With the exception of a few ethnic Italian activists, no American appears to actually celebrate Columbus Day anymore (assuming it was ever “celebrated” in any meaningful sense). And unless you work for a bank or a government agency, you may not even notice it’s a “holiday” at all.

Here’s a real shocker:  The 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics was not awarded to Israel Kirzner, as many Austrians fervently hoped.

Michael Pollaro writes in Forbes.com that the all-time high credibility that central bankers currently enjoy is about to change.

The Nobel committee has chosen Jean Tirole, a leader in game-theoretic industrial organization analysis, for the 2014 economics prize.

There are strong indications that the remarkable run up of asset prices in the last few years is beginning to run out of steam and may be on the verge of collapse. We will leave aside the question of whether the asset inflation is symptomatic of a garden-variety inflationary boom or is a more virulent bubble phenomenon in which prices are rising today simply because buyers anticipate that they will rise tomorrow.

The Evidence

Early on in the most recent meeting of the National Association of Business Economists (NABE) in Chicago, Dan Ratner, one of President Obama’s tech gurus for the 2012 election cycle and expert in the hip field of Big Data mining, stated to his audience that “there is no such thing as truth. There is only the most recent updated version of it.”

Little did I know this was to be a recurring theme at this conference.

Orders for US non-military capital goods excluding aircraft rose by 0.6 percent in August after a 0.2 percent decline in July to stand at $73.2 billion. Observe that after closing at $48 billion in May 2009, capital goods orders have been trending up.

Most commentators regard this strengthening as evidence that companies are investing both in the replacement of existing capital goods and in new capital goods in order to expand their growth.

In our age of technological marvels, it’s easy to be in awe of science, and even to believe that science in and of itself is responsible for the high living standards enjoyed in some nations. Likewise, it’s all too easy to see poverty and economic stagnation as stemming from a lack of scientific progress, and conclude that to make the world a better place, all we need are more breakthroughs and inventions.