The other week, the infamous and much-derided Green New Deal was voted down in the Senate and with it the dreams of a Federal spending party for tackling climate change. But maybe its advocates have been going about this the wrong way, engaged in political solutions and international treaties such as the Paris Agreement . To anybody with insight
It is fairly easy to imagine the regressive left having childishly high time preference; they see some current social ill (homelessness, potholes , student debt, inequality) and want them abolished right away . If your position is: “solve the problem now , damn the future consequences,” you show a very high discount rate; future costs pale in the
Banks provide fairly invaluable services to a monetary economy, many of which the economics literature has long been discussing: under division of labor, banks specialize in amassing savings and putting them to use. Bankers, partly due to non-public information, are in a better position to monitor and screen borrowers than would the rest of us be
Animals are a curious topic in finance, and we find them all over the place. We describe upward, downward or side-ways moving markets as bull, bear or deer markets. We have investment strategies ( “Dogs of the Dow” ) and trading behavior ( ‘dead cat bouncing ‘) named after pets. We have “pigs” and “wolves” and “ostriches “ and Nassim Taleb’s
Capitalism in America: A History Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge New York: Penguin, 2018, 486 pp. Joakim Book (j@joakimbook.com) is a graduate student at Oxford University. Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 22, no. 1 (Spring 2019), full issue, click here . What could possibly go wrong when a former Fed chairman and the Economist’s
Using numbers to describe the world is fraught with peril. The problem is not that you can prove anything with statistics (you can’t) or the Mark Twain quip equating statistics with lies, but rather that numbers unaccompanied by correct reference points tend to be very misleading. Hayek’s famous quote where aggregates conceal is merely a
The words ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’ have shared roots, both stemming from the Greek word oikos (οἶκος) for “house”. ‘Economy’ adds the suffix ‘nemein’ (νέμειν), for “manage”, creating ‘oikonomia’ for “household management”, or more commonly the “ the management of material resources ”, whereas ‘logia’ (λόγια) at the end of ‘ecology’ means “the study
There’s a remarkable confusion in the modern debate over energy sources. Informed by geological rather than economic considerations, energy sources and some raw materials are thought of either as “Renewables” or “Non-Renewables” — and the former is somehow much preferred to the later. We’ve all heard versions of the following story: the use of
A standard objection to the use of markets in organizing society’s production and consumption is that individuals are “malleable” — subject to social influence. They use a two-step approach. First, critics bring up the tiresome strawman of a hyper-rational homo economicus whose preferences are determined , constant, and transitive . Second, they
Clarity is a virtue, and if overlooking critical nuances can mean readers end up more confused after reading one’s work, that’s not very useful, to put things mildly. Earlier this month, Justin Fox at The New York Times made a splendid illustration of this blunder; his piece amounted to saying mostly unsubstantiated things about “the” state of
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.