I've decided, at the urging and with the guidance of some young friends, to get active on Twitter. It's s strange week to do so, as Twitter disintegrates a la Musk! But I'll me sending you to items I've written, and very occasionally offering also my Latest Profound Thoughts.
"Economics should be a worldly philosophy, looking on the economy from a height—with among other telescopes those supply and demand curves."
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
I am now working at Cato in Washington DC---age 80 and back in the paid labor force! I love it. My condo is literally next door. 50 meter commute!
It's great to be in a policy institute, especially as Cato is philosophical and historical among the 80 or so in Washington.
I just went to New Delhi to a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society.
The enthusiasts for childish policies, though, portray the Mont Pelerin Society as a deep, dark conspiracy of the 'neo-liberal' posh—conservative and powerful.
I’m the oncoming President of the Society, for a
"[Hirschman] was an advocate of what some of us now call “humanomics,” an economics that uses all the resources of our culture, from numbers to words, from life to art."
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
A thousand people have signed a petition against Michael Knowles 'debating" me on transgender matters on April 18 at Pittsburgh. They should be ashamed. True, Knowles is an anti-Jesus Catholic, a fascist advocating state power over ideas. But we live in a free country.
An editor for
@clarincom
in Buenos Aires asked me to tell why I described
@JMilei
, the libertarian candidate in Argentina, as not a “fully adult liberal.”
Yet I wish Argentinians would vote for him on 19 November, against the smooth but corrupt and Peronist statist.
"But it was not this French, rational side of the new ideas that mattered most. It was the new, Scottish, liberty side."
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
Peronism must stop. I pray that Milei can get Argentinians to grow up. But I worry that Milei may not be the grownup to do it.
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
"The way we actually get better off is not by shuffling jobs around, or letting the geniuses in Washington or Brasilia decide what the great new industries should be, but by thinking up better ways to do things."
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
I want you economists to read two books of mine that came out in the past couple of years from the University of Chicago press, 2021 and Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neo-Institutionalism in Economics.
The AI Panic is Insane.
"Maybe not in Brazil, but in the USA we are going insane about artificial intelligence. Our Congress might act to regulate, which is always a worrying sign of a panic attack."
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
"It is beautiful, and true, that much of our life, such as the Portuguese language and our patterns of love and friendship, and much of our economic life, is the outcome of spontaneous order, like the spontaneous order of a forest."
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
Here's a column I just wrote for the Brazilian newspaper. I do this every week, and will drip them out from now on---been doing it for a year now, so there is all sorts of mad opinion!
On April 18 at the University of Pittsburgh I "debate" with the very young, ultra-conservative Michael Knowles on transgender rights. A week later I have a knee replacement. The "debate" will let a young hater spew hatred. The operation will let an old woman walk.
"Yet the conviction has grown up over the past century that the state should take responsibility for solving every “problem,” because it has the orders to solve it."
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
Time for a quiz.
Who benefits monetarily from better local schools?
A new restriction on house building?
A denial of planning permission to change agricultural land on the edge of Cambridge, England to residential uses?
Answer: the owners of existing land in the city center.
I'm coming to the end of a month at the Cato Institute in Washington, and will be doing a month every autumn and spring from now on. Cato-ians are My People: real liberals, not conserves or socialists. What's liberalism? Adultism. Non slaves to any other human.
Well, amazingly we won our debate against good opposition at the Oxford Union (about 150 to 100 at the division) on Thursday, Feb 18, 2020. Nicole ASchoff was the final speaker in favor of the Proposition we opposed, namely, "Feminism cannot be capitalist."
Quite surprisingly, considering their steadily increasing confidence, economists have never shown scientifically that imperfections in exchanges are big.
And likewise they have never shown that states can fix the imperfections.
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
I recently spoke at
@sflibertycon
LibertyCon discussing the significant role freedom plays in fostering innovation and prosperity.
For those interested, the talk is now available online.
To repeat, I'm at
@CatoInstitute
after seven years of retirement from university teaching. Fifty years of teaching! But with all the young people here, it's like being back teaching.
I mainly write my own books, increasingly about liberalism---correctly defined, of course!
I'm also working, or going to work, with
@amingardi
on a book of portraits of what we call "the plausible illiberals," people like
@MazzucatoM
who call themselves liberals, but are not. They are, like many in the modern world, "statists." The opposite of liberal.
"Mobility is good, being part of personal liberty. But the big one is liberating people in all ways. As Moses said to Pharoah, “Let my people go.”
In order to have a go."
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
Working on a few books, always. The one that's almost out of the oven is God's Economy: Public Theology for an Age of Innovism. "Innovism" is my (better) name for what is misleadingly called "capitalism." The book persuades Christians to support liberty in the economy.
Most non-economists and all Marxist economists, bless ‘em, believe in the “labor theory of value.” You do, probably. Bless you also.
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
Why read the two books? Because they contain a diagnosis of what's going wrong with economics and then a suggestion for reforming at as "humanomics." We can do much better as a science.
A nation doesn’t know what it wants, because it’s not an “it."
Brazil, viewed as a free society and not an anthill, is 214 million individual people, with billions of plans for today, for life.
My column for Folha de S.Paulo.
Also on my Substack:
I just came back from a big Cato conference in Buenos Aires, 11-12 June about “The Rebirth of Liberty in Argentina and Beyond.”
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
For our readers in Brazil and Portugal: this year I've been writing a weekly column for the big newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. Here's the link to some of them in Portuguese. The paper's website has the original English versions.
Yet our friends on the left, and many of our friends on the right, too, believe that every “social problem” requires state intervention.
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
If you think like this you are “thinking like an economist,” which every professor of economics wants you to do. I do, for example.
@JMilei
does.
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
The authoritarians worldwide have already lost.
If the only way that Maduro, Putin, and Erdogan can stay in power is to fake elections, jail and murder opponents, and recruit enough fascist-inclined policemen to squash protests, their regimes are fragile.
The state is big and getting bigger. It requires papers, proofs of property or citizenship, by the ton. That gives rise to the problem of what the Greek-American economist
@Elena_Panaritis
calls “informality.”
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
The balloon theory and fine-tuning, then, are factually mistaken.
Let’s stop believing in the Keynes’ Brains.
My latest column for
@folha
Available on my Substack:
@RyanTAnd
@Heritage
Dear Dr. Anderson,
I am astonished that you gave a platform to radical feminists and
conservatives, but did not have an actual transgendered person to reply..
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Universal Basic Income?
The word “universal” is only one of UBI’s problems. It’s wholly impractical to give much to literally everyone.
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
Also on my Substack:
@majavonwestphal
I understand. I waver, but in the end it seemed irresponsible for a safely old and well positioned person like me to not reply to him. He does not believe in anyone's liberty.
A true er liberalism, then, should promise in the race of life only an equality of permission.
Wherever you start the race you may, as the sporting British put it, “have a go.”
My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
Also on my Substack:
Watch Out for Lawyers
Lawyers think that if there’s a problem, the solution is to pass a law that coerces people into doing good.
Check out my latest Substack post.
@mwickstrom40
It's not hard. Every cell of my body says XY. It's what you wish to infer from the fact that's the problem. Likewise certain sequences of DNA yield black skin. It's what people do with the undoubted fact that that makes for unchristian and anti-liberal treatment.
@floydt123
Your Biblical scholarship is defective, unhappily. do look into it. I take it your Greek is up to snuff? Have any Hebrew? Surely you must, considering your certitude. And I take you are an orthodox Jew, and have not merely selected a few out of the 614 commandments?
@genino1831
@larepublica_co
It is not true over any long time that human capital has grown slower than physical. Workers own it. So ignoring it biases the case. As to envy, it is surely the basis of much of socialism, if not your personal version. See
@GavinMarguerite
@PrudentiaMag
Dear Ms. Gavin, Thank you so much for your kind words. As I write this, my aged mother (95) is listening to your elegant voicing.
@GavinMarguerite
@PrudentiaMag
I have an account of my transition, published in 1999 by the U of Chicago Press. You would be ideal for the second half. Male for first.