Steven Landsburg

Steven Landsburg Speaking Topics

The Economist on the Playground

How should we feel about taxes that redistribute income? Ask how parents feel about children who forcibly “redistribute” other children’s toys. How should we respond to those who claim their neighbors are too wealthy? Ask how parents respond when children complain their siblings got too much cake. By insisting that fairness can’t mean one thing for children and another for adults, this talk shows that the instincts of the parent have profound consequences for economic justice. We think most clearly about moral issues when we are speaking to our children. By listening to what we tell our children about good behavior on the playground, we can learn something about good behavior in the marketplace and in the voting booth.

A Brief History of Economic Time

Until just 200 years ago, nearly everybody lived just above the subsistence level the modern equivalent of about $400 to $600 a year. There was no such thing as economic progress, and no expectation of progress. No eighteenth century politician ever asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”, because nobody ever expected to be better off than they were four years ago. Today, we are on a trajectory whereby a conservative extrapolation of our descendants a few centuries from now will have incomes of over a million dollars per day - not in some future nation ravaged dollars, but in the equivalent of today’s dollars. If that sounds implausible, consider how implausible our own wealth would have seemed to anyone living a few centuries ago. This is the story of economic growth - how it started, how far it’s taken us, where it’s headed, its power to lift billions out of poverty, and what we have to do to make sure it continues.

Armchair Economics

Why do celebrity endorsements sell products even when the celebrity has no special expertise? When rock concerts predictably sell out, why don’t promoters raise the prices? Why is popcorn so expensive at the movie theater (no, it’s not because the owner has monopoly power)? The world is filled with riddles, and economics is a powerful tool for unraveling them.

How to Fix Everything

Our prosperity depends on getting incentives right. Economists have a lot to contribute here. It was an economist who suggested that the airlines pay customers to give up their seats on overbooked flights. It was an economist who realized the best way to save endangered African elephants was by giving villagers a stake in their survival. Everything works better when incentives are designed to align private interests with the public good. We’ll talk about improving incentives for inventors and entrepreneurs, politicians and regulators, judges and juries, policemen and firefighters, polluters and environmentalists, and even college professors.

People Wanted

People solve problems, and when there are more people, more people get solved. Drawing on the evidence from a million years of history, this talk will argue that we’re more prosperous when we have more neighbors and that we should be encouraging population growth, not trying to limit it. We’ll explore the usual arguments on the other side (such as the finiteness of resources) and explain exactly why they’re not just wrong, but fundamentally illogical.

Surprise!

Common sense tells you that promiscuity spreads AIDS, population growth threatens prosperity, and misers make bad neighbors. This talk uses simple economic principles to challenge your common sense. We’ll see that daughters cause divorce, a thirst for revenge is healthier than a thirst for gold, the most charitable people support the fewest charities, and the tall, thin, and beautiful earn higher wages - but not for the reasons you think. This is a light-hearted presentation of ideas grounded in (sometimes maddeningly) rigorous logic. A little bit of reasoning can change the way we see the world.

Steven Landsburg Videos