Congratulations to Ed Stringham and Tom Woods, two of three junior faculty winners of the 2002-2003 Olive W. Garvey Fellowships.

From the June 2002 issue of the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (no. 158):

Oliver Volckart
No Utopia: Government Without Territorial Monopoly in Medieval Central Europe

Bill Anderson’s recent Mises.org piece on Krugman rings truer each day.  In today’s New York Times Magazine, Krugman attempts to push supply-side theory out of the economics profession, as he attempted several years ago to do to the Austrians.  It is clear that Krugman believes the only professional economists are Monetarists and Keynesians of various stripes. Jude Wanniski and Robert Mundell: call your office.

Using historical data to ”forecast” human action (points scored in a football game) from Tennessean.com: “Schwartz is also examining regressions, the same sort of predictive formulas used in economic and weather forecasting.  Meteorologists predict today’s chance of rain by plugging factors into a regression equation.

Concering  this item, perhaps Coach Schwartz isn’t familiar with the “Lucas Critique,” in which Robert Lucas demonstrated that government economic models tended to be incorrect because people change their behavior in the face of government policy?  Because Coach Schwartz will change his coaching behavior in response to what his models predict, they may be of limited usefulness (unless he has factored his endogenous responses into the model, in which case I’m really impressed).  Of course, he may

Protesting the WTO for free trade (BBC): “The G21 say the rich world needs to keep the promises it made two years ago to cut tariffs.”

Floyd Norris, writing in the New York Times, explains that Foreigners May Not Have Liked the War, but They Financed It.  This is one of the many perversities of the world wide dollar reserve system.  The US imports more goods than it exports, which must be balanced by exporting more financial assets than it imports.  Firms in foreign countries sell America goods for dollars that must be either held as dollars or converted back into their local currency.   The holders of dollars turn around and

“The Myth of Neutral Taxation”

by Murray N. Rothbard (1981)