Mises Search

A trope of contemporary social commentary is that “science” has somehow become “politicized,” such that people no longer trust or believe what is presented as the scientific consensus on important social, political, and economic issues. The most salient example until recently was climate change, where various scientific professionals,

I can’t recall the last time I heard something on National Public Radio in defense of savings but, there it was, in this morning’s Marketplace segment on Karen Petrou’s new book Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America . Savings, Petrou asserts, are the “engine of wealth accumulation.” Petrou, whose work has been discussed

I met Murray in 1988 and I will never forget the experience. The story begins the previous year, as I was completing my bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of North Carolina and considering pursuing a PhD. I was familiar with Murray’s writings as a semicloseted Austrian in a mainstream economics program. I had seen an advertisement

Peter G Klein is Carl Menger Research Fellow of the Mises Institute and W.W. Caruth Chair and Professor of Entrepreneurship at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business. He is also senior research fellow at Baylor’s Baugh Center for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise and adjunct professor of strategy and management at the Norwegian School

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Berkeley’s David Card, MIT’s Josh Angrist, and Stanford’s Guido Imbens for their work on “natural experiments,” a currently fashionable approach to estimating the causal impact of one economic variable on another. Card, of course, became famous in and outside the profession for his 1994 paper

As with the federal investigation into college basketball recruiting, the college admissions scandal announced yesterday seems to fall into FBI jurisdiction only because of the overly broad mail and wire fraud statutes and federal racketeering laws — which make every tort or contract violation into a federal crime. Put differently, if rich parents

Obituaries for the late Princeton economist Alan Krueger have combined praise for his personal character with implicit (or explicit) endorsement of his research approach. Krueger, writes Noah Smith , “helped turn the economics profession into a more empirical, more scientific enterprise.” Krueger was “a beacon of cool-headed reason -- his

Behavioral economics and its close cousin, neuroeconomics, have been all the rage in the last few decades. Behavioral economists claim to go beyond the naive assumptions of neoclassical economics by taking psychology (and neurophysiology) seriously, using laboratory experiments, brain scans, and other techniques to study how economic actors

Nicholas Kristof writes in the Sunday New York Times about the decline of the public intellectual . “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.” As Kristof rightly points out, in many academic disciplines, career success comes

A new NBER paper documents a strong, secular increase in US corporate borrowing during the Keynesian era. Unregulated U.S. corporations dramatically increased their debt usage over the past century. Aggregate leverage – low and stable before 1945 – more than tripled between 1945 and 1970 from 11% to 35%, eventually reaching 47% by the early 1990s.