Last week the United States, Mexico, and Canada agreed to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with a new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Sadly, instead of replacing NAFTA’s managed trade with true free trade, the new USMCA expands government’s control over trade.

For example, under the USMCA’s “rules of origin,” at least 75 percent of a car’s parts must be from the US, Canada, or Mexico in order to avoid tariffs. This is protectionism designed to raise prices of cars using materials from outside North America.

Jacob Bronowski wrote, in The Common Sense of Science, that “at the basis of human thought lies the judgment of what is like and what is unlike.” That is, useful analysis requires treating that which is like similarly, and that which is unlike, differently. Unfortunately, public policies often mistakenly treat people that are unlike in crucial ways as if they are like, and people who are alike in crucial ways as if they are unlike.

There are several issues in housing policy alone that illustrate this point.

It is a well-known belief that by means of monetary policy, the central bank can influence the rate of real economic expansion. It is also held that this influence however, carries a price, which manifests itself in terms of inflation.

For instance, if the goal is to reach a faster economic growth rate and a lower unemployment rate then citizens should be ready to pay a price for this in terms of a higher rate of inflation.

On a recent jaunt to the end of the world, I found myself in one of those situations awkward for an Austrian economist, which is that of defending the Chicago school and Milton Friedman. As a result of my discussions with Chileans regarding economics and politics—especially the persisting divide in Chile between Allende and Pinochet supporters—I reached my quota for Friedman defenses.

To that end, I’m glad to be home.

The 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science was awarded for the 50 th time today, to William D. Nordhaus of Yale University and Paul M. Romer of New York University. Although Austrian school economists might find common ground on a few aspects of Nordhaus and Romer’s work, such as Romer’s criticism of “mathiness” in economics, there is not much for Austrians to celebrate about this year’s prize.

“In the long run we are all dead.”

This famous retort of the most influential economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, was meant as a rebuttal to the views of the classical or free market economists. The entire quote reads:

But the long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again. [A Tract on Monetary Reform, p. 80]

In the July 1894 issue of American Mathematical Monthly, amateur mathematician Edward J.

Recently, I read a Los Angeles Times article that referred to high-deductible health plans as “much hated by employees.” That struck me as incongruous, since high-deductible — or catastrophic — plans are what insurance principles support. If that is true, why would employees hate them?

How do insurance principles support high-deductible, or catastrophic, plans?

The 2018 Nobel Prize in economics has gone to Yale’s William Nordhaus for work in environmental economics and NYU’s Paul Romer for work on economic growth. Both have long been considered front-runners for the award (Romer was described as a likely winner back in the 1990s) though the combination is unexpected.