The people over at the Calculated Risk blog had a helpful post today that links to the BLS’s primer on the differences between the “Establishment” employment data and the “Household” employment data.
Tom Woods just delivered his first Mises Academy live session (for his online course The New Deal: History, Economics, and Law) and the student consensus in the public chat is clear: as one student wrote, “great first class!!!” First, Woods gave an outstanding lecture on the origins of the 1929 crash (see his informative slides here). Then he answered topical questions at length.
Corey Robin reviews the two new books on Ayn Rand, including my favorite among them by Jennifer Burns, in this week’s The Nation. It makes for a gripping read, if you can stand the posturing throughout.
As a culture, we like our reality on television, but seem to oppose it in economics.
For more than two years now, and even longer depending on your dating scheme, the federal government has waged war on the reality of the incredible Fed-fueled bubble that developed in housing, with spillover effects on the rest of economic life.
That bubble had to explode to restore some sanity to the economic environment. There is no getting around that. The policies were all about trying to paper over what we did not want to deal with as facts. But the facts won’t go away.
The Denver Post has an excellent article on the convoluted system of farm subsidies that have produced such heavy production of meat, dairy and grain at the expense of fruits and vegatables. They note that it is more expensive to produce fruits and vegetables, but we could also notice that subsidy to grains, corn, for instance, leads to less farm land being devoted to the growing of corn, and less capital invested in corn overall. More land devoted to the growing of melons, for example, will lead to lower prices for the consumer. And once a crop is overproduced, production will go down.
The local state community college just opened a satellite campus five miles from my house. This afternoon, while on a bike ride, I headed over to check it out.
The college website loudly proclaims that the campus is “being built to rigorous LEED environmental standards.”
Ah, yes, LEED standards. It seems like every government building is adhering to them. OK. But how do those standards look in practice?
According to Paul Krugman, it seems that World War II created a foundation for long-run prosperity. Yes, what we really need is to add to our deficit and debt in ways unimaginable. (Thank goodness, Krugman does not recommend that our armed forces invade yet another hapless Third World country.)
[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]
[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]
[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]
