[ Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong, Basic Books, 2022 viii + 605 pp.] J. Bradford DeLong, who teaches economics at UC Berkeley and was a protégé of Larry Summer’s dislikes Austrian economics, which he sometimes assails on his blog. You might reasonably expect that for this reason, I will
Jesús Huerta de Soto, who is professor of economics at the Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid, is the leading representative of the Austrian school of economics in Spain. He is a renowned teacher, and two of his many doctoral students, David Howden and Philipp Bagus, both now themselves professors of economics, have edited a festschrift in his
Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936–1986 by James Rosen Regnery Publishing, 2023 496 pages James Rosen, who has written biographies of John Mitchell and Dick Cheney, and was for many years a reporter for Fox News, has found an ideal biographical subject in Antonin Scalia,, who served for thirty years on the Supreme Court. The volume under review, the
The Conservative Affirmation By Willmoore Kendall Regnery, 2022 (Originally published in 1963) lxix + 362 pp. Willmoore Kendall was the most important political theorist of the brand of conservatism associated with William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review during the 1950s and 1960s. To some of us, this will be not altogether a positive
Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2020 By Thomas Piketty Yale University Press, 2021 352 pages Thomas Piketty has written a useful book. Readers need no longer plough their way through his vast Capital in the Twenty-First Century , not to mention his even vaster Capital and Ideology, to understand his message. This fairly
Raghuram Rajan has written a surprising book. Now teaching finance at the University of Chicago, he is an international bureaucrat in good standing, and not a minor one at that; he was chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Yet far from calling for an increase in “global governance,” as one might expect from someone with his
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity By David Graeber and David Wengrow Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021 Xii + 692 pages The Dawn of Everything , which has already attracted much scholarly attention and is a best seller as well, should be a warning to all academics: do not write about economics or the history of modern Europe if you
The Power of Capitalism: A Journey through Recent History across Five Continents By Rainer Zitelmann LID Publishing, 2018 xiv + 233 pages Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is best known to the scholarly world for his outstanding study of Adolf Hitler’s economic ideology, now available in English translation as Hitler’s National Socialism . Originally written
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life Nassim Nicholas Taleb Random House, 2018 To review Skin in the Game is a risky undertaking. The author has little use for book reviewers who, he tells us, “are bad middlemen. Book reviews are judged according to how plausible and well-written they are; never in how they map the book (unless of
The Hell o Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy by Stephen M. Walt Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018 xii + 384 pages Stephen Walt has put himself in a difficult position. He is a Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the author of studies, most notably The
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.