[Chapter 3 of Per Bylund’s new book How to Think about the Economy: A Primer .] Economics is often faulted for being “ideological”—for promoting free markets . This is a misunderstanding. The free market in economics is a model—an analytical tool. It excludes complicating circumstances and influences and allows us to study core economic phenomena
[Chapter 4 of Per Bylund’s new book How to Think about the Economy: A Primer .] To help us understand what is going on in the economy, what is important is not the types and number of goods that sit on store shelves. It is why and how they got there. To answer this question is not simply a matter of pointing out that they arrived by truck last
[Chapter 5 of Per Bylund’s new book How to Think about the Economy: A Primer .] Why do we produce? For the simple reason that nature doesn’t automatically satisfy all of our needs and wants. Wild animals, grains, and berries are not enough to sustain the world population. Computers, airplanes, and hospitals do not grow on trees. In other words,
[Chapter 6 of Per Bylund’s new book How to Think about the Economy: A Primer .] So far, our discussion about the economy has been exclusively from the perspective of value . Value is the ultimate goal of our actions and what motivates our behavior. It is personal— subjective —which means it comes from satisfying a want. If we are hungry, we
[Chapter 7 of Per Bylund’s new book How to Think about the Economy: A Primer .] Money, as we discussed in the previous chapter, makes lots of exchanges possible that are impractical or impossible under barter trade. We are better off as a result. But money has greater implications that are often overlooked or misunderstood. Chief among these is
[Chapter 8 of Per Bylund’s new book How to Think about the Economy: A Primer .] The Boom-Bust Cycle The economy’s constant flux is not random change but adjustments to the production apparatus in the pursuit of creating value. Value is a moving target because consumers want change over time and innovations and new opportunities. The constant
[Chapter 9 of Per Bylund’s new book How to Think about the Economy: A Primer .] By regulations, we mean restrictions imposed on the economy by government: prohibitions, license requirements, quality or safety standards, price controls, quotas, and subsidies, etc. Although they differ in their specifics and in their stated purposes, they are all
[This article is chapter 1 from Bylund’s new book How to Think about the Economy : A Primer .] Economics is an exciting field. The economics of old sought to uncover how the world works. It showed, or even proved, that there is a natural order to it. There is structure to the apparent chaos. The economy has something of a life of its own: it has
It has been just over a century since Ludwig von Mises started the socialist calculation debate, one of the main contenders for fight of the century in economic theory. The debate raged primarily throughout the 1930s, but was also active in the 1920s and 1940s. Although Austrians started and comprised the one side of the debate, historians of
Murray N. Rothbard wrote in the February 1971 issue of the Libertarian Forum that “libertarians, if they have any personal philosophy beyond freedom from coercion, are supposed to be at the very least individualists.” Indeed, libertarianism holds high the rights and responsibilities of the sovereign individual: the right to self and to justly
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.