I’m spending today and tomorrow in the Archives at Tuskegee University; I’m working on a handful of projects about racist violence and Southern economic development, and a lot of the data and information I’m using is drawn from work done by scholars at Tuskegee. It has been an interesting study in the differences between how information traveled in 1910 or 1960 and how it travels in 2010.

Thanks to Stefan and FreeDomainRadio:

From page 111 of the 1918-1919 Negro Year Book, published by the Tuskegee Institute and edited by Monroe N. Work:

While the unemployment rate continues to hover between 9 and 10 percent, the average amount of time wage earners remain unemployed has skyrocketed to previously unrecorded levels.1 Keynesians fear that a weak fiscal and monetary response will allow the presently cyclically unemployed to become so permanently.

We just received word that Manuel Fr. Ayau died yesterday. He is the founder of Universidad Francisco Marroquin, author of Not a Zero-Sum Game, and a dedicated Misesian fighter for truth. Lew Rockwell wrote about his fight for freedom here. His lasting legacy is a huge presence for Misesian ideas in Latin America and many excellent students all over the world.

On Friday, July 30, the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank president, James Bullard, speaking on CNBC television, said that the Fed must weigh medium-term inflation risks against near-term deflation risks. For most economists and commentators, a general fall in prices, which they label deflation, is a terrible thing. They hold that a fall in prices generates expectations for a further decline in prices. As a result of this, consumers postpone their buying of goods at present because they expect to buy these goods at lower prices in the future.

Robert A. Lawson and I just published our paper “Human Rights and Economic Liberalization” in Business and Politics. The paper can be downloaded here. Here’s the abstract:

Using several case studies and data from the Economic Freedom of the World annual report and from the CIRI Human Rights Data Project, we estimate the effect of human rights abuses on economic liberalization. The data suggest that human rights abuses reduce rather than accelerate the pace of economic liberalization.