Are Technology Shocks Responsible for Business Cycles? In a Word, No.

In their writings, Finn Kydland and Edward C. Prescott (K-P), the 2004 Nobel laureates in economics, had hypothesized that a major cause behind boom-bust cycles is technology shocks. In order to assess the importance of this claim, which they labeled the theory of real business cycles, K-P employed the Solow growth model (after Robert Solow, the 1987 Nobel laureate), which in turn is based on the Cobb-Douglas production function of the following type:

Y = A*K(1–a)*Na,

Hazony on the American Tradition

In last week’s article, I discussed some of the arguments Yoram Hazony gives in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery in favor of an empiricist procedure in ethics that supports working within a particular national tradition and against the rationalist deductive method of those who without empirical evidence defend the supreme value of freedom by postulating it arbitrarily as an axiom. I tried to show that one could support the self-ownership principle by an empirical argument that appealed to human nature.

Don’t Be Fooled: The World’s Central Bankers Still Love Inflation

The Bank of Canada on Wednesday increased its policy interest rate (known as the overnight target rate) from 1.0 percent to 1.5 percent. This was the second fifty–basis point increase since April and is the third target rate increase since March of this year. Canada’s target rate had been flat at 0.25 percent for twenty-three months following the bank’s slashing of the target rate beginning in March 2020.