Economics

Archive for Economics

No One Takes Caplan Seriously on Bayes Law, Not Even Bryan

Back when TARP was first passed, Bryan Caplan said something that I considered absurd at the time: Ex ante, though, basic Bayesian reasoning doesn’t allow us to claim that whatever happens confirms our position. If the occurrence of X raises the probability of A, then the occurrence of not-X must reduce the probability of A. […]

Gold Flirting With All-Time High

News here. As Robert Wenzel pointed out, the day of the Greece bailout announcement, gold actually dipped. That made no sense, at least from a “fundamental” viewpoint. If I subscribed to conspiracy theories, I would say the plunge protection team dumped a bunch of gold futures to push down the gold price at least the […]

Rich Dad, Austrian Dad

Damien Forsythe emails to tell me that Robert Kiyosaki plugs the Austrian School and the Mises Institute at the 4:00 mark of this video: Point of No Return from Conspiracy of the Rich on Vimeo.

“Pattern Coordination and the Theory of Interest”

This was the Hayek Memorial Lecture that I gave at the Austrian Scholars Conference. It is based on Chapter 3 of my dissertation [.pdf]. (BTW early in the lecture I get a laugh at the expense of my dissertation committee. Let me say for the record that my chairman–Mario Rizzo–understood what I was saying. But […]

Obama on the Pesky Constitution

I have heard clips from this before, but it’s nice to go back to the classics (HT2 LRC). If you’re busy, at least listen to the first two minutes; there’s a nice bombshell just before the 2:00 mark.

My Superlative Op Ed

This guy didn’t like my op ed calling to abolish the income tax: The op-ed on income tax by Robert Murphy of Pacific Research Institute (“What do we get in return for our taxes?” April 5) couldn’t be farther from the point. He hates the income tax. Big deal: Everybody hates it. Everybody hates every […]

Admiral Ackbar on Martin Wolf

“It’s a trap!” Martin Wolf is the guy who asked an apparently innocent question about whether the Austrians had the best business cycle theory. It was Wolf’s post that led to the Krugman and DeLong critiques of ABCT. Hey that’s cool, Mr. Wolf is just giving the Austrians a fair shake, right…? Bob Roddis sends […]

Progressive Pile-Up On the Austrians!!

Good thing we have truth on our side; otherwise I might be nervous. Here’s Yglesias (HT2 Bob Roddis): The great failure of the Obama administration, on domestic policy, has been an inability to communicate at either a mass or an elite level what its diagnosis of the situation is. Are there things that should be […]