[This is a selection from “Driving the Market Process: ‘Alertness’ Versus Innovation and ‘Creative Destruction’” in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. The full article is here.]

Wise alecks on social media noted with amusement how Beto O’Rourke recently claimed humans had only ten years to act on climate change, thus one-upping Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who had previously gone out on a limb by putting the deadline at twelve years.

[A Selection From: “On the Coinage” by Juan de Mariana Translated by Hazzard Bagg for the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 21, no. 2 (Summer 2018).]

With the rise of the Yellow Vest Movement in France — which began last October and continues today — French activists and writers have begun to re-evaluate the state of French income and poverty.

The economist Alex Tabarrok in a post today criticizes what he calls ”identity economics”. Tabarrok says: “Identity economics is bad economics”. By “identity economics,” he means a theory that jumps from an accounting identity to a claim about causation. Keynesian economics is a prime example of this fallacy, as Tabarrok’s quotation from Nick Rowe illustrates:

1. Y = C + I + G + X – M. Therefore an increase in Government spending will increase GDP.

As I’ve noted in the past , when it comes to government spending on social welfare programs, the United States is hardly the free-market, libertarian “paradise” many social democrats suppose it to be. When we look at social spending as a percentage of GDP, the US is similar to Switzerland, and the US spends more on social benefits than Australia and Canada.

Mr. Quiggin’s recent book, Economics in Two Lessons, is the latest intellectual salvo fired by a member of the mainstream economics establishment towards the legendary unabashed defenders of capitalism like Ludwig von Mises, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A.