Lessons from the Phillips Curve
“The exploration of the Phillips Curve has taken many different paths and yet somehow ended up in the same place. The world could have been spared much of this meandering with a more firm grounding in what theory does and does not tell us.” ~ Joshua R. Hendrickson
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The Division of Labor and the Diminution of Man
“Every job is more than just a job. It is also an opportunity to help another human being develop as a member, a contributor, and perhaps even a leader in a society dedicated to freedom and responsibility.” ~ Richard Gunderman
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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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Stratification Economics?
“We don’t know the reasons why the economics JEL committee denied Stratification Economics its own niche, but the facts amply justify their decision. The real fault, of course, is the fragmentation of social science that has allowed such problems to arise.” ~ John Staddon
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Proposing a Hank Williams Jr. Economic Misery Index
“Another problem is that the misery indices, like definitions of recession and stagflation, focus on unemployment to the exclusion of real wages. But real wage declines are painful, and not fully captured by inflation alone.” ~ Robert E. Wright
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Micro-Microeconomics
“A renewed examination of the most basic economics—the theory of the good—might yet generate a revolutionary micro-microeconomics.” ~ Caleb S. Fuller
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Monetarism Remains a Useful Guide on Inflation
“If the Federal Reserve raises interest rates too quickly, sharply declining M2 growth will signal the risk of recession. Monitoring M2 growth can help in making sure the Fed tightens monetary policy at the appropriate pace, not too fast and not too slow.” ~ Peter N. Ireland
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Inflation and Relative Prices
“Although inflation is often classified as a macroeconomic topic, it is clear that a firm understanding of price theory is necessary to work out all of the costs associated with inflation.” ~ Joshua R. Hendrickson
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Why Studying Economics Requires Curiosity
“Studying economics requires curiosity because economics is about providing answers to social mysteries, not about condemning or praising social interaction. To make this point is to suggest that curiosity’s close intellectual cousin—humility—is also crucial to the economist’s task.” ~ Caleb S. Fuller
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Adam Smith’s Synergistic Moral Authorizations
“Smith teaches how we do our part in serving the good of the whole; how in focusing diligently on the good of our part we serve that of the whole; and how freedom fortifies the remarkable correspondence between those two goods.” ~ Erik Matson
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The Value of High Costs
“As the late Nobel-laureate economist James Buchanan explained in his 1969 book, Cost and Choice, cost is the barrier to choice. Cost is the benefit that a chooser believes he or she sacrifices whenever he or she makes a choice.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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In the Beginning: The Mont Pelerin Society, 1947
“The transcripts of the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society provide an extremely valuable and useful record for understanding the beginnings of the post–World War II movement to reestablish a meaningful market liberalism.” ~ Richard M. Ebeling
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