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 world’s oldest central bank, the Bank of Sweden (or Sveriges Riksbank), today celebrates its 350 th anniversary by organizing a conference on the theme “The role of central banks then, now, and in the future.” While the bank is probably best known for sponsoring the faux Nobel Prize in economics (it’s not one of the prizes in Alfred Nobel’s
With the 2007-8 financial crisis came a splendid alphabetical soup of central bank interventions to stimulate financial markets, lower interest rates, provide astonishing amounts of liquidity to banks and, allegedly, prevent another Great Depression. Likening the failure of big banks to falling elephants crushing even the smallest grass , former
Bitcoin and the blockchain technology are wonderful inventions; its anonymity, decentralised technology and speed of transactions just to mention a few features that have aroused supporters. The extension of competition into the domain of money that it represents is perhaps even more welcomed, coming as it does after almost a century of completely
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
One of many accusations of the economics discipline is that it spends too much time on the ideas of rich white men , long since buried. In our world ruled by moral and intellectual relativism and group identities, such an accusation is serious indeed. We can ridicule such positions all we want, and Mises does an excellent job of it in
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.