Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Anti-market bias, unemployment and immigration

Economist Bryan Caplan discusses the important topic of market-clearing wages. Why are wages not falling during the recession in order to establish equilibrium and full employment? Caplan gives an answer that seems common sense but receives little attention from professional economists and politicians. Is labor market rigidity a market failure?  I’m afraid so.  But strangely [...]

Animal spirits in public policy

In the Summer 2009 issue of the Independent Review, Arnold Kling reviews George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller’s new book Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Reading his review, one wonders how it is still possible for a serious scholar to make a case for [...]

Understanding business cycles

In his book Recessions and Depressions: Understanding Business Cycles, Todd A. Knoop correctly points out that a Rational Expectations perspective does not necessarily require that all segments of society are rational or use all available information: Those who are rational will take advantage of the profit opportunities created by those who are consistently making mistakes. [...]

The holiest of holy cows

The February 09, 2009 Issue of the American Conservative features a number of heterodox articles on monetary policy. In his article Fed Up: The Popular Uprising Against Central Banking, Thomas Woods writes about the holiest of holy cows of conservative and libertarian leaning think tanks: The libertarian and conservative think tanks that liberally invoke the [...]

Murray Rothbard’s obscure case for the obvious

Libertarians are not doing themselves a favor by taking on the burden of proof to argue for something that most people take for granted. Bryan Caplan makes a similar point about Murray Rothbard’s defense of “libertarian rights:” I object that anything that people do is ipso facto “natural,” so there’s no way you’re going to [...]

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 [...]

Market fundamentalism

A recent trend in progressive thinking is to accuse opponents of “market fundamentalism.” That seems to be a smart rhetorical tactic because a) it rides on the wave of concerns about any kind of fundamentalism, and b) the phrase appeals to people’s reasonableness. After all, if two ways of “organizing society” are available, only a [...]

Bryan Caplan on the media

In his excellent book The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan writes “like politicians, the media show viewers what they want to see and tell them what they want to hear” and speculates about the possibility that voters’ beliefs about other topics than economics may not be any sounder. When I find mistakes in [...]