Philosophy and Methodology

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David Gordon

This week on Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon reviews The Price of Our Values by Augustin Landier and David Thesmar. While the authors claim that economists often substitute utilitarianism for moral values, they dismiss any idea of objective standards for morality.

Frank Shostak

Carl Menger wrote, “All things are subject to the law of cause and effect.” Unfortunately, modern academic economists all too often confuse correlation of economic phenomena with causality.

Jonathan Newman

Part of bringing up young children is to tell them stories and accounts about people who did the right thing, and how they made life better for themselves and others. We can do the same with describing economic concepts, which don‘t have to be dry and boring.

Richard W. Fulmer

By omitting mercantilism, Marx could attribute its exploitative practices—particularly colonialism—directly to capitalism, reinforcing his ideological critique.

David Gordon

The philosopher Karl Popper was a strong critic of Marx, his system, and especially his reliance on historicism. Unfortunately, as David Gordon points out, Popper supported economic interventionism as a viable “third way” for social organization.

Wanjiru Njoya

Economic development cannot ever be seen as an end in itself. People are complex, social beings who may well forgo some of the advantages of economic growth for social stability, something Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard understood.

Frank Shostak

Mainstream economists claim that in order to “do economics,” they must collect data and then see where it leads them. However, data by itself is economically useless without a guiding theory to explain what is happening.

Larry J. Sechrest

J.B. Say deserves to be remembered, especially by Austrian economists, as a pivotal figure in the history of economic thought. Yet, one finds him discussed very briefly, if at all.