Other Schools of Thought

Learning the history of economic thought is important not because every economist has been right, but because we can learn from their mistakes.

Finn Kydland and Edward C. Prescott (KP), the 2004 Nobel laureates in economics think that technological shocks can explain 70 percent of economic fluctuations in postwar US data. Unfortunately their quantitative methods are simplistic and ignore the real problem: central banking.

A relatively new challenge to the Austrian framework comes from the “market monetarists” and their endorsement of a central bank policy of “level targeting” of nominal gross domestic product.

Brazilian journalist André de Godoy interviews economist and Mises Institute scholar Antony Mueller on the nature of money, banking, and prices.

The Nazi concentration camps were modified versions of Soviet originals.  It's true the Soviet Union is not history's only killer state, but it is the original model on which others are based.

The year 1898 was a landmark in American history. It was the year America went to war with Spain—our first engagement with a foreign enemy in the dawning age of modern warfare. Aside from a few scant periods of retrenchment, we have been embroiled in foreign politics ever since.

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There is productive consumption and there is non-productive consumption. In the Keynesian mind, it's not necessary to produce anything, so long as people spend and consume endlessly, even to the point of destroying real wealth.

Mathematics enjoys the prestige of being truly “scientific,” but it is difficult to mathematize the messy and fuzzy uncertainties and inevitable errors of real world entrepreneurship and human actions.

Randall Holcombe's has written an impressive new book on political capitalism (or "crony capitalism") and contributes a discussion on political and economic elites.