Tag Archives: Featured

Milton Friedman: The Last ConservativeBy Jennifer BurnsFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023; x + 587 pp.Imagine that you come across this about the “education premium” on someone’s blog: “By going to college, you are more than tripling your chances for success in after life.” The statement is buttressed by a calculation of the extra lifetime earnings that a college degree will provide. Wouldn’t you think that the author is an economist? In fact, the author was a high...

Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1960), an Austrian political economist who emigrated to the United States in 1932 to become a professor at Harvard University, is known for his theories on business cycles and entrepreneurship.He is perhaps best known for advancing the concept of “creative destruction,” which he defined as the natural process of business firms failing at some point, freeing up resources (land, labor, and capital) that can then become more productive in some...

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Societyby Joseph E. StiglitzW.W. Norton, 2023; 356 pp.To say that Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who now teaches at Columbia University, opposes the free market is an understatement. He does not favor complete central planning, he tells us, but wants a balance between market and nonmarket arrangements. However, when it comes to his concrete proposals, the market seems always in his eyes to be deficient....

Overview: The dollar is paring yesterday's advance that was spurred by the rise in US rates following the preliminary PMI, which reached its best level in two years. The survey also picked up higher prices. The dollar is in narrow trading ranges but softer against nearly all the G10 currencies today. The Swiss franc and Japanese yen are laggards. Despite a large disappointing miss on UK retail sales, sterling has steadied after falling yesterday for the first time...

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....

Stock market technicians are musing that if meme stocks are surging the Fed is not tight enough. Yes, after three years of hibernation “Roaring Kitty” returned with the first of a series of cryptic posts on X. Keith Gill’s (aka Roaring Kitty) post showed a man leaning forward with what looked like a gaming controller. Some traders interpreted it to mean Gill is coming back, according to Bloomberg. Gill rallied day traders on Reddit in an effort to squeeze GameStop...

The law that establishes California’s minimum wage rate at twenty dollars per hour is purportedly aimed at uplifting the state’s working poor. The role of economics is to evaluate such claims through economic theory and empirical evidence. In mainstream economics, commonly taught in introductory college courses, the conventional analysis indicates that such laws may lead to heightened unemployment only if the new minimum wage exceeds the market wage. While this...

It’s that time of year again. The first military appreciation day of the year, otherwise known as Memorial Day, is coming up on Monday, May 27.On the Sunday before this day, many conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist churches will have patriotic services where American flags are placed all over the church grounds and inside the building, the congregation recites the Pledge of Allegiance, hymns of worship to the state will be sung (including the blasphemous...

The price of copper has hit an all-time high. This represents a signal about the world economy. The euphemism on Wall Street for the implications of the price of copper is called Doctor Copper.If the price of copper is moving higher, then Doctor Copper is diagnosing economic growth, or possibly an artificial economic boom. If the price of copper is moving lower, then Doctor Copper will diagnose an economic contraction, or economic bust, or even an economic crisis,...

In this age of the “decolonized curriculum,” universities have set out to decolonize the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. By “decolonize,” they simply mean that all fields of knowledge should reflect all cultures and not just what they see as “Western” science. Epistemology, too, has been decolonized.In a field known as the “philosophy of race and racism,” it is argued that philosophy itself—how human beings reason and understand the world—is...