The second edition of the fun and fascinating guide to the main ideas of the Austrian School of economics, written in sparkling prose especially for the non-economist. Gene Callahan shows that good economics isn’t about government planning or statistical models. It’s about human beings and the choices they make in the real world. This may be the
Recent swings in the oil price remind us how market prices respond to changes in supply. Traders are constantly speculating how this or that political event, whether in Venezuela or the Middle East, will affect resource availability. The social function of such price swings is to eliminate shortages and surpluses. As Martha Stewart would say,
[Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Economics for Real People , available through Mises.org and Amazon.com .] [Economics] is universally valid and absolutely and plainly human. —Ludwig von Mises, Human Action When we first approach a science we want to know, “What does it study?” Another way of approaching the same issue is to ask, “What basic assumptions
You have left your house for a walk. You intend to pass through some woods on your way to town to meet a friend. After about 25 minutes of walking, however, you stop, puzzled. The trail through the woods should have put you in town several minutes ago. What happened? Suddenly, you remember the fork in the trail by the big chestnut tree. You always
Special-interest-group pleading often tries to hide behind supposedly economic arguments. It is important to debunk such arguments as they arise, so that the interest-group politics can be seen for what it is. So, in the spirit of Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms , I offer the following. There Is a Shortage of Programmers. Many advocates of government
>Many large brokerage houses, as well as small boutiques, rely heavily upon mathematical models in their day-to-day trading. Clearly, there is a market for this kind of modeling, yet Austrian economists have generally held the view that the neoclassical, mathematical approach to economics is a strictly limited approach. How can we reconcile 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.