Among the larger albatrosses burdening the economics profession is the idea of Homo economicus. To this day, most economics undergraduates hear about it in the context of neoclassical economics. Homo economicus, we are told, is the ideal economic man who always seeks to maximize profits and minimize costs. He only acts “rationally,” and rationalism is defined as, well, always seeking to maximize profits and minimize costs. Even worse, “profit” is often assumed to mean “monetary profit” measurable only in dollars (or some other currency).

On the 27th of March, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order which had the purpose of curbing speech deemed as “anti-semitic” on all state-run universities. Unfortunately, speech protection on public universities has been shaky in the past with universities attempting to restrict speech many times with varying levels of success.

According to a new report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics this week, the US economy added 175,000 jobs for the month of April while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 3.9%.

Finding the Money, a video aimed at explaining Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to a popular audience, debuted today on several streaming platforms and theaters throughout the U.S.  Whether it succeeded or not in its aim I will leave it for others to judge.    What I found most noteworthy and illuminating  in the 95-minute video was a brief clip of an interview with George Selgin, an economist of some note in free-market monetary po

“Why do we borrow our own currency in the first place?”

Stephanie Kelton posed this question in her new documentary, Finding the Money, and a clip of Jared Berstein’s fumbled response to the question has gone viral on social media. Bernstein is the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers to Biden, and so we would expect that he would have an articulate answer to Kelton’s question, but he did not.

Part of our mission at the Mises Institute is preserving and promoting underrated and great radical liberals and libertarians of the past. One of these is the great Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner.

Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again
by Robert Kagan
Alfred A. Knopf, 2024; 243 pp.

Earlier this year, I gave a short course on Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics for scientists and engineers at my institute. The course was brief, and I focused only on ideas that were relevant for researchers in engineering and the natural sciences. One of the ideas we talked about was supply and demand, in order to link it to the supply and demand of research-related things: the labor of researchers, research articles on specific topics, and so on.

This article is adapted from a lecture delivered to the Federalist Society: 

The Federal Reserve is a fundamental problem for the Constitutional order of the American Republic. How can it be that it considered itself able to unilaterally impose permanent inflation on the country, without legislative debate or approval?

It is the waning days of the Sunak premiership, and the Conservative party still has a stonking majority despite its cataclysmic capitulation in the polls. The government is effectively a lame duck; everyone knows it has no support, yet it will still be around for a few more months. One would think that since the Conservative party still has a large majority in the House of Commons that it would let loose with policy and attempt real reform so that the MPs have something to take to the people when election time begins.