Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk is known among historians of economic thought for his formidable History and Critique of Interest Theories (1884). Before offering his own explanation of the phenomenon of interest (in a second volume which appeared five years later), Böhm-Bawerk first systematically classified and refuted all previous explanations.
In 1837, Horace Mann became the first secretary of the State Board of Education for Massachusetts. According to most accounts, this event marks the beginning of the common school era.1 Mann led the fight to institute common schools, and his influence extended from New England to America as a whole.
If bar codes gave you the creeps, and you imagined a world in which the government stamps us all on the forehead, don’t read this article from the NYT. It seems the FDA is just crazy for a new technology called “radio-frequency identification.” The idea is to track products using tiny antennas in order to prevent fraud and conterfeiting.
It turns out that the blue states are subsidizing the red ones, writes Chris Westley, which makes for hypocrisy all around.
Hardly a week goes by without another claim that some basic technology in widespread use has been patented. Last week eWeek reported that MicroSoft corp may be “trying to retroactively claim IP (intellectual property) rights over many of the Internet’s basic protocols.” A more disturbing aspect of MicroSoft’s strategy is the possibility that they plan to use patent law to launch legal attacks against popular open-source systems such as Linux. Reporter Stephen J.
Should economics be pursued as a profession or a vocation? Below I argue that this choice of subjective orientation is enormously important, and tends to dictate whether an economist will serve the cause of truth and freedom, or waste his or her talents on convenience, ephemera, and statism.
The principle that there is a perpetual tendency in the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is usually attributed to Malthus. But he was really just the popularizer of a belief that was (and is) fairly widespread. William Hazlitt, a mighty adversary of Malthus, does not think he was the first to write about it, either. In fact, plagiarism is hinted at.
According to CNN, an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that prices next week will offer investors a chance to trade securities directly linked to gold prices.
