It was announced this week that the Denver Post will soon be cutting one-third of its newsroom staff. The newsroom currently has 100 reporters, and that will soon be cut by 30 positions.
Reporters and other observers quickly began to look for whom to blame.
When sharing Bob Murphy’s excellent article today on the Knowledge-Calculation Debate, one of the most common responses has been “Murphy makes a good case, but why does this really matter?”
Beyond the value of grasping intellectual nuance, I think this debate has actually increased in real world importance over time with the rise of “Big Data.”
In the face of staggeringly high tax rates and growing housing costs, people are abandoning San Francisco at such a rate that U-Haul prices have skyrocketed in the area.
In fact, most geniuses seem to simply not get economics. An example is the recently departed physicist Stephen Hawking, who - like so many - made rather ridiculous statements of economic nature. Quoted by MSN/MarketWatch, Hawking makes several very simple mistakes in his attempted economic commentary.
It is interesting to see how prices emerge in a hyperinflationary environment like see in Venezuela. While the government finally cut its “official” exchange rate of 10 bolivars to the dollar, it continues to vastly overstate the value of its currency.
Venezuela continues to be one of the great humanitarian crises of our times. Every day brings new horrific headlines of starvation, violence, and chaos.
When I started writing popular articles about economics, one of my major motivations was to demonstrate to my undergraduate students that it didn’t require advanced degrees in economics for them to competently evaluate economic policy issues and claims. They could get a long way simply by using careful, logical thinking, and consistently-applied basic economic principles, because those tools reveal most of the errors. I thought of Frédéric Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt as inspirations.
Gun control advocates often point to Australia as an example of how “banning” guns leads to significant declines in homicide rates.
