Behavioral economics and its close cousin, neuroeconomics, have been all the rage in the last few decades. Behavioral economists claim to go beyond the naive assumptions of neoclassical economics by taking psychology (and neurophysiology) seriously, using laboratory experiments, brain scans, and other techniques to study how economic actors
Nicholas Kristof writes in the Sunday New York Times about the decline of the public intellectual . “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.” As Kristof rightly points out, in many academic disciplines, career success comes
A new NBER paper documents a strong, secular increase in US corporate borrowing during the Keynesian era. Unregulated U.S. corporations dramatically increased their debt usage over the past century. Aggregate leverage – low and stable before 1945 – more than tripled between 1945 and 1970 from 11% to 35%, eventually reaching 47% by the early 1990s.
Thanks to Helio Beltrão and Instituto Ludwig von Mises Brasil for Definindo a Liberdade , the new Portuguese-language translation of Ron Paul’s book Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom . From the summary: O termo “liberdade” é tão comumente usado que se tornou um mero clichê. Mas será que sabemos o que significa
[To complement Robert Murphy’s post today on economics and education:] From Human Action XXXVIII: by Ludwig von Mises In countries which are not harassed by struggles between various linguistic groups public education can work if it is limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic. With bright children it is even possible to add elementary notions
by Jacob Huebert Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian theorist and economist, hated Goodfellas . He especially hated the depiction of gangsters as “psychotic punks” whose violence was “random, gratuitous, pointless.” He preferred the Godfather films, where the gangsters never engaged in violence “for the Hell of it, or for random kicks,” but
Two items of note: 1. Ross Emmett’s EH.Net review of The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression by Angus Burgin (Harvard, 2012) , which focuses extensively on Hayek and the Mont Pèlerin Society. Ross calls it ”a subtle and nuanced history,” much better than recent similar books by Stedman Jones (2012) and Mirowski and
I attended this year’s ASSA conference in Philadelphia. The big story for most attendees was the weather, with a big winter storm leading to delayed and cancelled flights and trains, missed connections, and a slight damper on enthusiasm. It is a huge conference with several thousand participants and hundreds of sessions, panels, receptions, and
Dick Langlois points us to an interesting NBER paper on self-selection into government service , the results of which will surprise few readers of this blog: In this paper, we demonstrate that university students who cheat on a simple task in a laboratory setting are more likely to state a preference for entering public service. Importantly, we
Mark Thornton responds to former DEA administrator Peter Bensinger’s claim that the legalization of marijuana is a disaster. Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute.
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.