Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty and Law Legislation and Liberty all arguing for the essential framework of law, customs and mores. James Buchanan wrote The Calculus of Consent, The Limits of Liberty and The Reason of Rules.
@JosephEStiglitz
just a few
No one’s truly free without rules and regulations. Counterintuitive? Think stoplights. Without them, pandemonium and gridlock. With them, I stop so you can drive through, and vice versa. We both have the freedom to move about with fewer traffic jams and accidents. This same idea
Excited to this monograph in the final stages of the publication process. The main thesis has been presented at seminars at Stanford, NYU, LSE, Chicago and of course GMU. We benefited from 2 outstanding reader reports and editorial team at Cambridge.
@CambUP_Econ
Why Israel Kirzner Deserves a Nobel Prize | Peter J. Boettke Here is my wish for 2023 — Kirzner, McCloskey and Mokyr for their contributions to our theoretical understanding and empirical performance of the entrepreneurial economy for economic growth and
Introduce yourself with 7 books.
1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
2. L Mises, Human Action.
3. FA Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order.
4. FA Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty.
5. James Buchanan, What Should Economists Do?
Public choice analysis is not a conspiracy story, it is about the systematic incentives that political actors face in choosing between alternative courses of action. That matters for how bureaucracies behave, how committees make decisions, and how politicians message campaigns.
Sorry, you can’t be serious! Have you looked at debt; Fed balance sheet; regulatory burden; trade protectionism; immigration restrictions; the militarization of local police; etc. I think you might misunderstand that Austrian economics is a scientific research program not an
Don’t anybody tell him that our country has been misruled by men and women, Republicans and Democrats, beholden to Austrian neoliberal claptrap for the better part of two generations.
Whatever it is in contemporary Austrian economics that attracts odious racial doctrines and illiberal attitudes in general needs to be identified, exposed and rejected. It has no place in the scientific tradition that evolved from Menger to Mises to Hayek to Kirzner.
When Hayek won the Nobel Prize, his lecture was an indictment of the contemporary (circa 1970s) practice of economic "science" -- it is very much worth reading his analysis of how and why economics became so messed up. This essay is not primarily about policy, but the
I just learned today that Yuri Maltsev passed away. Devastating news. Yuri was funny, generous, and insightful. I was fortunate that he wrote the preface to my first book even though we have never meet at that time.
Even President Obama needs a refresher course in the economic way of thinking. What do you think the consequences of these policies are going to be for the very people they say they will help? This isn’t a question of free market or market failure thinking, this is a question of
From capping the cost of prescription drugs for all to providing first-time homebuyers with financial support to restoring the child tax credit for families,
@KamalaHarris
just laid out some ways she'll help lower costs for the American people.
She has the vision, the
Here are 2 stories I heard in 1980s and 1990s from students who pursued their PhDs at GMU. 1 student wrote a fan letter to Milton Friedman and asked him about where to study economics and Friedman told him if he really wanted to learn economics go to GMU. That kid had that
I work with great colleagues. Would love to work another 25 years with them learning and discussing economic science, the art of political economy and social philosophy.
Excited for this paper to be published later this year and circulate. We sure hope it reaches a wide audience of professional economists and social scientists.
Southern Economic Association 2023 meetings in the books. Been attending since mid 1980s as this was the intellectual home of Virginia School of Political Economy since James Buchanan served as President in early 1960s. I served as President in late 2010s, in between many in
A major error in Mill was the separation of production and distribution, and thus distribution is a function of political will not economic forces. The evolution of economic thought in the early neoclassical economics was to demonstrate the distribution and production were
Our society has decided to accept enormous inequality but it doesn't have to. If we finally reject neoliberal doctrines and structure society in a way that takes all people and their right to live a full life into account—freer to live up to their potential—we would be better
Property gives rise to prices; prices communicate the relevant contextual knowledge; these aids to the human mind provide the basis on which decision makers engage in economic calculation. Property, prices and profit-and-loss are all critical to rational economic calculation.
Bigger shock to me is actually the figures for Econ majors. It means they didn’t absorb the point of the socialist calculation debate nor did they look at the historical evidence of socialism in practice. So it would be fascinating to see what economic principles they base
Elinor Ostrom in the 60s, 70s and 80s studied local public economies — e.g., schools, police, roads. She was an innovative field researcher and she studied the infrastructure and its responsiveness to citizens with a ‘rough-a-meter’. Turns out her approach was so brilliant that
I assign 2 core books in my Econ 676 course, Voigt to stress that INCENTIVES MATTER and Lavoie to stress that KNOWLEDGE IS NECESSARY and together that INSTITUTIONS structure incentives and generate the relevant knowledge to be utilized and communicated.
Juan de Mariana (1536–1624) wrote on regicide and the King paid no attention, but then he wrote about inflation, and the King prosecuted him. Think about what that says about the role of economists in society. Are we to be advisors to the powerful and the privileged, or merely
First look the design for my next book. I think the cover is actually very cool. I don't think its available for pre-order on Amazon yet, but it should be published by the end of the term.
I think every economist and economic policy decision maker needs to read Adam Smith. Let’s start with the premise that gov should only do those things which citizens cannot do for themselves or cannot do well, and gov can do well. Solve for that equilibrium given what you know
Quick reminder to EconTwitter, in most Econ101 courses and text, by this time of year the students are talking about little else than market failures — monopoly power, externalities, public goods, information asymmetry, etc. Not entrepreneurship, innovation and progress.
I have been trying to explain this for over 30 years to resistant ears. This presents the positive case, I was presenting it more critically. Maybe that explains the resistance, but if so then more reason to state the case clearly and convincingly I say. So thankful for Crotty.
My reading today. When I was preparing for grad school, I read
@lawrencehwhite1
Free Banking in Britain, and he still is to me someone who tells us what the argumentative bar is as a professional economist.
#ReadWhite
Thankful for freedom — economic, political and social — Estonia provides a wonderful demonstration of the consequences of state control and the relaxing of state control.
In 1984, I was introduced to Lucas’s work my first class in Macro 1. I read everything I could, and became obsessed with his invoking of Hayek and wrote a paper comparing and contrasting … Robert E. Lucas Jr. Brought Rationality to Macroeconomics - WSJ
Tell me you are confused without telling me you are confused. PLEASE think in terms of means/ends analysis, and that Hayek and other liberals might share your goals but just have examined the effectiveness of chosen means to obtain those ends.
PSA: Hayek’s argument in Road to Serfdom is not a deterministic slippery slope argument, its a logic of the situation argument and if one continues on a certain path there is a logical outcome.
Last year my dear friend, co-author, and general intellectual partner published a primer on Austrian Economics and to accompany it he released a series of videos. Please consider watching them today ...
This is from Milton Friedman’s review of Lerner’s Economics of Control in the JPE 1947. Note that he is making the Mises-Hayek point about the calculation problem being the more fundamental issue compared to the straight up incentive issue.
@NewmanJ_R
That’s a misreading of Hayek. His argument isn’t computational complexity. He pointed out that Pareto and Barone made that argument, but his knowledge argument was about the contextual nature of our knowledge that is utilized in the price system and serves as the basis of
Don Lavoie's two books Rivalry and Central Planning (Cambridge 1985) and National Economic Planning: What is Left? (Ballinger, 1985) are required reading for those interested in learning about the economic calculation debate. But he also has several articles ...
Steve passed away 2 years ago. He was my scientific partner and my deer friend. I loved him and miss him. Peter Boettke & Steven Horwitz on Austrian Economics in Recent Times, Pt. 1 | Mercatus Center
The problem of economic calculation is not exclusively a problem of socialism, it is a general problem that ALL systems of social cooperation must address. The argument is that the tools of commercial society aka capitalism are evolved to address it ( property, prices &
Starting when I was a grad student, but especially during my assistant professor years at NYU, folks that supposedly cared told me if I wanted to succeed I needed to translate the insights of Austrian economics into formal models and econometric tests. I have refused because my
Adding Coyne/Hall to my shelf dedicated to books written by my former PhD students. It is my favorite collection in a personal library that holds thousands of books. Thank you
@ccoyne1
and
@Abigail_R_Hall
for this signed copy which I will cherish.
Personal highlights of 2023 — 40th wedding anniversary, becoming a grandparent for first time; receiving the Clark-Kent-Aronoff Award from APEE, being named Distinguished Fellow of SEA; publishing survey of contemporary Austrian Economics in Annual Review of Economics, publishing
In the mid 1980s, I attended a lecture by Solow for young economists on the job market where he gave great advice. One of the crowd asked, why should I conform to those expectations. Solow responded, you don’t have to, but if you don’t then also don’t expect to have easy time
RIP. Bob Solow an absolute giant in Economics, has passed away at age 99. Tremendously influential in the profession and one of the key founders of the MIT Economics department as we live it today. Will be sorely missed.
I was taught early in my academic career that if you are discussing ideas with someone and rather than criticize the logic or the paucity of evidence but instead discuss the funding sources, or the personal characteristics of those holding the positions in question, then the
I am at home recovering from surgery and I decided to take some online courses during this period. I have several stored up at Great Courses, but I started with this one from Hillsdale College. It is excellent in production quality and the content … Marxism, Socialism,
As Hans Rosling points out in his widely watched BBC video the path to progress is moving from poor and sick to healthy and wealthy over time. Socialism in practice produced the opposite. To read about the Estonian case see my new book with
@Matt_d_Mitchell
and
@konstant_zhukov
Required reading to start your 2021 journey to advanced understanding of the economy. What if our Swedish steeping stones began with Lindahl and we did not fall under the spell of Keynes?
Wisdom from Adam Smith that all the politicians and regulators should take to heart. Government failure is real, and next to impossible to correct given the incentives and information issues associated with the public sector. Ignorance accentuated by arrogance.
The ideas that impacted me in 1970s and shaped my world view: open markets, including free flow of labor, capital and goods throughout the globe; anti-war; end draft; pro-choice; end drug prohibitions; government out of all sexual choices; religious freedom; intellectual freedom.
Most important words to utter as a scholar/scientist — ‘I don’t know.’ Second most important set of words — ‘But, I can and try to figure it out.’ The pleasure of figuring things out is science/scholarship.
Amazing, and interesting stat — of all PhD students in econ, roughly 2/3rds are being supervised by faculty who are graduates of MIT, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern. “Doctoral Origins of Economics Faculty”. HES2018
One thing you learn quickly in the archives in doing intellectual history is how deeply personal science/scholarship is. And how rivalrous and often quite harsh the reality is for elite participants. Buchanan, for example, faced not only resistance to his ideas but active
Twitter world — look carefully — this is Hayek on what must scholars and intellectuals do post WWII. Pursuit of truth in social science, research that is historical accurate, affirmation of democracy, and opposition to both left and right forms of totalitarianism.
David was a true liberal and he was true to that liberalism. Listen to his words here and let them sink in. This is true to the principles as laid out over the years by the leading thinkers and building on these words is the way forward.
Happy Birthday to the greatest Austrian economist in the world … The History and Importance of the Austrian Theory of the Market Process | Israel M. Kirzner | Mercatus Center: F. A. Hayek Program
My first book — The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism — explores Lenin’s writings in depth. If anyone would like a copy (pdf) please email me at my university email and I will send you a copy. Ideas do indeed have consequences!
@IsabellaMWeber
Isabella -- at the risk of being viewed as a buzz kill, you do know that this quote is taken completely out of context and that Mises -- a jew himself -- was chased out of Europe by the fascists and wrote a book condemning fascism. Just saying ...
Not to be too ‘braggy’ but both Alex and Bryan were trained in the lessons of price theory at GMU. They are right price theory needs a revival. At GMU students for generations learned price theory from Walter Williams, and that tradition continues with Chris Coyne and Rosolino
Steve Horwitz understood that we are TEACHER/scholars as academics. He was always trying to teach his students and the public, and to do that he was always LEARNING. Let's listen and discuss ...
Lots wrong here and reflects unproductive reading of Hayek and misunderstanding of the commercial life we live and experience. But the attention might point others to read Hayek, think harder understand more. Hayek, the Accidental Freudian | The New Yorker
I returned to GCC to give the Mises Lecture … I owe so much to my time at GCC and the education I received there. And it is so exciting for me to see the economic education at GCC has not only maintained but nurtured and continually developed and extended the Misesian tradition.
Just a thought, when price controls are invoked as tool to fight inflation, it might be wise to look up the concept of ‘repressed inflation’ and its consequences in the former socialist economies. The past does have a useful economics.
For those on the left, don't you think it might be better to focus your criticisms on Nozick, Kukathas, Schmidtz, Gaus, Barnett, let alone the work on polycentric orders by Vincent and Lin Ostrom, Bruno Frey, etc. Rather than fringe characters???
I've just finished Crack-up Capitalism for a review, and I must say that
@zeithistoriker
has really gathered an exquisite selection of cranks and weirdoes in this book
Why do people keep getting this so wrong? It must please them to believe what they are saying. Anyway, besides reading Caldwell's various clarifying efforts, you might find my book on Hayek in "Great Thinkers" series of value ...
Recommended Sunday reading. Calm dispassionate discussion of the contending perspectives and ways to adjudicate between them.
@DianeCoyle1859
excellent contribution to economic education and public discourse.
Feb 13th was Israel Kirzner’s 94th birthday. Kirzner is a profound scholar, a teacher of impact, and a man of deep faith and conviction. Working with him at NYU was a great honor. See his Collected Works of Israel M. Kirzner Archives - Liberty Fund