The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Berkeley’s David Card, MIT’s Josh Angrist, and Stanford’s Guido Imbens for their work on “natural experiments,” a currently fashionable approach to estimating the causal impact of one economic variable on another. Card, of course, became famous in and outside the profession for his 1994 paper
Obituaries for the late Princeton economist Alan Krueger have combined praise for his personal character with implicit (or explicit) endorsement of his research approach. Krueger, writes Noah Smith , “helped turn the economics profession into a more empirical, more scientific enterprise.” Krueger was “a beacon of cool-headed reason -- his
Behavioral economics and its close cousin, neuroeconomics, have been all the rage in the last few decades. Behavioral economists claim to go beyond the naive assumptions of neoclassical economics by taking psychology (and neurophysiology) seriously, using laboratory experiments, brain scans, and other techniques to study how economic actors
Nicholas Kristof writes in the Sunday New York Times about the decline of the public intellectual . “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.” As Kristof rightly points out, in many academic disciplines, career success comes
A new NBER paper documents a strong, secular increase in US corporate borrowing during the Keynesian era. Unregulated U.S. corporations dramatically increased their debt usage over the past century. Aggregate leverage – low and stable before 1945 – more than tripled between 1945 and 1970 from 11% to 35%, eventually reaching 47% by the early 1990s.
Thanks to Helio Beltrão and Instituto Ludwig von Mises Brasil for Definindo a Liberdade , the new Portuguese-language translation of Ron Paul’s book Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom . From the summary: O termo “liberdade” é tão comumente usado que se tornou um mero clichê. Mas será que sabemos o que significa
That’s the title of a new working paper by Per Bylund and me. It’s forthcoming in a special issue of the Review of Austrian Economics devoted to the contributions of Israel Kirzner. The Place of Austrian Economics in Contemporary Entrepreneurship Research Peter G. Klein and Per L. Bylund December 5, 2013 Abstract: We review the place of Austrian
Nelson Mandela, public face of the anti-Apartheid movement and South Africa’s first post-Apartheid president, has died. Much will be written about Mandela in the coming days, but little of it will deal directly with the Apartheid system, particularly its economic aspects. Apartheid is widely misunderstood as a system based purely on racial
Mike Konczal objects to the typical sequence of a first-year economics curriculum: a semester of microeconomics, studying individuals, firms, and markets, followed by a semester of macroeconomics, looking at the economy as a whole. Austrian economists generally reject the artificial distinction between micro and macro, as taught in the mainstream
Thanks to Felix Salmon for quoting me in his take-down of this embarrassing NYT piece on Craig Pirrong and Scott Irwin, two well-known economists who study commodity-market speculation. Basically, the reporter dislikes speculation (which he clearly doesn’t understand), so he assumes any expert with a different view must be a hired gun for various
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.