Economics

Archive for Economics

Bob Murphy vs. Bill Still

It’s the master of disaster versus the Money Master. It was supposed to be about money, but then we took off the gloves and started talking anarchy. Oh boy. When I saw the crowd was with him early on, I had to break out my Jimmy Stewart impression. I wasn’t screwing around. Incidentally, I have […]

Economics Laureates in Favor of Raising the Minimum Wage

[UPDATE below.] The Economic Policy Institute has released a letter signed by 75 economists–including 7 winners of the Nobel (Memorial) Prize in economics–calling for the federal government to raise the national minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 to $10.10 by 2016. In this post I want to explain how this is possible, and […]

Someone Has to Remind Bryan Caplan That No Such Thing as Utils

One of the issues in Bryan Caplan’s famous “Why I’m Not An Austrian Economist” essay (even though he had been one when he was younger) is the issue of cardinal utility functions. A lot of Rothbardians like to roll their eyes at the mainstream for thinking utility is a cardinal entity that can be measured […]

The Krugman/Sumner Showdown–In Layman’s Terms

The blogosphere has been abuzz (though nothing compared to the Great Debt Debate of 2012) with activity centered on whether the year 2013 provided a good test of the economic views of Keynesians like Paul Krugman versus Market Monetarists such as Scott Sumner. These things often get bogged down in technical minutiae. In the present […]

A Brief Note on the “War on Poverty”

In this country, if you want to spend trillions of dollars on an aspect of social life that you dislike, while not solving the problem, then the best thing to do is have the federal government declare a “war” on it. For example, lots of people are commemorating the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s “War on […]

Truth Is Stranger Than Bryan Caplan’s Fiction

From my new post at Mises Canada: Caplan then goes on in his post to lament the odd fact that people do not respond to this potential of trillions of dollars in global wealth (via labor mobility) the way Caplan claims they would respond to the discovery of trillions of dollars of Leonium buried under […]

Memorial Video for the “Night of Clarity” 2013

Matt Harris (with help from wife Pacey) put together this excellent memorial of the event Carlos Lara and I hosted last summer in downtown Nashville. Stay tuned for the NOC 2014!

Keynesians Wrong on Sequester Just Like Stimulus

My latest post on Mises Canada. The money part: For example, in February 2013 Paul Krugman wrote a piece titled “Sequester of Fools,” in which he referred to the “fiscal doomsday machine” that was being unleashed upon the nation. He claimed that the sequester would cost 700,000 jobs, and justified this number by linking to a Macroeconomic […]