Category: Economic Theory
The analysis published under this category are as follows.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
What Do Economies Grow Into? / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Raul_I_Meijer
"The world’s leading economies acknowledged on Friday that 'further actions are required' to put the global economy on track for strong, stable and balanced growth.", writes the FT. The torture never stops. Not that we had expected it to just today.
Well, alright then, you can make a point that the biggest news in economics last week was the revelation of the errors in Rogoff and Reinhart's "debt over 90% is deadly" paper. Personally, I think what is still much bigger is the - renewed - revelation that actual policies executed by actual politicians have been based on that paper. Talk about poverty of ideas and imagination. But maybe that shouldn't be surprising. If anything's the core of economics it's such poverty. And that politicians in turn base their policies on that poverty is only fitting. As an old Buddhist adage says: If and when everyone is mindlessly stupid, will anyone notice?
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Saturday, April 13, 2013
What Was Wrong with Thatcher's Poll Tax / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Murray_N_Rothbard
Riots in the streets; protest against a hated government; cops arresting protesters. A familiar story these days. But suddenly we find that the protests are directed, not against a hated Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe, but against Mrs. Thatcher's regime in Britain, a supposed paragon of liberty and the free market. What's going on here? Are anti-government demonstrators heroic freedom-fighters in Eastern Europe, but only crazed anarchists and alienated punks in the West?
Friday, April 12, 2013
Why Paul Krugman is Wrong About Margaret Thatcher / Politics / Economic Theory
By: Money_Morning
As the top Keynesian gadfly, Paul Krugman's recent attack on Margaret Thatcher wasn't very surprising.
In a blog post on the very day she passed, he questioned whether or not Margaret Thatcher had actually made any difference to the performance of the British economy.
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Friday, April 12, 2013
Seoul the New Capital of Capitalism / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Christopher_Westley
Picture a mono-racial New York metropolitan area with a fraction of the murders, if you can. Add in unreadable signs and buildings and infrastructure completed in 1960 or later. Then you might have a picture of Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea and, quite possibly, the new center of global capitalism. At least, that is my conclusion after spending several days there on academic and professional pursuits.
Friday, April 12, 2013
The Keynesian Endgame / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
David Stockman writes: Even the tepid post-2008 recovery has not been what it was cracked up to be, especially with respect to the Wall Street presumption that the American consumer would once again function as the engine of GDP growth. It goes without saying, in fact, that the precarious plight of the Main Street consumer has been obfuscated by the manner in which the state’s unprecedented fiscal and monetary medications have distorted the incoming data and economic narrative.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Is Austrian Economics a Cult? / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
I have experienced not one but two cases where eminent mainstream economists characterized Austrian economics as a cult. I told a friend and colleague of mine who is also an Austrian economist that I would be writing about this. He was worried that to mention the fact that two leading economists held the opinion that Austrian economics is cultish would place the praxeological school in a bad light. Well, maybe it will. However, I strongly believe that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." If these two dismal scientists strongly believe this, they can hardly be the only ones. My goal in writing this present essay is to attack this view as the pernicious and false doctrine that it is. I want to confront it, not run and hide from it.
Monday, April 08, 2013
The Economic World According To Stockman / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Andrew_McKillop
RIPELY CONSIDERED
In a review of main points from David Stockman's troublesome new book for peddlers of the mantra "We are all Keynesians now", in an economic world that Keynes wouldn't even be able to recognize, William Anderson listed the ways that "Neo Keynesians" not only hobble the fragile booms their basically schizophrenic policies produce, but also the fake recoveries that follow in their wake. In particular Anderson looks at Stockman's argument that when an economic boom crashes, the proper response of governments and monetary authorities should be to restore sound money and not try to prop up enterprises that failed in the crash. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article39835.html
Friday, April 05, 2013
The Stockman Backlash / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Peter_Schiff
This week, while economists should have been closely considering the implications of the actual bankruptcy of Stockton, California, they instead heaped scorn on the perceived ideological bankruptcy of David Stockman. In other words, Stockman trumped Stockton.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Grant Williams's Economic Theory of Disconnectivity / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Casey_Research
Grant Williams writes: On March 14, 1879, in Ulm, a tiny town on the banks of the river Danube in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, a boy was born to a Jewish electrical engineer and his wife.
Hermann and Pauline Einstein had no idea that their first-born son would one day change the way humans look at the world around them.
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Saturday, March 16, 2013
Profitably (& Properly) Understooding Libertarian Economics / Economics / Economic Theory
By: DeepCaster_LLC
Libertarians commendably focus on maximizing Economic Freedom and Individual Liberty. Who, after all, wants not to be economically and politically free?
But there is considerable dispute even among libertarians about what freedom does, or should entail regarding a variety of crucial issues such as “free trade,” immigration, and the proper role of government.
A profitable (and proper) understanding of Freedom is essential to maximizing Individual and Political Freedom, and to Protecting Economic Freedom and thus enhancing Wealth and Prosperity.
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Saturday, March 09, 2013
The New Limits To Economic Growth / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Andrew_McKillop
HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE
In a recent post Brian Bloom gave a list of reasons why he thinks politicians, worldwide, are spitting in the wind by turning their prayer wheel of "reform and recovery" to "relaunch the economy", which for major sectors like carmaking in Europe are facing an endgame scenario. In the recent high profile spat between the CEO of Titan International, who totally rejected any idea of taking over Goodyear's unprofitable tyre factory in Amiens, and France's minister of Industrial Recovery, Arnaud Montebourg, Titan's CEO said he could buy a tyre factory in either China or India where at most he would need to pay the workers 1 euro per hour: say $250 per month. Nobody in Europe can even eat and buy clothes and shoes to put on their backs and feet, let alone buy a house, electricity and water, a car, cellphone, Internet access and all the rest, for that pay. Starvation wages to "relaunch the economy" !
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Degrowth, Limits To Economic Growth And The Real World / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Andrew_McKillop
40 YEARS OF DEGROWTH
More than 40 years ago, in 1972, the MIT researcher Dennis Meadows and his team published "Limits to Growth", a report paid for by the Club of Rome. The study created a massive wave of interest, in part due to "environmentalism" only having just begun as a major theme, at that time, marked by the first UN conference on the environment, in Stockholm, the same year.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Ignore the Keynesian Axis of Evil / Economics / Economic Theory
By: William_Anderson
Your points in the November 29 column on Paul Krugman and the Austrians makes good points, and I would like to make a few comments of my own.
I do believe that when one makes apocalyptic comments, one gets what he deserves if the predictions don't pan out. As you said, that does not mean the Austrians are wrong regarding money and inflation, but expansions of money, especially in the way that the Fed has gone about doing so, are going to have a number of effects, rising consumer prices being only one of them.
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Saturday, February 16, 2013
Zombinomics - Paul Krugman and Zombie Financial History / Economics / Economic Theory
By: William_Anderson
Murray Rothbard liked to say that economists often tended to specialize in the area where their knowledge was the worst, and given Paul Krugman's butchery of the historical record, I'd say Rothbard had a good point. Regular readers of Krugman's columns and blog posts and other public statements would believe, for example, that World War II ended the Great Depression, that Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy (who were major forces in deregulation during the 1970s) were conservative Republicans, and that the only thing better than war to bring prosperity would be the nationwide preparation to fight an invasion of imaginary space aliens.
Friday, February 15, 2013
From Shipping To Shopping: Rationing To Economic Austerity / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Andrew_McKillop
MODELS AND PRECEDENTS
When World War II started in September 1939 the UK's first rationed commodity was unsurprisingly petroleum. By January 1940 food was added to the list: bacon, butter and sugar were firstly rationed, followed by meat, tea, coffee, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, lard, milk, canned fruits and dried fruits. This, also unsurprisingly, produced a black market within the first 12 months.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Politicians Waging War on Work / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Nicholas Freiling writes: Employment law is a mainstay of state economic policy. Few question its efficacy as a means to correct “market failures”—like unlivable wages for meaningful work—that would leave society in shambles. In fact, no serious debate exists among American policymakers about the benefits of such laws. Their utility is simply assumed.
But laws that restrict or stipulate the terms of voluntary employment contracts stifle economic progress and make life harder for everyone—even those for whom the laws were designed to aid.
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Sunday, February 10, 2013
The Economic Errors of Keynes / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Philipp_Bagus
[Los Errores de la Vieja Economía • Juan Ramón Rallo • UNIÓN EDITORIAL, S.A.; 1st edition]
The Austrian School of economics has provided the world with devastating critics of Keynes's magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (TGT) for a long time. Friedrich A. von Hayek, Jacques Rueff, Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig Lachmann, Ludwig von Mises, and William Hutt have already provided important arguments against Keynes and Keynesianism.
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Sunday, February 10, 2013
Fed’s Destructive Monetary Policies Expose Mainstream Economic Fallacies / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Frank_Shostak
At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in San Diego (January 4–6, 2013), Harvard professor of economics Benjamin Friedman said,
The standard models we teach … simply have no room in them for what most of the world’s central banks have done in response to the crisis.
Friedman also advises sweeping aside the importance of the role of monetary aggregates. On this he said,
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Saturday, February 09, 2013
Veblen's Prediction: The Triumph Of Capital Rent / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Andrew_McKillop
THEN AND NOW
As early as 1921 Thorstein Veblen felt able to predict that capital rentiers in the non-communist western economies would voluntarily abandon industry, like the rentiers of the recently founded Soviet Union who had been forced at gunpoint to abandon their control of industry, and the "super profits" that industry could deliver. His argument was that capital rentiers in the "free market" economies had already proven, during and after the long depression that started in April 1873 and tailed off by the end of the 1880s, that they could extract more rent, or super profits from the "pure play" of capital, than from classic or conventional economic rent extracting activities, like industry.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Paul Krugman May Be the World's Last Flat Earth Keynesian Economist / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Money_Morning
Keith Fitz-Gerald writes: Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Dr. Paul Krugman is at it again.
A favorite of the Keynesian crowd, he claimed earlier this week that fixing the deficit is important but added that "doing it now would be disastrous." He also observed that the 10-year U.S. debt situation isn't really all that bad.
At least he's consistent. I'll give him that.
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