Even the most innocent novel can give its reader a fresh perspective on the economy during the author’s time. Economic writings and economic conditions often inspired great writers who, in turn, allowed us to contemplate either a glimpse or a detailed picture of economic reality. Stendhal was influenced by Malthus, Flaubert by Bastiat, and Ayn
In 2012, Robert Higgs analyzed the role of government purchases in the calculation of GDP and suggested that a more reliable reading of domestic product would exclude government purchases . Higgs explained that — while government spending is fundamentally different from private-sector spending — the orthodox Keynesian notion of including
Economists understand very little about how technological progress occurs. — Alan Greenspan [ This article is adapted from Mark Thornton’s upcoming book on the skyscraper curse . ] Before we leave the topic of the problems and blessings of roundaboutness of production and the structure of production, it will be very useful to see a natural,
The world has come a long way since the heady days before the Great Depression of the 1930s. Technology, for one thing, has meant vast changes to our way of life and indeed to significant improvements in our economic productivity. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that these technological advances now make us depression-proof. Of course, the same
Various statistics that governments produce on a regular basis carry the label “seasonally adjusted”. What is the meaning of this label? According to popular thinking the data that is observed over time (labelled as time series) is determined by four factors, which are: The trend factor The cyclical factor The seasonal factor The irregular factor
The Bernanke-Yellen bubble is impacting many sectors of the economy. Agriculture land, motor vehicles and auto loans, banking, bonds, contemporary art, corporate stocks, higher education and student loans, mergers and acquisitions, ocean shipping and cruise lines, social media, technology, housing, real estate, and land markets have been
Nobel prize winning economist Robert Shiller recently revisited the Housing Bubble in an article published in the New York Times (“How Tales of ‘Flippers’ Led to a Housing Bubble,” May 18, 2017). He is troubled by the lack of consensus on what caused the bubble-bust that left the world mired in the financial crisis. He states: “We need to
Economists have long played semantic games with business cycles. In particular, they try to downplay the significance of the crisis and to obfuscate its cause. First of all, bubbles and economic crises are initially denied and then usually not named until after they end and particular sectors of the economy are revealed to be what Lionel Robbins
Beyond the behavior of speculators or OPEC—which some consider a cartel, if there is anything we can learn is that the fall in oil prices responds to the forces of supply and demand. On the demand side, lower economic activity throughout the world, specially in China, has lowered the price of oil. Projections by the International Energy Agency
When Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression first appeared in print in 1963, the economics profession was still completely dominated by the Keynesian Revolution that began in the 1930s. Rothbard, instead, employed the “Austrian” approach to money and the business cycle to explain the causes for the Great Depression, and to analyze the
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.