Bio

I’m a professor of economics at the Graduate

School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate

School in Monterey, California and a Research Fellow with the

Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 1982 to 1984, I was the senior economist for health policy and, from 1983 to 1984, the senior economist for energy policy, with President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. My specialty is in making economics understandable to non-economists. I blog regularly at Econlog, http://econlog.econlib.org/.

I’m the editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (Liberty Fund, 2008). It is now on the web at: http://www.econlib.org/library/CEE.html. It has been translated into Russian and Arabic. My book, The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey, was published by Financial Times Prentice Hall in the fall of 2001, and has been translated into Chinese. I also wrote, with my former student, Charles L. Hooper, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life (Chicago Park Press, 2006). It has been translated into Japanese and Korean.

I’ve written about 200 articles for such popular publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Barron's, Fortune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Public Interest, National Review, Red Herring, and Reason. I’ve also written scholarly articles for such journals as: Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Independent Review, Cato Journal, Regulation, Contemporary Policy Issues, Econ Journal Watch, and Energy Journal.

I’ve testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. I’ve also appeared on C-SPAN, CNN, the Jim Lehrer Newshour, the O’Reilly Factor, and the John Stossel show, and I’ve done radio interviews with NPR, the BBC, KQED-FM and many regional radio stations.

Born and raised in Canada, I moved to the United States in 1972 to pursue my Ph.D. in economics at UCLA. I became a U.S. citizen in 1986.