One of the more interesting economic debates in the past couple of decades is why the economy is slowing down.
Since 2000, per capita GDP growth in the US has been 0.9 percent per year, compared to 2.3 percent per year in the previous fifty years. This is a big difference: at 2.3 percent growth we double in wealth every generation. At 0.9 percent it takes us close to a century to double. So why the slowdown?
Mario Rizzo, a well-known Austrian economist who teaches at NYU, made an important point about Austrian economics in a recent post on Facebook. He said, “If you are an economist and want to be remembered by future generations, then you really should be a Austrian. We pay full homage to our ancestors and do not pretend that we discovered something new if we have not. On the other hand, most top-level conventional graduate students today barely know the names Ricardo, Mill, Marshall, Hicks, Samuelson, Coase, Friedman and they certainly have little idea of what they said.
Our guest on Mises Weekends this week is uniquely qualified to discuss modern progressives from a libertarian perspective. Jim Ostrowski, whom Murray Rothbard called “one of the finest people in the libertarian movement,” is a lawyer, writer, activist, and chronicler of progressive dysfunction in his native New York.
Mark Thornton speaks with Albert Lu about the recent violence in Ferguson and Baltimore and what can be done. Dr. Thornton discusses this in his most recent article, found here.
The economics profession today continues to face mounting criticism for its failure to predict and explain economic crises.
Today’s is Joe Salerno’s birthday. He is an outstanding Austrian economist and the Academic Vice-President of the Mises Institute. Murray Rothbard said of Joe that he “has done remarkably creative work in the history of economic thought.”He has made major contribution to monetary theory, Austrian business cycle theory, the nature of entrepreneurship, and price theory. In pioneering work, he showed how Mises’s socialist calculation argument differed from that of Hayek. He is a zealous defender of the free market, ever ready to apply Austrian insights to current problems.
With the victory of the Conservatives in last week’s British election, the future of both the European Union and the United Kingdom looks more doubtful.
Mises Daily Friday by Christopher Casey:
It is now commonplace for governments to measure economic prosperity with GDP metrics. Numerous arbitrary rules and faulty assumptions behind these measures, however, skew our view of how economies grow and living standards improve.
