Mises

Archive for Mises

Mises’ Momma Didn’t Raise No Fool on Banking Regulations

For some reason this passage from pages 443-444 of Human Action cracked me up: People may uphold the opinion that banknotes are more handy than coins and that considerations of convenience recommend their use….But all this has no reference whatever to the problem in question. It does not provide a justification for the policies urging […]

Yglesias vs. Mises on War Inflation Finance

In this intriguing post (since he mostly heaped praise on Ferguson in spite of the latter’s attack on him) Matt Yglesias writes: [T]he moral of [Ferguson’s book discussion of World War I] here is that when it comes to major sovereign states, strict considerations of public finance and the government deficit are not so important. […]

Danny Sanchez Interviews Me, Part 2 of 5

This is the second of five parts of a detailed interview Danny Sanchez had with me, over the summer when I was at the Mises Institute. It is partly to promote my upcoming Mises Academy online class, but we discuss a lot about Austrian economics in general.

Mises on the Invisible Hand Metaphor

From page 240 of the Scholar’s Edition of Human Action: Theism and Deism of the Age of Enlightenment viewed the regularity of natural phenomena as an emanation of the decrees of Providence. When the philosophers of the Enlightenment discovered that there prevails a regularity of phenomena also in human action and in social evolution, they […]

Mises on A Priori Reasoning

This comes from page 38 in the Scholar’s Edition of Human Action. I just had to paste this into a project I’m working on; thought it would be relevant: All geometrical theorems are already implied in the axioms. The concept of a rectangular triangle already implies the theorem of Pythagoras. This theorem is a tautology, […]

There Is Only One Body of Economic Law: Mises Has Spoken

I just typed in this block quotation from page 68 (Scholar’s Edition) of Human Action: The domain of historical understanding is exclusively the elucidation of those problems which cannot be entirely elucidated by the nonhistorical sciences. [The historian’s understanding] must never contradict the theories developed by the nonhistorical sciences. [Historical understanding] can never do anything […]

My Thoughts on Formalism in Economics

Recently many econobloggers have offered their thoughts on what is often called “mathematics in economics,” but I think is really more about formalistic model building in economics. Here’s a very interesting post that has links to some of the other people in this dispute. For my part, just some scattered observations with no necessarily overarching […]

Cool Quote From Mises

Came across this while reviewing something for a client… We are the lucky heirs of our father and forefathers whose saving has accumulated the capital goods with the aid of which we are working today. We favorite children of the age of electricity still derive advantage from the original saving of the primitive fishermen who, […]