Richard B. McKenzie – författare

With welfare reform at the top of the U.S. Congress agenda, the orphanage debate has resurfaced. The current child welfare system is flawed, operating to the detriment of tens of thousands of children. Foster care, intended to act as a temporary solution, has become inadequate permanent care. While adoption is a solution for some children, many children are difficult to place or legally unavailable for permanent placement. Editor Richard B. McKenzie contends that the resurgence of private orphanages or children's homes will become an option for those children. Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century reviews the policy reforms necessary for these homes to become reliable solutions for many of the nation's disadvantaged and abused children. This edited volume includes entirely new works and maintains continuity and cohesiveness as it explores a variety of topics ranging from judicial issues, child maltreatment, history of orphanages, regulation and funding, and solutions for reform. McKenzie, who grew up in an orphanage in the 1950s, includes the first and only large-scale survey of orphanage alumni, involving 1,600 respondents. He found that as a group, they outpaced their counterparts in the general population by significant margins on nearly all levels, including education, income, and attitude toward life.

Child welfare professionals, policymakers, sociologists, social workers, and family studies scholars will find this timely volume of great interest.

With welfare reform at the top of the U.S. Congress agenda, the orphanage debate has resurfaced. The current child welfare system is flawed, operating to the detriment of tens of thousands of children. Foster care, intended to act as a temporary solution, has become inadequate permanent care. While adoption is a solution for some children, many children are difficult to place or legally unavailable for permanent placement. Editor Richard B. McKenzie contends that the resurgence of private orphanages or children's homes will become an option for those children. Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century reviews the policy reforms necessary for these homes to become reliable solutions for many of the nation's disadvantaged and abused children. This edited volume includes entirely new works and maintains continuity and cohesiveness as it explores a variety of topics ranging from judicial issues, child maltreatment, history of orphanages, regulation and funding, and solutions for reform. McKenzie, who grew up in an orphanage in the 1950s, includes the first and only large-scale survey of orphanage alumni, involving 1,600 respondents. He found that as a group, they outpaced their counterparts in the general population by significant margins on nearly all levels, including education, income, and attitude toward life.

Child welfare professionals, policymakers, sociologists, social workers, and family studies scholars will find this timely volume of great interest.

This book argues that Lionel Robbins’s construction of the economics field’s organizing cornerstone, scarcity—and all that has been derived from it from economists in Robbins’s time to today—no longer can generate general consent among economists. Since Robbins’ Essay, economists have learned more than Robbins and his cohorts could have imagined about human decision making and about the human brain that is the lynchpin of human decision making. This book argues however that behavioral economists and neuroeconomists, in pointing to numerous ways people fall short of perfectly rational decisions (anomalies, biases, and downright errors), have saved conventional economics from such self-contradictions in what could be viewed as a wayward approach. This book posits that the human brain is the ultimate scarce resource, and that a focus on the brain can bring a new foundation for economics and can save the discipline from hostile criticisms from a variety of non-economists (many psychologists). 

Mainstream economists everywhere exhibit an "irrational passion for dispassionate rationality." Behavioral economists, and long-time critic of mainstream economics suggests that people in mainstrean economic models "can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the will power of Mahatma Gandhi," suggesting that such a view of real world modern homo sapiens is simply wrongheaded. Indeed, Thaler and other behavioral economists and psychology have documented a variety of ways in which real-world people fall far short of mainstream economists'' idealized economic actor, perfectly rational homo economicus. Behavioral economist Daniel Ariely has concluded that real-world people not only exhibit an array of decision-making frailties and biases, they are "predictably irrational," a position now shared by so many behavioral economists, psychologists, sociologists, and evolutionary biologists that a defense of the core rationality premise of modedrn economics is demanded.

America’s emerging “fat war” threatens to pit a shrinking population of trim Americans against an expanding population of heavy Americans in raging policy debates over “fat taxes” and “fat bans.”  These “fat policies” would be designed to constrain what people eat and drink – and theoretically crimp the growth in Americans’ waistlines and in the country’s healthcare costs.

Richard McKenzie’s HEAVY! The Surprising Reasons America Is the Land of the Free—And the Home of the Fat offers new insight into the economic causes and consequences of America''s dramatic weight gain over the past half century.  It also uncovers the follies of seeking to remedy the country’s weight problems with government intrusions into people’s excess eating, arguing that controlling people’s eating habits is fundamentally different from controlling people’s smoking habits.

McKenzie controversially links America’s weight gain to a variety of causes: 

In no small way – no, in a very BIG way – America is the “home of the fat” because it has been for so long the “land of the free.”  Americans’ economic, if not political, freedoms, however, will come under siege as well-meaning groups of “anti-fat warriors” seek to impose their dietary, health, and healthcare values on everyone else.

HEAVY! details the unheralded consequences of the country''s weight gain, which include greater fuel consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases, reduced fuel efficiency of cars and planes, growth in health insurance costs and fewer insured Americans, reductions in the wages of heavy people, andrequired reinforcement of rescue equipment and hospital operating tables.

McKenzie advocates a strong free-market solution to how America''s weight problems should and should not be solved.  For Americans to retain their cherished economic freedoms of choice, heavy people must be held fully responsible for their weight-related costs and not be allowed to shift blame for their weight to their genes or environment.  Allowing heavy Americans to shift  responsibility for their weight gain can only exacerbate the country’s weight problems.

The New World of Economics, 6th edition, by Richard McKenzie and Gordon Tullock, represents a revival of a classic text that, when it was first published, changed substantially the way economics would be taught at the introductory and advanced levels of economics for all time.  In a very real sense, many contemporary general-audience economics books that seek to apply the “economic way of thinking” to an unbounded array of social issues have grown out of the disciplinary tradition established by earlier editions of The New World of Economics. 

This new edition of The New World will expose new generations of economics students to how McKenzie and Tullock have applied in a lucid manner a relatively small number of economic concepts and principles to a cluster of topics that have been in the book from its first release and to a larger number of topics that are new to this edition, with the focus of the new topics on showing students how economic thinking can be applied to business decision making.  This edition continues the book’s tradition of taking contrarian stances on important economic issues.  Economics professors have long reported that The New World is a rare book in that students will read it without being required to do so.