Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

Recently, I was reminded of John F. Kennedy’s most famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” when I heard it among several famous sound bites leading into a radio show segment. It also reminded me that we will hear it more soon, as we are approaching JFK’s May 29 birthday. However, it is worth reconsidering what it means. Of particular importance is Milton Friedman’s response that “Ask not” was “at odds with the...

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic EventsRobert J. Shiller Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019xxi + 377 pp. Abstract: Much of Shiller’s new book is about how economic narratives form, spread, and fade. Drawing on medical evidence about the spread of infectious disease, Shiller argues that “economic fluctuations are substantially driven by contagion of oversimplified and easily transmitted variants of economic narratives.” But...

Even those fortunate enough to have escaped infection by the Wuhan coronavirus will by now have noticed one of the virus’ many secondary effects: the disruption of the supply chain. Sick workers at meat plants, closed restaurants, hoarding, and the sudden spike in demand for things like ventilators, masks, and comestibles with long shelf lives have thrown the global flow of goods and services into disarray. Shelves are empty, crops are rotting in the fields—supply...

It has been a full century since Mises dropped the economic calculation bomb, but the argument apparently still haunts socialists. It should, since Mises managed to show that a socialist economy is not an economy at all but calculational chaos. Yet it is curious that it does, since most have (incorrectly) concluded that Mises’s argument, after decades of debate, was debunked. Why does a presumably debunked argument still, drive even non-Austrian critics to pen new...

The editors are to be heartily congratulated for putting together this book, which covers an impressive range of topics in monetary economics from an explicitly Austrian perspective. Most of the twelve essays are of a very high quality and one will learn much about money and related topics by a careful reading of them. The chapters range from an insightful interpretation of Austrian monetary theory as a rehabilitation and development of classical monetary theory to...

The yearly growth rate of the US consumer price index (CPI) fell to 0.4 percent in April from 2 percent in April last year while the annual growth of the producer price index (PPI) plunged to –1.2 percent last month against 2.4 percent in April 2019. Furthermore, the yearly growth rate of the import price index fell to –6.8 percent in April from –0.2 percent in April last year. A general decline in the prices of goods and services is regarded as bad news since it is...

Economics has lost its way and the study has become both impotent and lacking in relevance. It’s easy to see how and why once we recognize that proper economic thinking takes place two steps beyond the apparent. Noneconomists typically take none of these steps, while modern economics has lost the ability to go beyond the first. This can, I think, be explained by economics’s increasing adoption of and reliance on mathematical and equilibrium models, which typically...

It has been a long time since I read anything by Paul Krugman, and seeing his most recent column simply reminds me why I’ve not missed anything. As both an extreme Keynesian and political partisan, he long ago abandoned economic analysis for something economists should recognize as nothing less than what Mises called metaphysics. Nonetheless, my curiosity got the best of me when he wrote that reopening the economy and allowing people to go to work almost surely will...

Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly John Quiggin Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019 xii + 390 pp. Abstract: John Quiggin’s Economics in Two Lessons alleges a failing in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson: the absence of a discussion of market failure. Quiggin’s adherence to the doctrine of neoclassical equilibrium misses an important fact: the absence of a neoclassical equilibrium is not a recession, but...

Despite the unprecedented increase in the European Central Bank’s asset purchase program, the spread of southern European sovereign bonds versus German ones is rising. The ECB balance sheet has soared to more than 42 percent of the eurozone’s GDP, compared to the Fed 27 percent of US GDP. However, at the same time, excess liquidity has ballooned to more than €2.1 trillion. The ECB has been implementing aggressive asset purchases as well as negative rates for...