The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Government Gone Wild on May 11th, 2012
Grading’s got me tied up, and Coyote’s on a roll. Here is his retelling of the now (in)famous life of Julia. Do read the whole thing. And someone please try to defend the “opposing position” if you can even characterize it as such. I am all ears. By the time Julia called it quits, she [...]
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Politics, Voluntary Society, Welfare State on Jan 27th, 2012
I strongly recommend reading Alex Tabarrok’s short e-Book Launching the Innovation Renaissance, which I will blog on shortly. Professor Tabarrok blogs it a little today, here is the entire thing: We like to think of ourselves as an innovation nation but our government is a warfare-welfare state. To build an economy for the 21st century [...]
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Environment, Price System on Nov 7th, 2011
One of my favorite essay questions assigned to students in my environmental economics class requires them to think about how government ownership and management of National Parks differs from alternative arrangements. I do not wish to write my version of the essay here. I do want to make a few observations. First, you would be [...]
Posted in Classical Liberalism, Competition, Entrepreneurs, Environment on Oct 10th, 2011
Abraham Gesner’s New York Kerosene company, in 1856, began to make kerosene for the purposes of illumination. When it brought that product to market, it did not advertise itself as, “having the potential to save the whales,” though indeed that was its effect. When it did the research on this fuel, it was not the [...]
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Government Gone Wild on Sep 24th, 2011
Just remember what happens in a market when a product is a failure, it disappears, often spectacularly, and with much pain to the entrepreneurs. However, it’s a lesson learned. You don’t get the good stuff (like Cherry Coke) without having the intense trial and error that produces and weeds out the bad, like New Coke. [...]
Posted in Education, Entrepreneurs on Sep 19th, 2011
Marcus Winters contributes to the growing literature demonstrating that K12 teacher effectiveness has nothing to do with their credentials: Modern research on teacher quality makes clear that the factors used to determine a teacher’s compensation tell us little to nothing about how well the teacher will perform in the classroom. That consistent finding has (or [...]
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Environment, Standards of Living on Jan 1st, 2011
I see this one quite regularly: Seems to make sense. But we are not “running out of” farms. Nor are we running out of food. For example, we grow three times as much grain today than we did 50 years ago … and do it in roughly the same amount of land. Here is Matt [...]
Posted in Entrepreneurs on Dec 28th, 2010
A commenter on this post asked me to say a bit more about how effective the price signals of profits and losses are in guiding useful entrepreneurial action. Briefly, here is the good question he asks: I wonder about these price signals in the discovery process. I see two distinct situations: where I am copying [...]
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Price System on Dec 17th, 2010
In what might be called the “Economics 1.0″ view of the world we think of the process of producing some good or service as a simple “Sneetch Machine.” Someone gets some land and uses that land along with some workers and some machines to produce some output. The financial flows in this sort of a [...]
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Price System on Sep 23rd, 2010
Oops, wrong again. Blockbuster Inc., once the dominant movie rental company in the U.S., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday, reeling from mounting losses, rising debt and competitors that have better catered to Americans’ changed media habits. What? I thought companies told people how to consume? I thought we were powerless to choose? [...]
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/gold/t24_au_en_usoz_2.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/silver/t24_ag_en_usoz_2.gif)