Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Both the Senate hearings on “Big Tech” companies and the Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit against Google amplify popular misunderstandings of what drives competition in the market for information. In any market, competition is a means to consumer satisfaction, the ultimate governor of which firms prevail, and which firms fail.

When Money Dies, Adam Fergusson’s cautionary account of hyperinflation in Weimar-era Germany, is the book Americans desperately need to read today.

Abstract: Many scholars have pointed to Austrian subjectivism as an appropriate framework for understanding and studying entrepreneurship. Yet very few empirical studies in the field of entrepreneurship have applied a subjectivist lens. This research article responds to calls for more subjectivist entrepreneurship research by theoretically refining and empirically extending the subjectivist approach to team entrepreneurship.

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

Michael Shermer, a famous skeptic, was forced to admit that one of the reasons is that some of them are true. In his research he found that the fact that some conspiracy theories are real feeds people’s suspicion and makes them susceptible to the belief in others that are far less credible.

Abstract: New institutional economics (NIE) and Austrian economics (AE) both emphasize the role that institutions play in facilitating or impeding entrepreneurship and hence economic growth. In this paper, we discuss the complementarities between AE and NIE for advancing our understanding of the relationship between institutions and entrepreneurship.

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
by Elizabeth Hinton
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016
464 pp.

Tate Fegley (tjf59@pitt.edu) is a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World
by David Skarbek
New York: Oxford University Press, 2020
240 pp.

Christopher Calton (caltonc@ufl.edu) is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Florida.

The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind, whether everyone knows it or not. It is presaged by the measures undertaken by states across the world in response to the covid-19 crisis. (I mean by “crisis” not the so-called pandemic itself, but the responses to a novel virus called SARS-2 and the impact of the responses on social and economic conditions.)