Economics in Three Lessons & One Hundred Economic Laws

By Hunter Lewis
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“Former global investment firm CEO Hunter Lewis tackles contemporary economics in his two-part book. It distills the topic into three understandable lessons, followed by one hundred “economic laws” that the author hopes can be used “to guide our actions and choices in an uncertain world. . . . This material is an education unto itself . . . and . . . deftly illuminates a subject that is too often maligned and misunderstood.”

Barry Silverstein, Foreword Reviews (September/October 2017)

Summary

Two works in one volume:

Economics in Three Lessons

Henry Hazlitt’s 1946 book Economics in One Lesson sold more than a million copies. It is perhaps the best selling economics book of all time. In this book, Hunter Lewis, a Hazlitt admirer and student, provides a sequel and update.

The central lesson of Hazlitt’s seminal work is that economic thought and policy must consider all the consequences of an action, not just the immediate or most visible ones.  Hazlitt is right that this is the kernel of all good economics. Lewis covers this theme and also introduces two more lessons: how a free and uncontrolled price system creates prosperity and how a controlled or manipulated price system creates only crony capitalist corruption and, ultimately, poverty and economic failure.

The great merit of this work is its brevity and simplicity. Anyone can read and understand it. It is an ideal introduction to economics.

One Hundred Economic Laws

In this groundbreaking work, Lewis does what no one has attempted to do, at least not for many decades. It collects in one place some of the most important laws of economics.

Everyone understands the importance of understanding the laws of physics and other natural sciences. Are there also laws of economics? Can understanding them also make our lives better? Lewis answers with a resounding yes to both questions.

We need the laws of economics to help guide our choices and actions in a very uncertain world. We also need them to protect us from the “thinkers for hire” who, paid by special economic interests, try to persuade us to ignore reality.

This short work is also a complete course in economics. Unlike the dry-as-dust and often irrelevant textbooks forced on high school and college students, it is written in a lively style.

About the Author

Hunter Lewis is co-founder and former CEO of global investment firm Cambridge Associates, LLC and author of 12 books on economics and moral philosophy. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Times of London, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic Monthly, as well as numerous websites such as Forbes.com, RealClearMarkets.com, and many others. He has served on boards and committees of fifteen leading not-for-profit organizations, including environmental, teaching, research, and cultural organizations, as well as the World Bank.

From The Austrian, Vol. 4, No. 1, January-February 2018, pg. 19

A Publication of the Mises Institute

A Sequel to Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson

Hunter Lewis—Mises Institute Hayek Society Member, Board of Directors, and contributor to Mises.org—has released a new two-in-one book that carries on the tradition of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. The new book is really two books: Economics in Three Lessons and One Hundred Economic Laws.

Henry Hazlitt’s 1946 book Economics in One Lesson sold more than a million copies. It is perhaps the bestselling economics book of all time. In this new volume, Hunter Lewis, a Hazlitt admirer and student, provides a sequel and update.

The central lesson of Hazlitt’s seminal work is that economic thought and policy must consider all the consequences of an action, not just the immediate or most visible ones. Hazlitt is right that this is the kernel of all good economics. In Economics in Three Lessons, Lewis covers this theme and also introduces two more lessons: how a free and uncontrolled price system creates prosperity and how a controlled or manipulated price system creates only crony capitalist corruption and, ultimately, poverty and economic failure.

In One Hundred Economic Laws, Lewis does what no one has attempted to do, at least not for many decades. It collects in one place some of the most important laws of economics. Lewis’s explanations will be helpful as an antidote against “thinkers for hire” who, paid by special economic interests, try to persuade us to ignore reality and the laws of economics. Like Hazlitt’s original, the entire volume is written in a simple, easy-to-read style. The book is now available on Amazon.

[PDF of The Austrian, Vol. 4, No. 1, January-February 2018]

Laurence Siegel, from Amazon (November 13, 2017):

5 out of 5 stars: Nice easy introduction to economic thinking.

“Nice easy introduction to economic thinking, inspired by Henry Hazlitt’s magnificent Economics in One Lesson. While Hazlitt’s examples are dated, Lewis uses a modern context that gets his point across very effectively. Every high school student should be required to read this, or something like it.”

Barry Silverstein, ForeWord Reviews (September/October 2017):

“Former global investment firm CEO Hunter Lewis tackles contemporary economics in his two-part book. It distills the topic into three understandable lessons, followed by one hundred “economic laws” that the author hopes can be used “to guide our actions and choices in an uncertain world. . . . This material is an education unto itself . . . and . . . deftly illuminates a subject that is too often maligned and misunderstood.”

[Complete review: ForeWordReviews.com]

Laurence Siegel, from Amazon (November 13, 2017):

5 out of 5 stars: Nice easy introduction to economic thinking.

Ronald Johnson, Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (February 2018):

The author of this book, Hunter Lewis, is the co-founder and former CEO of the global investment firm Cambridge Investments, LLC. He is also the co-inventor of what became known as the American University style of institutional investing. Lewis has written for the New York Times, The Times of London, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic Monthly. His Economics in Three Lessons is a “sequel” to Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson, a 1946 book about free-market economics. The one lesson in Hazlitt’s book is as follows: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” Lewis espouses a similar philosophy in his book, but refines it to three lessons. He also describes 100 laws that follow from these lessons, with 80 of those laws actually being corollaries of only 20 laws.

The first of the three lessons is titled “Sustainability.” Much of the single chapter devoted to this lesson is a long quotation from Hazlitt’s book, including the quote cited above, and reflects what Lewis means by sustainability. In this long passage, Hazlitt discussed public works, stating that some of them (e.g., police and fire departments) are necessary, but that public works used primarily as a means of providing employment (such as those established during FDR’s New Deal) are of little or no value. For every public sector job created by such public works, argued Hazlitt, a private sector job is destroyed somewhere else. Hazlitt’s long quotation emphasizes the importance of thinking long term rather than short term. The author writes that this difference is what separates good and bad economics. Without naming any names, he states that there are supposedly brilliant economists who, citing John Maynard Keynes’ statement that “in the long run, we are all dead,” deprecate savings and recommend massive government spending. But Hazlitt warns that there will ultimately be dire consequences from this short-term thinking, and, even if these consequences do not affect us, they will affect our children and future generations.

The book’s second lesson is titled “The free price system.” In laying out this lesson, Lewis states that “the most reliable barometer of economic honesty is to be found in prices.” Any attempts to manipulate or control prices, claims the author, will end up in failure, because the economy will not be able to function properly. In fact, such efforts have often ended up hurting the very groups they were intended to help. More than once Lewis cites an example from 18th century France. At the time, wheat shortages in the country had driven the price of bread higher, so the peasantry was struggling to afford the cost. In response, the French government placed price controls on bread. Realizing that they would now have to sell their wheat at a loss, farmers stopped planting, and the price of bread rose even higher. According to Lewis, we now know that, just like the French regulatory intervention, government price controls do not work. Imagine government officials trying to figure out what the prices of all the commodities and services in a country’s economy should be. Wouldn’t it be much easier and better just to let a free market determine what these prices should be by the efficient allocation of capital and labor?

We hear so much these days about income and wealth inequality and how important it is to reduce inequality through wealth redistribution. Lewis claims that any government-led effort of this kind will ultimately be a failure. Wealth is not the product of a zero-sum game in which the gain of some people has to be balanced by the loss of others. Rather, it is created through hard work and investment, and it is possible for all segments of society to benefit from such creation. To reinforce this view, Lewis quotes the well-known economist Milton Friedman: “Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those countries that do not permit the free market to operate.”

The third lesson presented in the book is titled “Enemies of the free price system.” Lewis dedicates a few chapters to discussing and denouncing “crony capitalism,” another term that has appeared frequently in recent media coverage. Crony capitalism is an economic system characterized by close, mutually advantageous relationships between business leaders and government officials. One particular example Lewis cites is President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill of 2009. This bill provided for an $800 billion stimulus that was intended to revive the economy, which had been devastated by the collapse of some investment firms and the near-collapse of the housing market and several banks. Lewis claims that much of the money went to select state and local governments and private-interest donors such as the green energy company Solyndra. The “cash for clunkers” program, designed to encourage consumer spending on more fuel-efficient vehicles, was another government program that turned out to be ineffective. The point Lewis aims to convey is that regulations on business have their place, but they should be kept to a minimum.

The second part of the book is devoted to Lewis’s 100 economic laws (counting the 80 corollaries). Of the 20 key laws in the compendium, three in particular seem to conform most closely to the three economic lessons. The first of these is the Law of Prices, which states that “if we wish to cooperate on a voluntary basis, we must have shared, workable, flexible prices.” In discussing this law, Lewis uses a quote from Matt Ridley’s book Genome: “The illusion that economies run better if someone is put in charge of them has done devastating harm to the wealth and health of peoples all over the world, not just in the former Soviet Union, but in the West as well.” The second law is the Law of Profit and Wages. Many people today rail against companies that they claim make “obscene profits.” However, Lewis claims that any government action to restrict profits in a particular industry will decrease the number of companies willing to engage in that industry, thereby reducing supply and most likely increasing prices—a result contrary to the one intended. Moreover, because companies compete in a free market, their primary way of increasing profits is to become more efficient and cut costs. The final law that Lewis emphasizes is the Law of the Non-Neutrality of Money, which suggests that “injecting new money into the economy from any source…by definition cannot be neutral,” that is, it will favor some groups over others. Thus, Lewis opposes any type of fiscal stimulus program, even the “quantitative easing” that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke put in place after the 2007–09 financial crisis. To sum up the 100 laws into one, Lewis writes that “if you want a thriving economy, protect free and flexible prices.”

The book advocates policies that few, if any, governments, foreign or domestic, have followed faithfully. However, evidence that these policies actually work can be found in the historical experiences of Singapore and South Korea. Although these countries were quite poor 60 years ago, today they are very prosperous, with per capita income in Singapore being higher than that in the United States. This transformation occurred primarily because both countries became bastions of free trade and free markets. Whether in agreement with Lewis’s economic philosophy or not, readers will find his arguments compelling and worthy of debate.

Kevin Price, Price of Business Radio (January 9, 2018):

Hunter Lewis – New Book: Economics in Three Lessons & One  Hundred Economic Laws

“I consider it must reading.”

—Host Kevin Price

 

The Tom Woods Show (December 1, 2017):

Ep. 1051 Want to Be Poorer? Defy These Economic Laws

Hunter Lewis, in an amazing book called Economics in Three Lessons & One Hundred Economic Laws, concisely reviews the crucial economic ideas that can help people see the world in a whole new way.

“An amazing book.”

—Host Tom Woods

 

One America News Network

Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler (November 6, 2017):

 

Bill Martinez Live (October 23, 2017):

Hunter Lewis – Economics in Three Lessons, and will President Trump’s Tax Plan really help the middle class.

 

The Chad Benson Show (October 4, 2017):

Hunter Lewis, economist and co-founder of Cambridge Associates, talks about economics and economic laws.

 

Fox Business (October 6, 2017):

Varney & Co.

Is a big market correction coming?

[Video Interview]

ECONOMICS IN THREE LESSONS

Lesson One: Sustainability

1: Henry Hazlitt’s Invaluable Insight

Lesson Two: The Free Price System

2: The Central Role Played by Free Prices

3: What Prices Do for Us

4: The Role of Profits in Driving Down Prices

5: Who Are the Bosses in a Free Price System?

6: “Spontaneous Order” from Free Prices

7: The Essential Role of Loss and Bankruptcy

8: What About Inequality?

9: Why Greed Is Not “Good” in a Free Price System

Lesson Three: Enemies of the Free Price System

10: Crony Capitalism

11: Laissez-Faire Contra the Cronies

12: Today’s Crony Capitalism

13: The Crony Capitalist Conundrum

14: The Progressive Paradox

15: Where Does This Leave the Poor?

16: How the Fed Fits In

17: The Fed’s Conflict of Interest

18: Who Exactly Is Feeding off the Fed?

19: Keynes’s General Theory: The Crony Bible

20: Saying Goodbye to Crony Capitalism

Endnotes

_________

ONE HUNDRED ECONOMIC LAWS

Preface

I:     Laws of Economic Analysis

  1. Law of Analytic Laws
  2. Corollary A of Law of Analytic Laws: Material Life
  3. Corollary B of Law of Analytic Laws: Boundaries
  4. Corollary C of Law of Analytic Laws: Physical Science Myopia
  5. Corollary D of Law of Analytic Laws: Logic
  6. Corollary E of Law of Analytic Laws: Mathematics
  7. Corollary F of Law of Analytic Laws: Economic Data
  8. Corollary G of Law of Analytic Laws: Predicting the Future
  9. Corollary H of Law of Analytic Laws: Immutability
  10. Corollary I of Law of Analytic Laws: Universality
  11. Corollary J of Law of Analytic Laws: Corruption

II:   Laws of Economic Sustainability

  1. Law of Sustainability
  2. Corollary A of Law of Sustainability: Unintended Consequences

III: Laws of the Division of Labor

  1. Law of the Division of Labor
  2. Corollary A of Law of the Division of Labor: Voluntary Exchange
  3. Corollary B of Law of the Division of Labor: Private Ownership
  4. Corollary C of Law of the Division of Labor: (Law of ) Potential Diseconomies of Scale
  5. Corollary D of Law of the Division of Labor: (Law of ) Diminishing Returns
  6. Corollary E of Law of the Division of Labor: (Law of ) Potential Economies of Scale
  7. Corollary F of Law of the Division of Labor: (Law of ) Comparative Advantage, also called Law of Shared Advantage
  8. Corollary G of Law of the Division of Labor: (Law of ) Absolute Advantage
  9. Corollary H of Law of the Division of Labor: Deceptive Trade Practices
  10. Corollary I of Law of the Division of Labor: Scale of Participation

IV: Laws of Prices

  1. Law of Prices
  2. Corollary A of Law of Prices: (Law of ) Discovery and Communication
  3. Corollary B of Law of Prices: (Law of ) Order
  4. Corollary C of Law of Prices: Honest Prices
  5. Corollary D of Law of Prices: (Law of ) Supply
  6. Corollary E of Law of Prices: (Law of ) Demand
  7. Corollary F of Law of Prices: (Law of ) Supply and Demand
  8. Corollary G of Law of Prices: (Law of ) One Price
  9. Corollary H of Law of Prices: (Law of ) Marginal Utility
  10. Corollary I of Law of Prices: Monopoly

V: Laws of Profits

  1. Law of Profits
  2. Corollary A of Law of Profits: Consumer Control
  3. Corollary B of Law of Profits: Patience
  4. Corollary C of Law of Profits: “Speculation”
  5. Corollary D of Law of Profits: Loss and Bankruptcy
  6. Corollary E of Law of Profits: Change
  7. Corollary F of Law of Profits: Changing Ideas
  8. Corollary G of Law of Profits: “Frictional” Unemployment

VI: Laws of Profits and Wages

  1. Law of Profits and Wages
  2. Corollary A of Law of Profits and Wages: Union Wage Gains
  3. Corollary B of Law of Profits and Wages: Mandated Wage Floors or Gains
  4. Corollary C of Law of Profits and Wages: Say’s Law of Supply and Demand
  5. Corollary D of Law of Profits and Wages: Balanced Prices
  6. Corollary E of Law of Profits and Wages: Wage Ceilings

VII: Laws of Economic Equality and Inequality

  1. Law of Economic Equality and Inequality
  2. Corollary A of Law of Economic Equality and Inequality: The Problem of Envy
  3. Corollary B of Law of Economic Equality and Inequality: Inequality “Data” and Its Interpreters
  4. Corollary C of Law of Economic Equality and Inequality: Greed and Conspicuous Consumption
  5. Corollary D of Law of Economic Equality and Inequality: The “Trickle Down” Fallacy
  6. Corollary E of Law of Economic Equality and Inequality: Wealth Taxes
  7. Corollary F of Law of Economic Equality and Inequality: Wealth “Redistribution”
  8. Corollary G of Law of Economic Equality and Inequality: Making the Worker the Boss

VIII: Laws of the Division of Labor within the Free Price System

  1. Summary Law of the Division of Labor within the Free Price System
  2. Corollary A of Summary Law of the Division of Labor within the Free Price System: Competition within an Overall System of Cooperation
  3. Corollary B of Summary Law of the Division of Labor within the Free Price System: Growing Networks
  4. Corollary C of Summary Law of the Division of Labor within the Free Price System: Worldliness Redefined
  5. Corollary D of Summary Law of the Division of Labor within the Free Price System: Nation Size
  6. Corollary E of Summary Law of the Division of Labor within the Free Price System: Individualism and Cooperatism
  7. Corollary F of Summary Law of the Division of Labor within the Free Price System: World Governments Today

IX: Laws of Economic Calculation

  1. Law of Economic Calculation
  2. Corollary A of Law of Economic Calculation: Measuring Change
  3. Corollary B of Economic Calculation: Limits of Calculation
  4. Corollary C of Law of Economic Calculation: Externalities

X: Laws of Economic Calculation outside Business

  1. Law of Economic Calculation outside Business
  2. Corollary A of Law of Economic Calculation outside Business: “Borrowed Prices”
  3. Corollary B of Law of Economic Calculation outside Business: Halfway Houses between Socialism and a Free Price System

XI: Economic Law of Government

  1. Summary Economic Law of Government

XII: Laws of Money

  1. Law of Money
  2. Corollary A of Law of Money: Gold
  3. Corollary B of Law of Money: Gresham’s Law
  4. Corollary C of Law of Money: “Paper” Money
  5. Corollary D of Law of Money: “Paper” Money and Inflation
  6. Corollary E of Law of Money: (Law of ) Diversification
  7. Corollary F of Law of Money: (Law of ) Investment Value

XIII: Laws of Money Prices

  1. Law of Money Prices
  2. Corollary A of Law of Money Prices: Stabilizing Prices
  3. Corollary B of Law of Money Prices: Measuring Prices
  4. Corollary C of Law of Money Prices: “Elastic” Money Supply
  5. Corollary D of Law of Money Prices: Real Wealth
  6. Corollary E of Law of Money Prices: Deflation
  7. Corollary F of Law of Money Prices: Inflation (Roots of )

XIV: Law of Interest Rates .309

  1. Law of Interest Rates (on Money Loans)

XV: Laws of Banking

  1. Law of Banking
  2. Corollary A of Law of Banking: Fractional Reserves Create Money
  3. Corollary B of Law of Banking: The Federal Reserve
  4. Corollary C of Law of Banking: Fed as Price Fixer
  5. Corollary D of Law of Banking: Reform
  6. Corollary E of Law of Banking: Bank Privatization

XVI: Laws of Government-Controlled Banking

  1. Law of Government-Controlled Banking
  2. Corollary A of Law of Government- Controlled Banking: Government Financing Options 101

XVII: Laws of Spending Versus Saving

  1. Law of Spending Versus Saving (Law of Fiscal “Stimulus”)
  2. Corollary A of Law of Spending Versus Saving: “Fiscal Stimulus”
  3. Corollary B of Law of Spending Versus Saving: Keynesian Financing “Tricks”

XVIII: Law of the Non-Neutrality of Money

  1. Law of the Non-Neutrality of Money

XIX: Law of the Non-Neutrality of Money, Newly Created Money, “Business Cycles,” and Depressions

  1. Law of the Non-Neutrality of Money, Newly Created Money, “Business Cycles,” and Depressions

XX: Summary Laws of Economics

  1. Summary Law of Economics
  2. Corollary A of Summary Law of Economics

Appendix: Summary List of One Hundred Laws

Endnotes

Index for Economics in Three Lessons

Index for One Hundred Economic Laws

Economics in Three Lessons

Chapter Two: The Central Role Played by Free Prices

Why is the human race so poor? Why do billions still lack enough even to eat? As this author noted in an earlier book, even a small sum of money, such as $10, if compounded at 3% over 1,000 years, would produce a sum equal to twice the world’s wealth today. It should be ridicu­lously easy, over time, to end human poverty. Why have we failed to do so?

Failure to cooperate, to work together is the obvious answer. There is very little each of us can do alone, but there is endless opportunity in organizing ourselves to work constructively together in an ever broaden­ing circle. Like children, we refuse to do what is clearly in our long-term interest to do. We either think only of the short term, or sacrifice the common and greater good for the immediate benefit of our particular group. Moreover, we cover up and lie about what we are doing, lie both to ourselves and others.

How can we do better? First of all, we must be assured of our physical safety and the safety of our property. How can we consider the long term if our life and prop­erty are at risk at any moment from human predators, whether criminal or sanctioned by government? It is difficult to consider the long term if everything we have can be stolen at any moment. But safety and protection from theft is not enough either. In addition, we need an honest system of mutual exchange that everyone can rely on. A corrupt and dishonest economic system does not create wealth; it destroys it.

The most reliable barometer of economic honesty is to be found in prices. Honest prices, neither manipu­lated nor controlled, provide both investors and con­sumers with reliable economic signals. They show, beyond any doubt, what is scarce, what is plentiful, where opportunities lie, and where they do not lie.

A corrupt economic system does not want hon­est prices, honest information, or honest results. The truth may be inconvenient or unprofitable for power­ful government leaders or private interests allied with them. Typically, throughout human history, these leaders and special interests have sought to use their power to manipulate and control prices to their own advantage.

Much of the time, powerful price manipulators and controllers are accompanied and assisted by ideologists or theoreticians, special pleaders for hire, as described by Hazlitt. These professional advisors—skilled verbally or in mathematics—confidently argue that dishonest prices are really honest; honest prices are really dishon­est; the resulting chaos is really order; and a future filled with jobs and plenty lies ahead with just a few more manipulations or controls. Sometimes the arguments are presented with calculated deceit, sometimes with muddled sincerity.

Can it really be this simple, that job growth and eco­nomic prosperity will follow if we provide a safe envi­ronment and allow economic prices to tell the truth, free from the self-dealing and self-interested theories of powerful special interests? That is the central thesis of this lesson, and each chapter will explore it from an additional angle. What is needed to pull humanity out of dire poverty is a free price system, one that is neither manipulated nor controlled.

If prices are not free, an economic system cannot be expected to function properly. What happens there­after will depend on the degree of price manipulation or control. If it is not extreme, the economy may limp along, impaired, not realizing its full potential, but not in overt crisis.

If the undermining of free prices is extreme enough, the system will visibly falter and may even collapse, as in 1929 or 2008. In this case, capital, jobs, and people’s lives are destroyed. Ironically, the crisis often leads to a government response entailing even more price manipulation or control, which guarantees even more trouble, if not immediately, then down the road.

A further irony of all this is that a large majority of professional economists, including those aligned on the political “left” as well as “right,” respond to surveys by indicating that they generally oppose “government price controls.” The problem is that most government price manipulations and controls are not advertised as such. They may be stealthy by design, or they may just take a form that is not easily recognized for what it is. Whatever form they take, they are doing untold dam­age to the hopes and prospects of anyone who depends on the economy, especially the poor.

One Hundred Economic Laws

Preface

The concept of economic law was once a famil­iar feature of everyone’s education. It was taken for granted that they existed. The difficulty was discovering what they were and elucidating them for the enlightenment and betterment of humanity. They were also assumed to be complex, so that after economists worked them out through abstruse investigations and debates, they would have to be translated for lay people.

In more recent years, another idea has gained ground: that while physical laws certainly do exist and help us manage our lives better, economic laws do not really exist or at least have no predictive value whatsoever. This the­sis has been argued in a 2013 Atlantic article by an expert titled “The ‘Laws of Economics’ Don’t Exist.”

This Atlantic article assumes that economic laws must be derived from massive amounts of data, with­out explaining why this must be so, and claims that we simply lack enough systematic economic history to draw any conclusions. This is wrong for reasons that will shortly be explained.

The author also writes that “I may agree that the war on drugs is flawed, but not because it violates ‘laws of economics,’ …rather because it fails in most of its basic goals.” This is actually contradictory. Laws of economics are based on our own human logic. A pub­lic policy or private action that is inconsistent with its most basic goals violates logic, and by doing so, vio­lates economic law as well.

Lawrence Summers, former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, President of Harvard, and Chief Economic Advisor to President Obama, evidently does believe that economic laws exist. He wrote an article in the Washington Post shortly after President Trump’s election titled “Trump Can’t Repeal the Laws of Eco­nomics.” Summers did not, however, give any specific examples of the laws of economics he had in mind.

The ideas that have been organized and presented in this book under the term “economic law” have been developed (and frequently corrected) by numerous economists over the centuries. The most notable con­tribution by far was made by the twentieth-century economist Ludwig von Mises, although it should be emphasized that he did not present his own ideas as a system of laws, but rather as a treatise that often made reference to underlying laws.

At the onset of Mises’s masterpiece, Human Action, we have this discussion of how the discovery of the concept of economic law changed human history:

The discovery of the inescapable interde­pendence of market phenomena …[pro­duced] a new view of society….Bewil­dered…[at first], people…learned…that there is another aspect…[of ] human action…than that of good and bad, of fair and unfair, of just and unjust. In the course of social events, there prevails a regularity of phenomena to which man must adjust his action if he wishes to succeed….[Despite their differences], one must study the laws of human action and social cooperation as the physicist studies the laws of nature. Hu­man action and social cooperation seen as the object of a science of given relations, no longer as a normative discipline of things that ought to be—this was a revolution of tremendous consequences for knowledge and philosophy as well as for social action.

Mises’s students Friedrich Hayek and Murray Roth­bard also contributed many insights about economic law. Another contemporary and friend, Henry Hazlitt, in turn described many of these same ideas with unpar­alleled clarity in both books and articles.

In some cases, the names of economic laws were developed long ago, and are now settled. No one would ever call the law of supply and demand anything else, although they might call it the principle of supply and demand or just “supply and demand.”

The law of marginal utility may sound needlessly obscure or jargonish, but has too much history even to think of rephrasing it. As groundbreaking as the law of marginal utility was (and is), it is presented in this book not as a standalone law, but as a corollary (deriva­tive) of another law. The logic behind the laws is often highly interrelated, so the order of presentation mat­ters. In this book, there are twenty principal laws and eighty corollaries, each of which could be considered a law in its own right, which is why the title is One Hun­dred Economic Laws.

Although for some economic laws (e.g. supply and demand and marginal utility) there is a well-estab­lished terminology, in other instances, there is not. The goal in developing terminology for this book has been to keep it clear and free of technical language. The reader should feel free to substitute his or her own terms and descriptions, to challenge whether some of the laws really qualify as laws, and to identify laws that should be added to the list.

Economics is a collaborative and cumulative disci­pline. This can lead to serious lapses in logic, self-decep­tion, or, worse, deliberate deception. Self-deception may be closely linked to deliberate deception if someone’s personal income, career standing, and prestige depend on promoting untruths, and both forms of deception are particularly acute in economics.

Over the years, no other scientific discipline has been so plagued by “thinkers for hire” lavishly rewarded by special economic interests. But it must be acknowl­edged that this practice is increasingly spreading within the physical sciences as well, because of the high finan­cial and political stakes in industries closely connected to government, including, among others, drugs, bio­technology, chemicals, energy, and farming.

Even so, there is no place for dismissal, disdain, or mockery in economics. We owe each other a respectful hearing, if only because, being human, we are prone to logical errors, and can learn from listening.

We will now attempt to establish, as briefly as pos­sible, what economic laws are, what they tell us about economic life, and how we can use them to guide our actions and choices in an uncertain world.

It is hoped that most readers will start with the first law and proceed from there through the hundredth. Each law builds a further foundation for what follows. Alternatively, there is a summary list of the one hun­dred laws at the back of the book without explanation or commentary, but noting the page where explana­tion or commentary may be found. In this way, readers who wish to browse can pick out particular laws they wish to read about.