Category Archives: economics
Credit Rating Agencies – Folie à Trois
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 30th December 2024There are three credit agencies that provide consumer reports. They are Transunion, Experian, and Equifax. They’re all addled. Below are the factors that they say they use to determine an individual’s credit score. Below that is what they really do. Payment historyOn-time payments is the number one factor credit scoring agencies use to assign a…
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Joseph Schumpeter and a Broken Jar of Coffee
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd December 2024Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) was an Austrian political economist. After a distinguished career in Germany, he emigrated to the US in 1932. He taught at Harvard for the remaining 18 years of his life. In 1942 he published his best-known work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. He is famous for creative destruction a term he borrowed to…
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More on Hayek
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 16th December 2024Fourteen years ago I wrote a brief article about Frederich Hayek’s essay Individualism and Economic Order. Now 50 years after he won the Noble Prize in Economics I happened upon another of the great man’s essays The Use of Knowledge in Society. It focuses on one of Hayek’s major insights – the diffusion of knowledge…
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Essential Services
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th February 2024A financial writer recently mused over the complexities of Jerome Powell’s job as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He focused on the problem of interest rates. Lower them too rapidly and inflation may recur or worsen. Keep them high for too long and consumers will be priced out of the loan market and even worse…
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Social Justice Fallacies – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 4th December 2023I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy. Richard Feynman Thomas Sowell has been one of America’s greatest public intellectuals for over a half-century. During that span, he has published 48 books. His latest, written at age 93, is Social Justice Fallacies. He didn’t start life behind…
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Prostate Cancer and the Federal Reserve
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 15th March 2023The two subjects of the above title seem to have little in common. But they are both examples of action unmoored from knowledge. If the scientific foundation of medicine is compared to that of economics, specifically the actions of the world’s central banks, the practitioners of the former are certainly closer to the dictates of…
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The Price of Time – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 26th January 2023Edward Chancellor’s book , subtitled The Real Story of interest, starts with Hammurabi and continues to the present. He shows that interest is older than money and that the compulsion of governments to manipulate it is equally ancient. Interest has been seen as immoral by many religions, but has persisted because commerce is impossible without…
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The Bottom of the Slippery Slope
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 24th December 2022Warnings about the slippery slope have been around as long as deranged thinking. As an all purpose cathartic it quickly devolved to a cliché. But no one seems to be interested in what happens when you get to its bottom, or even how you can tell that you’ve arrived at its destination. Well, I think…
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Maverick – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 13th October 2021Jason Riley is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Maverick, is an intellectual biography of the economist and public intellectual Thomas Sowell. Focusing mainly on Sowell’s thinking, it presents only the bare facts of his life. Sowell has averaged about…
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Defaulting on the Debt Was Impossible
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 8th October 2021There was a lot of scare declarations about the disastrous effects of the US defaulting on its debt if it congress didn’t raise the debt ceiling. Virtually all of it was wrong. We were told that the country had never defaulted on its debt. It’s done so several times, the last was in 1979. As…
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