Roger Garrison reviews Tyler Beck Goodspeed’s Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution: Keynes, Hayek, and the Wicksell Connection (Oxford, 2012) for EH.Net. Writes Roger: The most recent episodes of unsustainable booms (centered on digital technology in the 1990s and housing in the 2000s) have rekindled interest in the clash between Keynes and Hayek.
A recent comment by Bryan Caplan provides a good opportunity to discuss differences between Austrian and neoclassical concepts of marginal utility. In response to Steve Horwitz, who claimed that the law of diminishing marginal utility and the downward-sloping demand curve can be known a prior, Bryan asks: Mainstream micro textbooks often have
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
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.