Earlier this year, I gave a short course on Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics for scientists and engineers at my institute. The course was brief, and I focused only on ideas that were relevant for researchers in engineering and the natural sciences. One of the ideas we talked about was supply and demand, in order to link it to the supply and demand of research-related things: the labor of researchers, research articles on specific topics, and so on.What I told them was that supply and demand were not as simple as one would expect upon first encounter. We usually imagine the price of a commodity increasing if people “demanded” it more. What actually happens relates not to the prices of the items as they stand but their prices in a situation where all other

In his Nations by Consent, Murray Rothbard reminds us that the concept of a nation “cannot be precisely defined; it is a complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups, or religions.”
And yet, in most states of the world, this concept of nationality has been transformed from a group with a shared heritage, language, and history into a set of documents that needs to be processed in central facilities. Gone are the days of dynamic, instinctual social belonging; to belong to a nation now requires a documentation process put in place by bureaucrats and politicians.
To belong to the nation of Kuwait (now understood as the state of Kuwait), for example, means that you have the right to employment, government-mandated social