I had Skyline Chili for dinner this evening for the first time in years. My co-author Robert Lawson–our paper “Human Rights and Economic Liberalization” is here –had sent me a couple of cans of Skyline chili, spaghetti, and red beans as one fo the conditions of a bet we had made: his Cincinnati Reds won the NL Central, but my St. Louis Cardinals
After much thought and after twitching back and forth between different options, we decided to take the plunge and get iPhones. These things are amazing, to say the least. I used to say that the iconic gizmo of the early twentieth century would be the iPod. I was wrong. It’s the iPhone. It’s one thing to be able to carry a few thousand songs in
I’m reviewing my notes for a lecture I’m giving in Denver in about an hour, and I came across notes about an FTC judgment against Toys-R-Us claiming that they were stifling competition by using their market power as a toy distributor. In light of the recent bankruptcy filing by Blockbuster, I started to wonder: what is the effect of a negative
Leonard E. Read’s classic I, Pencil stands as one of the twentieth century’s pedagogical triumphs. Thousands upon thousands of people have learned about the futility of central planning by considering the incomprehensibly complex processes that go into the production of something as mundane as a pencil. It’s also a process of cooperation that has
There has been a bit of discussion of this piece in the New York Times about mental health issues on college campuses (HT: Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba ). The article reports on a greater preponderance of mental illness among students. Here are a few hypotheses that are open to testing: 1) The populations are changing over time. Lower infant mortality
Today is “Blog Action Day;” here’s an apparent mission statement from the official website : “Today thousands of bloggers will unite to discuss a single issue–poverty. We aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!” I’ve been telling people for weeks that economists are the wet blankets of the world, so keeping this in mind I
Here are some links based on my “Environmental and Resource Economics” lecture. The audio will be available at Mises.org soon. After the IHS Liberty & Society seminar I taught at in June, we collected links relevant to the discussions we had there. The links are here . For links on resource economics more specifically, here is an excellent
As I argued in my last Forbes article , most of our expressions of conscience have more to do with signaling to others like us that we are righteous than they have to do with fixing problems. Things we do to Save the Earth are shining examples; to paraphrase Thomas Sowell, most kinds of “going green” are about showing that we are on the side of
The Law of Supply: Other Things Equal Quantity Supplied Rises When the Price Rises The Law of Demand: Other Things Equal Quantity Demanded Falls When the Price Rises On Comparative Advantage: Yes, Trade Creates Wealth. Costs Will Fall while Incomes Rise When We Specialize. Special thanks to Scott Barton for the first line of the Supply and Demand
On this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the prosperity we all enjoy. In a couple of my econ 100 classes on Tuesday, we spent a bit of time talking about how land-use restrictions affect both housing prices and the environment. An important point of departure between economics and an extreme form of ecocentric environmentalism that I have called “
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.
