The Unbroken Window

Since participating in a year-long seminar on the major works of Hayek I have decided to continue reading some of his less known works. I have been especially intrigued by the more personal of his writings, many of which can be found in the later years of his life. The following is from his speech/essay, [...]

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From the American Economic Association (note: I allowed my membership to expire a few years ago): ALERT: Amendments may be offered to disproportionately reduce funding for the National Science Foundation’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences Directorate when NSF’s 2012 Appropriation is voted on by the full U.S. House of Representatives in August. Although the [...]

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I must go to our local libraries one or two times a week. It would be more often if I could find the time and manage to wrangle the kids. I’ve done a complete back of the envelope calculation since I’ve moved here two years ago. About 75% of the economics/social science material that is [...]

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We just completed our finals here at the University of Rochester. It is probably the most frustrating time for me as a Professor. No, it’s not because I do not like grading. It’s probably closer to the opposite — grading finals gives me a terrific chance to see how well our kids write, how well [...]

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I honestly believe that “friends of the market” do more damage to the cause of freedom and markets than the statists. Now, we’ve let Randi Weingarten win the day by calling these market reforms: Market-based reformers advocate using student test scores to evaluate and compensate teachers, increasing the number of charter schools, firing teachers in [...]

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From a Heritage rebuttal to Krugman: We used the highly regarded U.S. Macroeconomic Model of IHS Global Insights, Inc. Perhaps this is a model you as a pundit “do not recognize,” but most economists do.  This model has been around in its various forms for nearly 50 years. It contains over a thousand equations and [...]

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I recently waded through Veblen’s famous Theory of the Leisure Class. I found it tough reading, far more of a slog than reading Hayek, and on par with reading some of the great philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th century. In an essay that you simply must read, HL Mencken describes the writing [...]

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I’ve just finished reading Joe Stiglitz’s account of the financial crisis.  In it he makes the following comment: Competition, in this case, had a perverse effect: It caused a race to the bottom — a race to provide ratings that were most favorable to those being rated. Ughh. I guess being a Nobel Prize winner [...]

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Suppose you are a policymaker with clearly specified goals. You determine, with the input of your constituents, that we desire to improve the discipline of Americans, and to have them do a better job of showing up on time. How do you proceed with doing something about this problem? Aside from the obvious start of [...]

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Sadly, for three years running, not much needs to change. Not much has changed in the intervening time. I suppose I could say something about QE2 and fears of deflation as commodity prices soar. I might say what we learned about the original TARP, which was as much of a bailout of European banks as [...]

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