I posted last week on Organizations and Markets about the tepid,and entirely predictable, reaction of the higher education establishment to the information technology revolution. Mainline universities loudly proclaim their love of online learning — and pedagogical innovation more generally — while doing everything possible to retard it. The
Early reports describe Facebook’s much-ballyhooed IPO as a dud . This seems to support The Economist’s worries about the future of the public company , a theme raised by Michael Jensen in a famous 1990 article . Indeed, the corporate form has been hammered lately, the victim of particularly burdensome regulation under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and
That’s the title of my talk tomorrow evening at the CEVRO Institut in Prague (5pm, Tuesday 9 October). You can probably anticipate the answer, but you have to come for the full explanation! The CEVRO Institut is a private college, founded in 2005, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science and international relations, public
This year’s Nobel-ish prize in economics goes to Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley for research on “matching methods” and the resulting application to “market design.” Briefly, this work deals with allocating resources in the absence of money and prices. Shapley applied noncooperative game theory to study the properties of different matching rules, and
In an Onion spoof of a typical TED talk, the speaker explains a profit opportunity he has costlessly discovered: For more serious discussion of costless discovery, the metaphor of entrepreneurial opportunities, and alternative Austrian attempts to understand the entrepreneurial function, see this and this
Rafe reminds us that the entire archive of Encounter magazine is online . While Encounter, like the Congress on Cultural Freedom, was a CIA project, it still managed to publish a number of important and influential essays by Hayek, Popper, Polanyi, and other classical liberal scholars. (Use the search box.) A few highlights: Hayek’s 1983
Matthew Yglesias makes the same mistake as Brad DeLong , thinking that Bastiat’s argument against breaking windows applies only in conditions of “full employment.” Bastiat “doesn’t counter any Keynesian or monetarist points about the viability of stimulus during a recession induced by nominal shocks, it involves assuming that no such recessions
A friend informs me that the mainstream and prestigious CFA Institute now features Austrian economics in the study materials for the Level 1 CFA Exam . The section “Theories of the Business Cycle” includes several pages on Mises and Hayek (as well as Schumpeter), and they’re pretty good. “As a result of manipulating interest rates, the economy
Ronald Coase has a short piece in the December 2012 Harvard Business Review, “Saving Economics from the Economists” (thanks to Geoff Manne for the tip). Not bad for a fellow about to turn 102! I always learn from Coase, even when I don’t fully agree. Here Coase decries the irrelevance of contemporary economic theory, condemning economics for
Hayek defined “scientism” or the “scientistic prejudice” as”slavish imitation of the method and language of Science” when applied to the social sciences, history, management, etc. Scientism represents “a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed, and as such is “not an
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.