How State Intervention Fueled Haiti’s Descent into Chaos

2024-02-21

Reports on the death of the present cycle of politically motivated monetary easing, in the words of Mark Twain, grossly exaggerated. Contemporary market analyses are full of how the Fed and ECB are dialing back on previous hints of Spring 2024 rate cuts. In tune with this, commentators are lauding the central banks, especially the Fed, for a show of political independence as elections approach.
The bigger picture though suggests otherwise. In the economic aftermath of the pandemic, monetary policy has again been blatantly political.
Yes, in both the US and Europe, central banks have had the chutzpah to claim credit for slowing down the rise of consumer prices. The truth is they have taken advantage of the supply boost from fading pandemic dislocations to pursue continued—but now partially

2023-11-24

Dear Friend,
In the chapter of The Road to Serfdom entitled “The End of Truth,” F.A. Hayek wrote that in a totalitarian society “truth” is not determined by scholarship, research, discussion, and debate but by pronouncements by the government “authorities.” Anthony Fauci’s notorious “I am science” declaration is a perfect example of such totalitarian thinking, as is Al Gore’s “settled science” declaration regarding global-warming research. Of course, no real scientist would say that scientific questions are ever “settled” forevermore. It was once “settled science” that Earth is flat, after all, and that government can make us all rich thanks to the “multiplier effect” of government spending.
But that’s just one arm of the totalitarian scissors. The other arm is that all dissenting opinions

2023-11-23

[The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything, by Ruth Goodman, Liveright Publishing Corporation; 2020. xxi + 330 pp.]
The subtitle of Ruth Goodman’s book The Domestic Revolution doesn’t come close to describing what this book is really about. Yes, this book tells us a lot about coal and how it affected Victorian domestic life. But this book is really about how what we eat and how we prepare food has been closely tied to economic, industrial, and technological changes over 400 years of history. 
Moreover, this book will provide some valuable perspective for anyone who thinks he or she spends a lot of time "slaving" over a hot stove. Whatever time we spend cooking and cleaning in the twenty-first century is nothing compared to the time,

2023-11-21

Econometric model building attempts to produce a laboratory with controlled variables. By means of mathematical and statistical methods, an economist establishes functional relationships between various economic variables.
For example, personal consumer outlays are related to personal disposable income and interest rates, while fixed capital investments are explained by the past stock of capital, interest rates, and economic activity. A group of such estimated relations constitutes an econometric model.
A comparison of the goodness of fit of the dynamic simulation versus the actual data is an important criterion in assessing the reliability of a model. (In a static simulation, the model is solved using actual lagged variables. In a dynamic simulation, the solution is obtained by employing

2023-11-17

In the aftermath of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and its companion case, race-based affirmative action is, for the most part, dead. While there are legitimate criticisms of this decision from the Right, the Left has taken the near opposite approach.
Rather than simply lamenting, the Left is using this as an opportunity for taking further action against what they perceive to be racial discrimination. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) states in a tweet, “If SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous ‘colorblindness’ claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged. 70 percent of Harvard’s legacy applicants are white. SCOTUS didn’t touch that—which would have impacted them and their patrons.”
Beside the fact that by AOC’s own admission white