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My greatly esteemed friend Vernon Smith turned 86 years of age yesterday. Vernon is, among other things, the leading figure in the development of experimental economics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 2002. For various methodological reasons, I have never been a fan of experimental economics. To me, it represents the sort of positivism

James M. Buchanan , one of the past century’s most distinguished economists and most compelling champions of free markets, died earlier today at age 93. His professional career spanned more than sixty years, during which he wrote extensively on public finance, economic philosophy, and other topics in related areas. With Gordon Tullock, he founded

Arline Alchian Hoel reports that her father, Armen Alchian, “passed away peacefully in his sleep early this morning at his home in Los Angeles.” He was 98 years old. Armen Alchian was a major figure in the economics profession for more than half a century. At UCLA, where he spent his academic career as a faculty member in the department of

In July 1940, when Ludwig and Margit von Mises made their way by bus from Switzerland across German-occupied France [Note: Mises was Jewish], the bus driver had to proceed very carefully and make many detours via back roads to avoid German checkpoints. If you would like to play with a fascinating exercise in counterfactual history, imagine how

I’ve just finished reading Leo Tolstoy’s remarkable book The Kingdom of God Is Within You . This was written in Russian and completed in 1893, but the Russian censors forbade its publication. It circulated in unpublished form in Russia, however, and was soon translated into other languages and published abroad. It had substantial influence on the

By George Smith   If you were asked how we should go about achieving real economic growth throughout the economy rather than just certain sectors of it, what would you suggest?   Would you revisit the Keynesian toolbox and call for a really, really big stimulus instead of just another really big one?   Would you impose more controls on business,

Now in ebook format or paperback: The Gold Standard: Perspectives in the Austrian School The world’s financial system is in a precarious state, and everywhere the cry is heard for reform. But a reform to what? More government created fiat money under a new name? The contributors to this notable anthology think not and argue for one particular sort

Familiarity may indeed, as the saying goes, breed contempt, but it also breeds a sort of somnolence. People who have never known anything other than a certain state of affairs—even an extraordinarily problematic state of affairs—have a tendency not to notice it at all, to relate it, so to speak, as if they were sleepwalking through it. Such is the

In recent years, many people, at least in certain circles, have become familiar with Bastiat’s broken-window fallacy and have come to recognize that Keynesian macroeconomic policy amounts to little more than this fallacy writ large. Perhaps even more important is what we might call the unbroken-leg fallacy. This is the presumption, which underlies

Do you remember the Sixties? I do, vividly. The latter half of that decade was the worst time of my life so far as the enveloping social and political conditions were concerned: endless, horrifying war; unraveling civil rights movement; urban riots and violence; political assassinations and mass protests; university upheavals and bombings; police