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Institutions
Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance by Doug North. Read it; it will likely change the way you think about why some nations manage to become rich and others stay poor, despite the billions of dollars being thrown at them annually. More France photos will come soon, I promise. I am through 1.5/2 papers, so…
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Day 354 – Shopping as a Discovery Process
While I was out finishing my Christmas shopping on Saturday, I couldn’t help but think a little bit about economics. I know I am strange, but it is what I am majoring in and what I’ve been studying these past three semesters at Hillsdale, and I am not very successful at turning my mind off…
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Day 325 – Two Types of Fair Trade
I realized tonight that there are two different, commonly accepted meanings of “Fair Trade,” and only one meaning I support. The first type focuses on paying producers a higher price for goods, typically raw materials, raw food, etc. (This is the meaning I am against.) The second type is against products that use slavery anywhere…
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Day 282 – Economizing on Brain Power
I had an interesting concept brought up to me today while I was discussing the difference between rationality and reason with Professor Lea. To try to understand the difference, we did a thought experiment about making choices. When a person makes a choice, he or she weighs the expected utility (broadly defined) of each unit,…
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Day 279 – Aggregates
Today’s post is short. After a meeting of the Classical Liberal Organization tonight in which a few people confused this, I feel the need to say something about this: Aggregates don’t act. Aggregates don’t make choices, laws, invade other countries, or have rights. Only individuals which make up those aggregates make choices, act, have rights,…
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Day 272 – Happy Birthday, Mises!
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Day 176 – Aesop’s Fables
I came across a PDF version of Aesop’s Fables today, and I spent a while reading them. While reading them, I was struck by the economic principles his fables contained! Though the principles were not named until long after his time, some of his fables definitely contained some ideas that modern economics uses. I suspect…
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Day 76 – Entrepreneurship in Charleston/Take 3
Above is a photo of the downtown waterfront Charleston area from a boat. Click the photo to view it large. Also, check out the link to the photo gallery at the bottom of the first part of this post. Today, Tuesday, March 17, was the third full day of being in Charleston. Today we got…
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Day 9 – I, Pencil
The Foundation for Economic Education released the 50th Anniversary Edition of I, Pencil in late 2008. Written by Leonard E. Read in 1958, I, Pencil illustrates the importance of markets and dispersed knowledge and shows why centralized economic planning cannot work. In the afterword, Milton Friedman writes: Leonard E. Read’s delightful story, “I, Pencil,”…
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What is Value?
A friend of mine was reading New Ideas from Dead Economists, a book by Todd Buchholz that explains and critiques economic thought from Adam Smith to Keynes. In it, there is a section about Karl Marx and his theories. In explaining Marx’s labor exploitation theory, Buchholz points out that Marx rests his claims on the premise that…
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Lessons from FEE
I am learning a lot from the seminars at FEE that I have been attending. I plan to overview some of the lessons from the seminars on here this week. They will be in no particular order. Aggregates We should all do our best not to speak in aggregate terms when we actually mean…