Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 29–64

Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 3–28

The US homicide rate in 2014, the most recent year available, was 4.5 per 100,000. The 2014 total follows a long downward trend and is the lowest homicide rate recorded since 1963 when the rate was 4.6 per 100,000. To find a lower homicide rate, we must travel back to 1957 when the total homicide rate hit 4.0 per 100,000.

The majority of economists view deflation as a general decline in prices of goods and services. This is viewed as a major threat to the public’s well-being for deflation is seen as a major factor that plunges the economy into an economic depression. Most of them are of the view that central banks and governments’ worldwide must aggressively fight the possible emergence of deflation. This way of thinking stems from an erroneous view of what deflation is. As a result, it is overlooked that it is not deflation but rather monetary pumping which is the root of economic hardship.

1)    Michel Chevalier on the cumulative nature of innovation

Michel Chevalier (1806-1879) was one of the most brilliant of the French Classical School of Political Economy, rightly called by Dr. Joseph Salerno the “Bastiat’s school”. As a minister during the second empire, he led the negociations that resulted in the Cobden–Chevalier Free-Trade Treaty of 1860.

[Originally published May 2016]

Although it is sometimes imagined that a world based on gift-giving rather than market exchange would be a world without scarcity or want, we are still left with the problem of manufacturing and producing complex goods that require markets to allocate resources.

Moreover, if we remember that the act of gift-giving requires both the giver and the recipient to agree to the exchange, we quickly find that the situation is more complex than we initially thought.

Last week, I examined how obesity among low-income households cannot be explained by simply claiming that low-income people don’t have access to healthy food. It is claimed that supermarkets and other places that sell food are too far away from low-income neighborhoods for households to access them. It is assumed that low-income people will eat fast food instead. This is known as the “food desert” concept in which some places are devoid of food choices.