Calculation and Knowledge

Much ink has been expended in discussions of the US yield curve and also on the reluctance of the country’s lower money aggregates to grow as

Greg Mankiw reports on

I’m sure most readers of this blog are familiar with Julian Simon’s

For anyone interested, the full version of the article which includes thoughts on the role of the yield curve — updated to take account of the feed

From The New York Times of September 21:

Free-market capitalism allows for a degree of coordination that no other system can match. Those who hold capitalism to a standard of perfection ignore the fact that activist governments have failed to attain anything better, and have often made matters worse.

The lead article in today’s New York Times/Pravda is titled

Let us remember that we live in a world of scarcity, that economizing on information can be efficient, and that sometimes the reason stereotypes exist is because, well, they're true.

The various sources of error that come into play in the social sciences suggest that the error in economic observations is substantial. Morgenstern shows that the solution of a system of economic mathematical equations or econometric models is, due to the quality of the data, completely devoid of meaning.

For many years, I’ve been pointing out that the entire mass of the earth, from the upper limits of its atmosphere 4,000 miles straight down t