Oliver E. Williamson, 2009 Nobel laureate and founder of “transaction cost economics,” has died at age 87.
As I wrote in 2009,
Oliver Williamson’s Nobel Prize, shared with Elinor Ostrom, is great news for Austrians. Williamson’s pathbreaking analysis of how alternative organizational forms — markets, hierarchies, and hybrids, as he calls them — emerge, perform, and adapt has defined the modern field of organizational economics.
The present COVID-19 pandemic has left public schools scrambling to find ways to dampen the impact on students. Some public schools have switched to virtual instruction, while others have simply sent students home with passing grades.
A few weeks ago I presented a libertarian take on the ethics of the lockdown. Following Murray Rothbard in his Ethics of Liberty, I argued that the government has no right to confine or quarantine innocent people, even though it might lengthen some lives. The government is not the just owner of the streets. Rather citizens or taxpayers are, and consequently have the right to use their streets.
Donald Trump today announced that “we are not closing our country“ if a second wave of COVID-19 hits the country later this year.
Given that Trump is not the one who decides whether or not state governments attempt to impose forced social-distancing measures, we can nonetheless interpret his statement as an announcement that he plans to use his position to oppose efforts to impose lockdowns in the in the future.
Paul Cantor, longtime Mises Institute scholar and author of Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream, recently was featured in an Arizona State University miniroundtable “The Walking Dead, the Post-Zombie Apocalypse, and the American Capacity for Resilience.” Cantor discusses how popular culture has partly formed our views of pandemics.
Abstract: Since Samuelson’s (1966) reswitching example in the 1960s, it became clear that the Average Production Period (APP) is not necessarily a decreasing function of the interest rate. Recently, Fillieule (2007) and Hülsmann (2010) have shown that Samuelson’s example is not a mere curiosity. They showed that in a reasonable production structure model, the length of production increases with the interest rate instead of decreasing. However, their model did not present “reswitching” behavior.
Abstract: Karl-Friedrich Israel (2018) sees “obvious tension” in a book chapter (Salerno 2018) in which I argue that the Hicksian income effect plays no role in the causal-realist approach to the demand curve. Israel’s reconstructed “wealth effect” is an effort to solve this perceived problem. This comment addresses the expositional gap in my analysis, and resolves the perceived tension. I then outline the problems with Israel’s proposed solution, which involves a wholesale reconstruction of demand theory that, in the end, implies a denial of the law of demand.
Richard Ebeling (rebeling@citadel.edu) is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel.
[This article in the QJAE’s “Remembering” series is adapted from https://mises.org/wire/remembering-oskar-morgenstern.]
