Editorial JGGM

14/04/2026

Countries where I have been Drunk 🍻

14/04/2026

Blog Post | Mineral Production The Most Important Check in Economics The Simon–Ehrlich wager and why predictions of resource scarcity keep getting it wrong. Gale L. Pooley, Marian L. Tupy — Mar 20, 2026 Summary: A famous bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich illustrates two ways of thinking ...

05/04/2026

China’s Great Leap Forward caused a dramatic spike in child deaths—

Child mortality rates in China have fallen from more than 20% in 1950 to less than 1% today.

But this steady progress was interrupted in the late 1950s during the “Great Leap Forward”. This was China’s national plan to industrialize rapidly, but it resulted in widespread famine and economic turmoil.

As the chart shows, child mortality rates spiked in China over this period, with up to one in three children dying before reaching the age of five. This change was so dramatic that it is also clearly visible in the global trend.

This data comes from the UN’s World Population Prospects.

(This Data Insight was written by Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Arriagada.)

Explore child mortality for all countries in our interactive chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?tab=line

07/03/2026

06/03/2026

26/02/2026

Prosperity demands independence.

26/02/2026

Justice demands courage—and sometimes that means standing against the law itself. Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us that true law exists to protect freedom, not to suppress it.

As John Locke said, "The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom."

24/02/2026

Karl Marx argued only labor creates value, so capitalist profit comes from underpaying workers. With Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) urged seizing production, inspiring revolutions worldwide.

Carl Menger, Austrian economist, published Principles of Economics (1871), developing subjective value and hinting at trouble for Marx: prices reflect human preferences, not accumulated labor.

Menger flipped causality: people work because goods are valued; goods are not valued because work was done. Labor follows value; value does not follow labor.

Building on Menger, Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk argued Marx predicted higher profits in labor intensive industries, yet competitive markets tend to equalize returns across sectors.

Some modern Marxists abandon labor value, but Menger’s framework explains entrepreneurship, prices, and profits as signals guiding resources toward higher valued uses in open economies.

24/02/2026

A map comparing the Mercator projection with countries shown in their true relative sizes, highlighting how traditional world maps distort land areas near the poles.

24/02/2026

For most US workers, overall purchasing power has risen substantially over the last two decades, despite inflation and widespread economic pessimism.

Learn more: https://humanprogress.org/are-americans-getting-richer-new-data-might-surprise-you/