Subjectivism

I heartily await other fortunes that discuss capital theory, interest rates, the business cycle, and perhaps even price controls.

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.

Economic science per se cannot establish ethical statements. The problem of 'welfare economics' has always been to find some way to circumvent this restriction on economics….The free market is the name for the array of all the voluntary exchanges that take place in the world.

The problem with this assumption is that it is quite impossible to construct a scale of measurement for human preferences — both for individuals and especially for groups of individuals.

Roderick Long talks about value-subjectivism, and where Austrian economics is supposed to endorse a subjective sense of value.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains the neglected role of insurance in a free market economy. Any insurance involves the pooling of individual risks by the market, a task the state can only distort.

Recorded at Mises University 2005.

The idea behind hedonic price index calculation is to incorporate quality changes into prices. This way, a product may be on the market at a higher price, but when the product qualities have augmented more than the price in the eyes of the BLS, it will calculate that the price of this product has actually fallen.

Leland Yeager

Volume 12, Number 1 (Fall 1990)