25 Mar 2013

Potpourri

Economics, Pacifism, Politics, Potpourri, Rothbard, Shameless Self-Promotion 11 Comments

==> If you’re interested in the economics of climate change, I throw out some factoids in this blog post that may surprise you.

==> Somebody asked me to find this (I had cited it in my Rothbard study guide), so I thought I’d relay it to y’all: It’s a wonderful essay by Bohm-Bawerk that includes a neat response to the idea that if people decide to save more, that should kill business investment. I read this in high school as part of a Richard Ebeling collection published by Hillsdale College. Ah, to be young and discover Bohm-Bawerk was pure bliss…

==> Now we know why Robert Wenzel doesn’t put up lots of photos of himself: turns out he is really Judge Napolitano having some fun as a blogger.

==> Clash of the Monetary Titans: Look at JP Koning and Nick Rowe having an argument about endogeneity in the comments of this post. I think they created a black hole.

==> I can no longer reconstruct how we came upon this, but my son and I found this “Mario Is Evil” essay quite humorous. (Don’t worry, I scrolled quickly so he couldn’t see the naughty words.)

==> If you’ve never seen Steve Horwitz in video before, this is a good interview. (Note: I didn’t watch the whole thing, so if he uttered some heresy don’t flip out on me. I’m a clearinghouse, not the thought police.)

==> This “Last Psychiatrist” blogger is strangely persuasive.

==> Anthony Gregory writes more on the antiwar movement by 9am, than most people do all day.

11 Responses to “Potpourri”

  1. visose says:

    You can tell he’s not Judge Napolitano by the simple fact that you can actually see his forehead.

    • Major_Freedom says:

      No, this is the smallest forehead. That’s Mary Ann Esposito, Italian chef and cookbook author.

  2. Gene Callahan says:

    “that includes a neat response to the idea that if people decide to save more, that should kill business investment.”

    That’s good, but I hope no one thinks this addresses Keynes on savings!

    • Adrian Gabriel says:

      No need to worry, Hazlitt and Rothbard already did. Whether people decide to read and comprehend is one thing, whether they follow the herd of academia toward fallacious repetition and unrealistic modeling for an over-priced education or attractive pension is another.

      • Bob Murphy says:

        Adrian don’t leave out the desire to exercise power for its own sake! You don’t know Callahan like I do.

    • Major_Freedom says:

      Your hopes are dashed, because Keynes did indeed believe that saving more will, eventually, kill business investment. He believed it would kill business investment by way of the MEC allegedly continuously declining.

      Arch-Keynesian Paul Samuelson wrote:

      “In a multiplier model with unchanged investment, an upward shift in the savings function, reflecting an increase in thriftiness, will actually reduce income and output. How much? Output is reduced in a multiplied way until income falls low enough to bring people’s new desired saving again into equality with investment. Thus an attempt to save more may lead, instead, to a lower income and no more saving or investment.” – Economics, 13th Ed., pg 183.

  3. Greg Ransom says:

    Bohm-Bawerk is remarkable, and essential.

  4. JFF says:

    Bob, “factoid” means an invented fact that is believed to be true because it appears in print. Definitely not the correct word to use in relation to anything having to do with climate change.

  5. Bob Roddis says:

    I highly recommend listening to each of these Scott Horton interviews which examine in detail the lies and more lies about the Iraq invasion told by both the Neocons and their media hacks:

    3/22/13 Peter Hart
    3/22/13 Daniel McAdams
    3/20/13 Greg Mitchell
    3/19/13 Dahr Jamail
    3/19/13 Jonathan Landay
    3/15/13 Karen Kwiatkowski

    http://scotthorton.org/all-interviews/

  6. Steve Horwitz says:

    Oh good – Bob missed the part where I called myself the greatest bald modern Austrian economist. Of course, that’s not heresy in my book…. 😉

  7. Bruce says:

    Re: item one: Documents on Segways?

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