Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Theodore Dalrymple on the culture of inflation

In the Summer 2009 issue of City Journal Theodore Dalrymple  discusses the cultural effects of inflation:

asset inflation—ultimately, the debasement of the currency—as the principal source of wealth corrodes the character of people. It not only undermines the traditional bourgeois virtues but makes them ridiculous and even reverses them. Prudence becomes imprudence, thrift becomes improvidence, sobriety [...]

Unfalsifiable achievements

William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal:

“Saved or created” has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs…However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula “save or create” allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion [...]

A conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on economic models that we would be better off without:

Every time I saw [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke [on television], I would have a fit of rage. He claimed that we were in a period of “great moderation.” He did not understand that Black Swans are preceded by low volatility and the [...]

Capitalist Counter-Revolution

The consequentialist consensus

Don Boudreaux writes:

It’s no ethical challenge to support something that works.  It is, however, a real ethical challenge to oppose something that you believe would work.  Someone opposed as a matter of principle to government intervention into the economy might be sensible or not; but if that person sticks by his or her principles — [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]