Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics - 2020 V-23 I-02

Christopher Calton reviews David Skarbek's insightful book on prison social order, which shows how informal governance systems form and operate in a surprising environment.

Leisure (the state of not engaging in labor) is a necessary complementary good for consuming other goods. As such, leisure’s status as a consumer good is a priori true, not an empirical assumption.

This book is a must-have for management and economics scholars whose research interests include Austrian economics, entrepreneurship, strategy, and organization. 

Before I had read less than a hundred pages of this book, I surmised that the author was not an economist and definitely not an economist who had any “Austrian School” affiliation. Instead, I was sure he was an historian.

The good news is that Stephanie Kelton—economics professor at Stony Brook and advisor to the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—has written a book on modern monetary theory that is very readable, and will strike many readers as persuasive and clever. The bad news is that Stephanie Kelton has written a book on MMT that is very readable and will strike many readers as persuasive and clever.

We can easily imagine a world in which leisure does not represent the opportunity cost of labor, and that Mises and Rothbard have been misconstrued. 

During the boom phase of the business cycle, the economy shifts to a more risky position as the result of entrepreneurs’ profit targeting. The duration can be used to quantify this risk and to determine the discount rate for calculating the project's present value.

Professor Joseph Salerno (2019) has commented on my recent reconstruction of the income effect from a causal-realist perspective (Israel, 2018b). In this rejoinder, I clarify my position and show that the main points of criticism in Salerno’s response are unfounded.