FEATURED Articles

Dec 6 2021

Article
Article

Israel Kirzner and the "European Miracle"

Professor Israel M. Kirzner, more than any other economist of the Austrian School (and among economists in general) since the second half of the 20th century, has revived our understanding of the systematic role of the entrepreneur as the driving force of the market as a process of discovery, error correction, and learning (Kirzner 1973). The economist's task, according to Kirzner (1963 [2011], p. 10), in "explaining what has happened in the real world, or in predicting the likely consequences...
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Articles By Stephen Davies
Toward the Final Transition
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A Book Review of Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made, by Vaclav Smil.1 Over the last two decades, Vaclav Smil has produced a series of outstanding scholarly works across a range of interconnected topics. The core interest in all cases is energy—its sources...

Dec 29 2021

Competition

John Madden on How Competition Among Small Numbers...

By:

  David Henderson

And Bryan Curtis on Schumpeterian competition. Millen: I’ll never forget the quote he gave me. I said, “John, how it’s going?” He said, “Matt, let me tell you one thing. If you got one person who wants you, you get a job. If you got two people who want you, you get a great deal. And if you have three or more...

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Jan 2 2022

Liberty

Choice, Coercion, and Bastiat

By:

  David Henderson

A friend who read Charley Hooper's and my recent Wall Street Journal article, "Coercion Made the Pandemic Worse," December 27, 2021, which I blogged about here, sent it to his son. His son, who's a fan of Frederic Bastiat, told his dad that our point in the first paragraph reminded him of this paragraph from Bastiat's...

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May 5 2014

An Economist Looks at Europe

Ideas Matter

By Pedro Schwartz

"Politics is the art of the impossible" —Think Tank Lore "The first question for anybody who believes in the importance of ideas is why our beliefs and proposals seem to have so little influence on governments, politicians, civil servants, lobbyists and trade representatives." Let...

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Dec 28 2021

Macroeconomics

Exactly who is targeting inflation at 2%?

By:

  Scott Sumner

To me, the answer to this question seems obvious.  The central bank.  But lots of very smart people don't agree. MMT proponents believe that when inflation is lower than target it can be increased only with fiscal stimulus---monetary policy is ineffective.  Similarly, they believe that high inflation can only be ...

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Economies Outside the United States

Foreign Aid

By Deepak Lal

Foreign aid as a form of capital flow is novel in both its magnitude and its global coverage. Though historical examples of countries paying “bribes” (see below) or “reparations” to others are numerous, the continuing large-scale transfer of capital from rich-country governments to those of poor countries is a ...

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Jan 1 2022

Microeconomics

A Pedagogical New Year Resolution

By:

  Pierre Lemieux

If your resolution for the New Year is to help your friends learn economics, here is an idea. Tell them something like that: "Except if you are venturing into the special fields of monetary or financial economics, rethink and reformulate any economic problem in terms of real resources, that is, actual inputs and the go...

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Dec 6 2021

Book Review

When the Elite Become the Elect

By Arnold Kling

With the rise of Third Wave Antiracism we are witnessing the birth of a new religion, just as Romans witnessed the birth of Christianity. The way to get past seeing the Elect as merely "crazy" is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they ...

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