A recent 60 Minutes piece by Lesley Stahl cut into an extremely urgent problem of our day: expensive sunglasses. The report identified a possible monopoly in the market for glasses, a firm called Luxottica, which owns almost all the leading brands of eyewear, four large retailers of glasses, and even a popular vision insurance provider.
I am wary of adding yet another conceptual margin for entrepreneurial action but I highly recommend a new (and for the moment, ungated) paper in the Scandinavian Economic History Review by the distinguished economic historian Joel Mokyr on “cultural entrepreneurship.” Starting from a broadly Schumpeterian perspective, Mokyr focuses on individuals who introduce and disseminate novel ideas:
Carol Connell, author of several insightful articles on Fritz Machlup (including “Fritz Machlup’s Methodology and The Theory of the Growth of the Firm” in the 2007 QJAE), has a new book, Reforming the World Monetary System: Fritz Machlup and the Bellagio Group. The book deals with Machlup’s attempts in the 1960s to organize a group of elite economists to make recommendations on in
. . . says Thomas Mayer, a former IMF economist and former Chief Economist of Deutsche Bank Group and Head of DB Research, and now a Deutcshe Bank Senior Advisor. In a letter today to the Financial Times, Mayer writes:
I just arrived back from lecturing at the week-long Free State Project’s Tenth Annual Porcupine Freedom Festival, a huge gathering of libertarians of all stripes from all over the U.S. in the beautiful White Mountains of New Hampshire. As you can see by browsing the schedule, the festival was chock full of educational and social events as well as commercial activities of the “grey market” (and perhaps darker) variety. Many of the vendors accepted an array of payments media.
You will probably never see Ralph Raico, professor emeritus of history at Buffalo State College, holding forth on the History Channel surrounded by wide-eyed naïfs eager to improve their mastery of American Establishment gospel. His new book, Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010) shows why.
There is now a Ludwig von Mises Institute in South Africa. This interview with Chris Becker describes the Austrian scene in South Africa and the purpose of the Institute. However, it also has a good discussion about the decline of South Africa, the rise of Subsaharan Africa, gold and much more.
