I’m spending today and tomorrow in the Archives at Tuskegee University; I’m working on a handful of projects about racist violence and Southern economic development, and a lot of the data and information I’m using is drawn from work done by scholars at Tuskegee. It has been an interesting study in the differences between how information traveled
...disaster recovery remains an important area for research. Peter Boettke discusses Emily Chamlee-Wright’s excellent The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery .
One of the main functions of a price is that it carries information. What information does a price transmit? According to one theory, a price transmits information about the caprice of the buyer or the seller. Prices at the grocery store are high and wages for unskilled labor are low because fat-cat grocers and employers are just evil people.
Posts from Robin Hanson and William Easterly got me thinking about rankings, zero-sum status games, and critiques of markets. Too often, criticism proceeds as if there is an obvious, easy to obtain, and unambiguously superior alternative out there just waiting for us to see it. Consider one of the standard critiques of commercial society: it makes
Thomas Sowell is fond of asking whether reality is optional. As I tell my students, the economic way of thinking helps identify and define the non-negotiable constraints on social reality. Economics isn’t “one way of looking at things.” If you’re advocating a higher minimum wage or protesting free trade while taking no need of the laws of demand
This has been in my “drafts” file for a while, and I decided to go ahead and post it now that some of the initial fury has died down and since I read this post by Steve Horwitz on how, apparently, some organizations that have received funding from AT&T are explicitly endorsing AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile. You might have heard about the
We try to make an occasional dent in the amount of junk in our house. It makes for a handful of decent experiments in everyday economics. Today, I shipped a box of about 3200 sports cards that I sold on eBay for $5.50 with $0 shipping. They cost over $13 to ship, and processing the echeck with PayPal cost $0.46. Naturally, they raise two
Today is a big day in the Carden house: my three-year-old son Jacob took a step toward independence and earned his first money in the labor market. Jacob and I went to Brother Juniper’s , which in a bit of serendipity was featured in this morning’s paper , for breakfast. In my opinion and with apologies to my beloved City Cafe , it’s the best
Here are three principles we should employ if we want to distinguish between 1. The long-run effects and the short-run effects of policies and programs aren’t always the same. We might incur short-run costs in order to get long-run benefits. Similarly, short-run benefits might come with long-run costs. 2. Interventions don’t occur in isolation,
Complaints about student loan debt and education funding create an I Portent teachable moment. Value The margin Resources allocated among competing ends.
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.
