economics

Naturalizing History – Book Review

July 15, 2026

Stephen Balch is a distinguished scholar and teacher. He has taught at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and at Texas Tech University, where he was the director of the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. He was also the founding president of the National Association of Scholars. He […]

Sleeping Under the Bridge

January 3, 2026

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.Anatole France Anatole France’s observation was made to underscore the government’s indifference to the plight of the poor. It appeared in his novel Le Lys Rouge (The […]

Credit Rating Agencies – Folie à Trois

December 30, 2024

There 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 […]

Joseph Schumpeter and a Broken Jar of Coffee

December 22, 2024

Joseph 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 […]

More on Hayek

December 16, 2024

Fourteen 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 […]

Essential Services

February 11, 2024

A 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 […]

December 4, 2023

I 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 […]

Prostate Cancer and the Federal Reserve

March 15, 2023

The 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 […]

The Price of Time – Book Review

January 26, 2023

Edward 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 […]

The Bottom of the Slippery Slope

December 24, 2022

Warnings 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 […]

Maverick – Book Review

October 13, 2021

Jason 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 […]

Defaulting on the Debt Was Impossible

October 8, 2021

There 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 […]

Spontaneous Order

August 11, 2021

Everywhere we look we are surrounded by orderly systems that arose spontaneously and continue to operate in the same way. The universe, regardless of how it started, operates according to rules that no matter their complexity are knowable and fixed. The laws of physics are unchangeable; it’s our understanding of them that’s subject to alteration. […]

On Corruption

February 22, 2021

Lord Acton’s famous line about the relationship of power and corruption needs no more than its first phrase. The two are conjoined twins. Under the right circumstances all of us are likely to succumb to the corrosive effect of authority. Some occupations have it as part of their job descriptions. While corruption is ineluctably part […]

The Case Against Children

January 10, 2021

Fertility rates are below replacement levels in every country in the developed world except Israel. While the leaders of these countries view this decline with alarm, it represents a logical response to the realities of the modern world. Below are a few reasons for this infertile phenomenon. My discussion is pertinent only to the modern […]