Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty?

In the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics of Spring 2000, Robert Tollison joins David Laband in reiterating a stretched conception of market test. Laband and Tollison recommend grading academic performance by the sorts of statistics that Laband compiles, which involve article and page counts, impressions of journal quality, and citations. As I said in the 1997 article that Laband and Tollison attack (the preceding chapter here), not even the actual commercial market is a test of truth and beauty or excellence.

Ode to the Warehouse

If there were perfect information about the future, all goods would be manufactured on a need-be basis only. Despite its stillness and orderly calm, the warehouse embodies a wild leap into the unknown — a physical monument to the human capacity to imagine a future we cannot see.