While much of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom focused on correcting erroneous ideas and sloppy thinking that misled (and still mislead) many to support socialistic expansions of government power, that is not all it did. It also reiterated the case for individualism and its economic manifestation—free markets.

In addition to providing crucial insights into the cleavages between social organization based on freedom and social organization based on coercion, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom provided many other insights. Many of them dealt with the morality of collectivism. In honor of the books 75th anniversary this year, please consider Part 2 of our considerations— Collectivism and Morality. (See Part I here.)

Back when I taught political science, a phrase I used when preparing students for the tests was “he who makes distinctions well, teaches well.”

That is, if we’re talking about regime types, dear student, you better know the difference between a totalitarian regime, and a regime that is merely authoritarian. If we’re talking about eighteenth-century American ideologies, you better know the difference between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. If we’re talking economic policy, know the difference between fiscal policy and monetary policy.

The Americas are unusual because citizenship is often granted based on birthplace, rather than on the citizenship or place of origin of one’s parents. Countries in North and South America have historically tended to more freely grant citizenship due to their relatively low populations, abundant land, and a historical dependence on migrant labor to take advantage of the region’s vast natural resources.

The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – colloquially known as the Nobel Prize in Economics – has gone to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer are pioneers in the use of field experiments, or randomized-controlled trials (RCTs), to study economic phenomena. An RCT in economics is analogous to its counterpart in medicine.

Can the increasing politicization of life in America be stopped, or even slowed?

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019 to Abhijit Banerjee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and to his wife Esther Duflo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and to Michael Kremer (Harvard University).

From the Nobel committee:

[The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society. By Binyamin Appelbaum. Little, Brown, 2019. 439 pages.]

Efforts to stimulate growth end up hampering growth. The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle (ATBC), pioneered by Ludwig von Mises, explains this seeming paradox. Government reduction of interest rates below the would-be market rate triggers an expansion of fiduciary credit in the context of fiat currency and fractional-reserve banking. It leads to a boom whose main features are both malinvestment and overconsumption. The former squanders factors of production in business activities less urgently needed by consumers while the latter undermines the replenishment of the capital stock.