I’m spending today and tomorrow in the Archives at Tuskegee University; I’m working on a handful of projects about racist violence and Southern economic development, and a lot of the data and information I’m using is drawn from work done by scholars at Tuskegee. It has been an interesting study in the differences between how information traveled
...disaster recovery remains an important area for research. Peter Boettke discusses Emily Chamlee-Wright’s excellent The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery .
One of the main functions of a price is that it carries information. What information does a price transmit? According to one theory, a price transmits information about the caprice of the buyer or the seller. Prices at the grocery store are high and wages for unskilled labor are low because fat-cat grocers and employers are just evil people.
Posts from Robin Hanson and William Easterly got me thinking about rankings, zero-sum status games, and critiques of markets. Too often, criticism proceeds as if there is an obvious, easy to obtain, and unambiguously superior alternative out there just waiting for us to see it. Consider one of the standard critiques of commercial society: it makes
Thomas Sowell is fond of asking whether reality is optional. As I tell my students, the economic way of thinking helps identify and define the non-negotiable constraints on social reality. Economics isn’t “one way of looking at things.” If you’re advocating a higher minimum wage or protesting free trade while taking no need of the laws of demand
Bryan Caplan and David Henderson have put together a set of very interesting and provocative posts at Econlog that deserve comment. First, Caplan has been reading Ralph Raico’s splendid Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal , which incidentally is the first book I’ve read from cover to cover on my iPad. Second, Henderson points out
The idea that the benefits of economic growth have accrued primarily to the rich is an important part of the conventional wisdom, and it is supported by official income statistics. I would argue that technological change and economic growth over the last several decades (or centuries) has made us more equal, not less. Here are two ways we are more
My first contribution to my weekly Forbes column/blog “The Economic Imagination” (which was going to be “Guerrilla Economics,” but it turns out that’s copyrighted) is up . There will probably be a couple of hiccups with Forbes’ new publishing platform and the first post might change accordingly, but I’m pretty excited about it. Please join the
Here are some basic principles of bizarro economics in the 21st century: 1. Actual human beings do not matter. Spaces bounded by latitude, longitude, and natural barriers do. 2. Actual human beings do not matter. Political abstractions like nation-states do. 3. The country with the biggest GDP wins. 4. Societies exist so they can fight wars. 5.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen Greg Ransom’s posts below discussing what Tom Woods and Yuri Maltsev’s appearance on Glenn Beck did for Hayek exposure (watch the whole thing here ). I’m optimistic about the world we’re building for our children. The Road to Sefdom became the hottest seller on Amazon.com after Tom and Yuri appeared
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.