Prices

Presented at the Mises Institute's "First Annual Advanced Instructional Conference in Austrian Economics" at Stanford University.

Much of the media discussion around the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall will focus on American military politics and the politicians of the time. But to truly understand why the Soviet system in Eastern Europe collapsed, we must look to Mises's pioneering work on economic planning.

When an elected official or government bureaucrat interferes with a valid, non-coerced exchange, they may appear to be helping one individual when they are actually harming a foundation of modern society; free exchange of goods and services.

Market prices reveal critical information about sellers, buyers, and market demand. But government interference in markets substitutes a fake version of reality that leads to impoverishment.

More than half of the people in the world currently live in urban areas or cities, in spite of it being more expensive to do so. Why?

Dressing up the history of the world, and its economic development, in terms of transaction costs is mostly not very helpful.

"The problems of poor relief are problems of the arrangement of consumption, not of the arrangement of production activities."

There is a type of income effect in Austrian or causal-realist price theory, and the difference between neoclassical and Austrian microeconomics is smaller than has been portrayed, says Karl-Friedrich Israel.

The Economic Theory of Costs contains valuable criticism of the standard neoclassical approach and some original ideas on how to develop causal-realist economics in the Mengerian tradition.

This Christmas, countless workers will profit when others spend freely on "unnecessary" luxury goods.