It’s become quite fashionable for members of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) like Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson to decry equality of outcome as a thinly veiled guise for tyranny and oppression. However, in pleading against the doctrine of equality of outcome, these digital intellectuals inevitably defend the insidious doctrine of equality of opportunity.
How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future
Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehl, and Livia Chitu
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018, 250 pp.
Research Handbook on Austrian Law and Economics
Todd J. Zywicki and Peter J. Boettke, eds.
Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2017, 440 pp.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017
Hope Jahren, ed.
Wilmington, Mass.: Mariner Books, 2017, 352 pp.
ABSTRACT: Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, in their book Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700 (Princeton University Press, 2016), explore the reasons for the decline in the share of income captured by top earners in industrialized nations. Embedded in their take on the “Greatest Leveling” is a push for progressive redistribution policies, based on old misconceptions from Malthus and the Classical economists.
As the microbrewery trend is seeing a rise everywhere in the world, 2018 saw the launch of the White Collar Brewing in Bucharest, in my native Romania. Behind the already highly acclaimed beers lies an interesting piece of information: the brewery is the entrepreneurial endeavor of an Austrian economist, professor at the Romanian-American University in Bucharest and former Mises Institute fellow, Bogdan Glăvan.
The main reason why the ECB quantitative easing program has failed is that it started from a wrong diagnosis of the eurozone’s problem. That the European problem was a demand and liquidity issue, not due to years of excess.
The ECB had been receiving tremendous pressure from banks and governments to implement a similar program to the US’ quantitative easing, forgetting that the eurozone had been under a chain of government stimuli since 2009 and that the problem of the euro-zone was not liquidity, but an interventionist model.
There are three money supply statistics that every citizen should understand. They are the monetary base, M1, and M2.
Some commentators are of the view that when the velocity of money rises, all other thing being equal, the buying power of money declines, (i.e., the prices of goods and services rise). The opposite occurs when velocity declines.
If, for example, it was found that the quantity of money had increased by 10% in a given year, while the price level as measured by the consumer price index has remained unchanged it would mean that there must have been a slowing down of about 10% in the velocity of circulation.
