Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

The destruction of self-help by state intervention

The Independent Institute’s quarterly Independent  Review is a worthy publication. The journal produces well researched and innovative scholarly articles in the classical liberal tradition, avoiding excessive emphasis on “public policy libertarianism” on the one hand, and avoiding an exclusive emphasis on a single school of economic thought (such as Austrian Economics) on the other. The [...]

Stimulating monkey brains

At Overcoming Bias Patri Friedman observes:
In the ancestral environment, pulling together to help the tribe in a time of crisis was the best way for an individual to survive.  In our modern environment, however, we are often led to identify with an entire nation as our “tribe”, and it turns out that this is an [...]

Assumptions in economic science

Economists are often taken to task for creating models that employ assumptions that are not consistent with reality. Such reality checks are important and can protect economists from making policy recommendations that may follow from their models but not from empirical observation.
A good example is the private provision of public goods. Most orthodox economic theories [...]

The political and the primitive

“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.”
Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

Game theoreticians weigh in on financial crisis

In November 2008 the Nobel laureate economist Robert Aumann spoke at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies and expressed concern about the faulty proposals to solve the financial crisis. His talk is now available on YouTube:

In October 2008, another game theoretician and Nobel Prize winner, John Nash Jr. weighed in on the financial crisis [...]

Beyond politics

In the introduction to his collection of writings, Socratic Puzzles, Robert Nozick writes that  he never responded to the sizable literature on Anarchy, State and Utopia. His natural inclination would be to defend his views. As Nozick notes, “How could I learn that my views were mistaken if I thought about them always with defensive [...]

The addiction to politics

Can politics become an addiction? A more realistic question is to ask why politics is an addiction for so many people. The most straightforward answer would be that a compulsive interest in politics just reflects a natural preoccupation with advancing one’s interest (or that of others). But as was discussed in the previous installment, The [...]

The calculus of voting

Is it rational to vote? For most people the question may seem absurd but quite a few economists and political scientists have made the claim that it is not. The reasoning is that in large elections the probability that your individual vote will decide the outcome is so small that voting is a futile exercise. [...]