Quit College —or Better Yet, Don’t Even Start When I was in university a decade ago, this was some wacky, contrarian advice. It wasn’t unheard of for intellectual, middle-class youngsters to opt out of college, and it was still the early days of efforts like Praxis , but realistically there didn’t seem to be any alternatives. So, I went to
[On Monday, October 9, the Royal Swedish Academy awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin of Harvard University. Two Swedish expatriates reflect on the meaning of the Prize and this year’s recipient.] Per Bylund As an Austrian economist, the announcement of the economics prize—often
The wonderful thing about liberty, property rights, and markets is that if you don’t like something, you don’t have to be a part of it. Under pure and beautiful capitalism, consumers are sovereign: they’re not forced to consume something, and their value creation isn’t expropriated to finance what someone else thinks is important. A liberal order
The other week, the infamous and much-derided Green New Deal was voted down in the Senate and with it the dreams of a Federal spending party for tackling climate change. But maybe its advocates have been going about this the wrong way, engaged in political solutions and international treaties such as the Paris Agreement . To anybody with insight
It is fairly easy to imagine the regressive left having childishly high time preference; they see some current social ill (homelessness, potholes , student debt, inequality) and want them abolished right away . If your position is: “solve the problem now , damn the future consequences,” you show a very high discount rate; future costs pale in the
Banks provide fairly invaluable services to a monetary economy, many of which the economics literature has long been discussing: under division of labor, banks specialize in amassing savings and putting them to use. Bankers, partly due to non-public information, are in a better position to monitor and screen borrowers than would the rest of us be
Animals are a curious topic in finance, and we find them all over the place. We describe upward, downward or side-ways moving markets as bull, bear or deer markets. We have investment strategies ( “Dogs of the Dow” ) and trading behavior ( ‘dead cat bouncing ‘) named after pets. We have “pigs” and “wolves” and “ostriches “ and Nassim Taleb’s
Capitalism in America: A History Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge New York: Penguin, 2018, 486 pp. Joakim Book (j@joakimbook.com) is a graduate student at Oxford University. Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 22, no. 1 (Spring 2019), full issue, click here . What could possibly go wrong when a former Fed chairman and the Economist’s
Using numbers to describe the world is fraught with peril. The problem is not that you can prove anything with statistics (you can’t) or the Mark Twain quip equating statistics with lies, but rather that numbers unaccompanied by correct reference points tend to be very misleading. Hayek’s famous quote where aggregates conceal is merely a
The world’s oldest central bank, the Bank of Sweden (or Sveriges Riksbank), today celebrates its 350 th anniversary by organizing a conference on the theme “The role of central banks then, now, and in the future.” While the bank is probably best known for sponsoring the faux Nobel Prize in economics (it’s not one of the prizes in Alfred Nobel’s
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.
