Economics

Archive for Economics

Sample “Liberty Classroom” Lecture on Bohm-Bawerk

As 3 of you know, my doctoral dissertation focused on the work of Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. I was thrilled to be able to devote three of my lectures in my course for Tom Woods’ “Liberty Classroom” to Bohm-Bawerk’s work. Partly because I think even Mises and Rothbard misunderstood what Bohm-Bawerk was saying, I decided this […]

David Friedman Bask

(Remember, we don’t beg on this blog, we ask.) In a recent EconLog post, Bryan Caplan quotes from Friedman’s book *Hidden Order*: Economists are often accused of believing that everything – health, happiness, life itself – can be measured in money. What we actually believe is even odder. We believe that everything can be measured […]

Michigan Reform

With co-authors, I have a new study from the Fraser Institute documenting the surprisingly sharp economic turnaround in Michigan. (We contrast it with Ontario.)

Open Borders and NGDP Targeting: A Numerical Example

In my last post, in which I argued that Open Borders plus NGDP (or even total labor compensation) targeting would lead to disaster, I fired off some quick numbers that (although technically not wrong) made it look as if I were missing the basic logic of Sumner’s framework. Thus, David Beckworth in the comments said: […]

Mises Defeats the Robot Overlords

My latest FEE article responds to Scott Alexander’s intriguing (but baseless, I think) worries: Yet these are mere quibbles. The real difficulty is that Alexander has implicitly assumed that the mines of iron ore (that’s how you make steel) are either unowned, or are owned by one of the two operations in the loop. There’s […]

Power to the People

My latest at FEE. I quote a socialist with approval! (Really.) Here’s the conclusion: The advocates of political intervention think that they ensure “consent of the governed” through the institution of democracy. But both history and theory show the naïveté of that belief. Suppose we had retained the medieval guild system, but with the tweak that […]

Trump on Debt Default

So people are freaking out about Trump’s remarks concerning Treasury debt default. (E.g. Yglesias and Sumner.) My initial response (on Twitter) was to contrast the freaking out with free-market economists who had favored debt repudiation as a sound (and moral) strategy. But then I went and dug up Paul Krugman’s posts (one and two) from […]

Are Economists Wrong When They Solve the “Firm’s Problem”?

Thanks to those who chimed in for my test question in a previous post (which you will need to review if you want to understand the present post). So, people agreed with me that in the question I reproduced, the “correct” answer was to have each type of firm maximize profit, meaning the actual amount […]