NPR featured an unintentionally funny piece this morning on Donald Trump’s views toward the EU and free trade. The guest, former US ambassador to the EU Anthony Gardner, rightfully criticized the president’s view that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength,” and called for continued global engagement by US companies and
The New York Times recently ran a fascinating piece on the innovative management practices used by sharing-economy firms like Uber, AirBNB, and TaskRabbit. These firms match riders with drivers, house guests with building owners, homeowners with plumbers, and so on. The challenge for the platform owners is that the providers are independent
[ The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur (2010)] While Schumpeter, Kirzner, Cantillon, Knight, and Mises are frequently cited in the contemporary entrepreneurship literature in economics and management, much of this literature takes, implicitly, an occupational or structural approach to entrepreneurship. Any relationship to the classic functional
[ Adapted from a Liberty Matters online discussion at the Online Library of Liberty. ] Pete Boettke provides an engaging and accessible summary of Israel Kirzner’s contributions to the analysis of competition and entrepreneurship. Kirzner’s work has inspired several generations of Austrian economists, and he is an articulate and persuasive
The dominant story in last week’s news cycle was Google engineer James Damore’s diversity memo and his subsequent firing by CEO Sundar Pichai for allegedly violating Google’s code of conduct. Damore argued that at least some of male-female employment gap at tech firms can be attributed to average biological differences between men and women,
The American Economic Review has published Esther Duflo’s Richart T. Ely Lecture, “The Economist as Plumber” (ungated version here , video version here ). The essay summarizes Duflo’s vision of economics. First, economics is primarily useful as a policy tool; i.e., the main role of the economist is to advise governments in designing laws and
A few weeks ago I was quoted, along with several other business-school professors, in a newspaper article on President Trump’s management style . Does the fact that Trump was a successful businessperson before becoming President -- rather than a lawyer and politician, like most of his predecessors -- make him a better chief executive? (George W.
The US higher-education world has been rocked the last two years by student protests, “free-speech” controversies, and allegations of faculty misconduct at schools as diverse as Missouri , Yale , Middlebury , Berkeley , and Evergreen State College . You’ve all heard about safe spaces, microaggressions, intersectionality, snowflakes, claims that
“Is Government the Source of Monopoly?” asked Chicago economist Yale Brozen in an essay first published in 1968. Yes, he answered — not only directly, by awarding exclusive licenses and contracts, but also indirectly, via regulation, minimum-wage legislation, and other forms of government intervention. Austrian economists such as Murray Rothbard
In a recent social media discussion someone raised the issue of Murray Rothbard’s relationship with Milton Friedman. I reported that Rothbard had a good relationship with Friedman and other academic libertarians in the 1950s and early 1960s, with Friedman even recommending Rothbard for a post at Chicago. Thanks to the Mises Insittute’s archivist
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.