Kevin Brancato at Truck&Barter posts a few paragraphs from his dissertation that deal with Mises and index numbers. “No aprioristic theory exists to determine the exact outcomes of changes in law that apply to the economic system. In fact, Mises is fine with data, as long as you are not trying to construct economic theory out of it.
In my capacity as an economics student one of the hardest things to grasp has always been the exact relationship between consumption expenditures, savings, and prosperity. At the undergraduate level, I was fed the standard IS/LM story, which says in effect that consumption drives production. The standard story can be told in a few simple sentences using some obvious “facts” about the functioning of the economic system.
An obscure regulatory agency, the OFHEO, has succeeded in bringing down one of the politically savviest and most well-connected figures in the Washington, Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines. An OFEHO investigation revealed that Fannie Mae had been violating rules concerning derivatives accounting, and that the resulting mis-statements in their finances enabled Fannie to meet numerical targets that were required for Raines and other top executives to earn multi-million dollar bonuses.
Yesterday it was revealed that the US trade deficit rose sharply in November, to a record high $60.3 billion, an increase of $4.3 billion against the upwardly revised $56 billion in October and also far higher than the consensus estimate of $54 billion. And it was a sharp increase against the $40 billion deficit in November 2003. That caused the dollar to fall roughly 1% against the euro and most other major currencies. It also meant that fourth quarter GDP growth estimates will be sharply downwardly revised.
Ask the typical undergraduate to discuss the ideas advanced in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and you may as well be asking for an overview of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. Yet these nearly forgotten documents fully merit a place among the most important political writings in American history, both in terms of the ideas they put forth and the influence they had on subsequent generations of American political thinkers.
Nick Gillespie at Reason is “not a raving fan of Social Security ‘privatization’ for a number of reasons.
On January 3, 2005, President George W. Bush held a news conference to discuss the federal government’s response to the awesome and terrible destruction of the natural disasters in South Asia. When he approached his podium, he was flanked by two stoic and serious men.
Government figures put US savings at 0.3% of income. Two recent articles (Are Spendthrift Americans Really the Problem? in the New York Times, and A Savings Crisis? Maybe Not in Business Week, state that the alleged low savings rate in the US is either mis-measured or not a problem anyway.
