My first exposure to formal economics came during my undergraduate degree at Washington University. I was working on an engineering degree and they required that we take some basic economics. So in 1990–1 I took Econ 103/104, introductory micro and macro economics. I found it boring, irrelevant and uninspiring. If you had told me then that I’d be
It was only a matter of time before Hollywood “discovered” homeschoolers. Ponder the promo from The O’Keefes , a sitcom, which will premiere this summer on the Warner Brothers network. “Harry and Ellie O’Keefe are loving but eccentric parents who’ve homeschooled their three children to protect them from the loud and libidinal world.”
Economists speak of competition as the rivalry in supplying or acquiring an economic good or service. Sellers compete with other sellers as do buyers with other buyers. In the area of higher education colleges compete with other colleges and students with other students. The competition among colleges is especially keen as private colleges must
Many people in my generation suffered enormous trauma at some point in our teen years. It was something our generation had to endure as a matter of technical necessity. It only lasted a few months, it’s true. It’s also true that we do not regret the final benefits that came from enduring the pain. But it left deep emotional scars which, to this
How awful we were to substitute teachers when I was in grade school! These “substitutes” — the very term implied dread mixed with malicious opportunity — didn’t know our names, our lesson plans, the class culture, and had no pre-existing expectations for our behavior. We took full advantage, switching seats, hurling paper wads, goofing off, or
The mantra of “school choice” is getting louder. The wholesale failure of the K-12 public school system to adequately educate children, no matter how much money is spent per pupil, is universally acknowledged by all but the most diehard teacher union bureaucrat. Educational reform is a leading topic of governors, state legislators, members of
A Monopoly of Ignorance Mises Review 9, No. 3 (Winter 2003) THE WORM IN THE APPLE: HOW THE TEACHER UNIONS ARE DESTROYING AMERICAN EDUCATION Peter Brimelow Harper Collins, 2003, xxi + 296 pgs. If Peter Brimelow is to succeed in showing, as his subtitle states, that teacher unions — he has in mind principally the National Education Association — are
Because of their minority status, most budding Austrian economists must endure graduate training in the mainstream orthodoxy before earning their Ph.D.s. As a recent graduate of New York University, I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the major differences I perceived between Austrian economics and the neoclassical, New Keynesian
[From a paper that was first written and printed in 1991] The fate of families and children in Sweden shows the truth of Ludwig von Mises’s observation that “no compromise” is possible between capitalism and socialism. Here I show how the welfare state’s growth can be viewed as the transfer of the “dependency” function from families to state
When economic times are good, people pay very little attention to the work of economists. Only when an economy experiences a downturn do people come to economists asking how this latest disaster happened and how do we get out of it. Unfortunately, the economist tends to speak in a cryptic language using references to things like the NAIRU, 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.