Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

It is 2023, eight years after 2015, the year of flying cars and climate-controlled clothing that Marty McFly traveled to in a time machine. In our own world, the ruling elite wants to ban cars to control the climate. How did we get here? What caused the discrepancy between our vision of a more advanced future and the reality we face now? We had reason to expect it. From 1860–1970, the United States grew at an average of over 5 percent per year. But...

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One of the most eventful things to have happened recently was from an unexpected source. The State Department and the intelligence apparatus didn’t initiate any coups somewhere in the Third World, the Kremlin didn’t launch a blitzkrieg and capture Kiev, and a currency from the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) hasn’t entered circulation yet. For the man who was once heralded as a savior for spearheading electric vehicle...

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Save the date! Join us for our 2024 Supporters Summit, October 10–13, 2024, on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. We'll be at the lovely Omni Hilton Head Oceanfront Resort.  We will have an event rate at the Omni Hotel for $299 per night before tax.  Speakers and agenda details forthcoming. Registration will be open soon on this page.

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Practically all schools of contemporary economic thought recognize that value is subjective. Although mainstream economists merely pay lip service to value subjectivity—and, in practice, treat value as objective so that they can analyze so-called utility functions—it is still a core assumption in modern economic thought. This is very different from classical economics, which typically treated value as objective and determined by production costs....

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Snow White (2024) is a terrible movie. Granted, I don’t have any particular insights into the film, but economics teaches me that everyone involved in that movie believes it’s a terrible movie, and I’m willing to bet that they’d know. So, unless this movie surprises absolutely everyone involved in making it, it’s a terrible movie. “So what?” you might ask. But this example reminds us that the Fed’s inflationary money policies destroy all values,...

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Review of Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis Scott Patterson New York: Scribner, 2023; 293 pages Scott Patterson has delivered an unusual book. At least to this reader, it produced the same effect as watching a Black Mirror episode where you think you know where the story is heading, then suddenly all of your moorings go out the window in a most unpleasant fashion. In the case of Chaos Kings, the book starts...

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[On Monday, October 9, the Royal Swedish Academy awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin of Harvard University. Two Swedish expatriates reflect on the meaning of the Prize and this year’s recipient.] Per Bylund As an Austrian economist, the announcement of the economics prize—often misleadingly referred to as the economics Nobel Prize—is a matter of not knowing whether to laugh or cry (or...

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The surprise terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas has created a new geopolitical crisis with many unexpected implications. We cannot forget the hundreds of people that have been killed in this attack—a terrible loss of innocent lives. In markets, the Key Tel Aviv share indices declined around 7% and sovereign bonds slumped by 3% after the bloodiest attack on Israel in many years. Investors should not worry because this war has very significant...

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