Against Interest Rate Reductionism
“Monetary policy is about money, not interest rates. Central bankers should stop trying to implement monetary policy by messing with relative prices. There are better measures and more effective transmission mechanisms.” ~ Alexander William Salter
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“No, Sarah, Our Prosperity Wasn’t Extracted from Slaves”
“A key purpose of my intro econ course is to help my students understand how peaceful, commercial cooperation emerges to create and maintain our astonishing material prosperity.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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Frédéric Bastiat: The Jonathan Swift of Economics
“Bastiat’s collection of essays is a worthy addition to the pantheon of immortal economic satire, rightfully taking its place alongside Swift’s own Modest Proposal.” ~ Caleb S. Fuller
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Smith to Entrepreneurs: Go Forth With Prudence
“We find in Smith both condemnation of imprudent projectors and endorsement of prudent entrepreneurs. Although projectors occasionally turn a profit, it comes at the risk of squandering resources and missing out on more sober opportunities.” ~ Kacey Reeves West
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Made to be Broken?
“Understanding just how and when institutions matter requires an appreciation for imperfections in governance, the socially constructed nature of rules, and the unique knowledge and motivations of entrepreneurial actors.” ~ Caleb S. Fuller
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LOL!
“Among the full set of arguments offered for government intervention into the economy, those that are serious and credible are the exception rather than the rule. Most arguments for intervention are simply not credible, with more than a few being downright silly.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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Revisiting the Pokéflation
“During the massively expansionary monetary response to the Covid outbreak, the price of Pokemon cards and other assets shot to unprecedented levels. Contractionary monetary policy now has the opposite effect.” ~ Peter C. Earle & April Liu
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The Myopia of Antitrust
“Intellectuals and officials arrogantly suppose that any contractual term or organizational arrangement that they cannot immediately understand as serving competition must therefore be devious exercises of monopoly power or attempts to secure such power.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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An Image Worth 10,000 Words: A Review of Superabundance
“Pooley and Tupy find that every one-percent increase in population corresponds to a roughly one-percent decrease in the time-price. This formulation is elegantly simple and conveys the crucial point that population growth is good.” ~ Vincent Geloso
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Some Pictures Are Indeed Worth a Thousand Words
“No data or sets of graphs, regardless of how carefully constructed and intelligently interpreted, can convey a complete picture of an economy. Yet, such data can convey important information, which is often the opposite of popular narratives about the economy, generally, and about trade in particular.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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Jubilee and Student Loan Forgiveness
“Today, we have modern governments, which have significantly more power to tinker with economic incentives, monitoring and enforcing policies that ostensibly benefit the commonweal.” ~ Michael D. Thomas and Anthony Gill
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Wanted: Economic Literacy
“Economics is in a very real sense a way of thinking that is continuously enlightening to whomever masters that science. It is not about memorizing lemmas or models, or of learning technically sophisticated methods. It’s something much more fundamental: an understanding of how the world works.” ~ Per L. Bylund
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