Keeping Up With The Miseses, Rothbards, Schumpeters and McCloskeys

Two days ago I graduated from the beautiful University of Glasgow with a degree to my name and tons of knowledge in my head. Many years ago, a very different, dedicated and self-proscribed politically-aware youngster set out to understand what people were talking about in financial magazines – what this thing called 'The Economy' was – and he decided to push through struggling instances of a nonsensical economics classes for the reward of a piece of paper with the 9 letters E-C-O-N-O-M-I-C-S written on it. Now that I've got that, almost spot-on my 26th birthday, I realized that some comparisons are in order. There are certain academic giants on upon whose shoulders I one day would be honoured to stand. Then: how am I currently measuring up against them?

Review of Murphy's 'The Genesis of Macroeconomics'

Today I’m going to cheat slightly: I’m reviewing a book that I haven’t yet finished – an otherwise fairly strict rule for my book reviews. However, thanks to Antoin Murphy’s great outline and the four chapters I have read (introduction, conclusion and the chapters on Henry Thornton and Adam Smith), I feel confident and impatient enough to discuss its content. Moreover, I have it on authority of Dr. David Colander and his review that Murphy’s creation is both “interesting and important”; I trust his judgment and my own intuition in professing that Murphy's book is right down my alley. The full title, The Genesis of Macroeconomics: New Ideas From Sir William Petty to Henry Thornton is enough for me to put down whatever I'm doing and start reading.

A New Economists' Creed

Paul Krugman, my favorite economically illiterate economist, has this infamous tale of an Economists' Creed from back in the days when he wasn't a junky-for-Hillary and a sell-out. It's about free trade – and its actually not a bad starting point:

If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations "I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage" and "I advocate Free Trade."

In light of his own retraction from free trade positions, I feel like we should expand this creed somewhat, include in it what else it takes to be an economist, what crucial knowledge and fundamental understanding it takes. Here's my attempt to formulate a criterion, a New Economists' Creed:

The Fallacy of Spare Capacity

One of the reasons for my interest in various competing strands of economic thought is the rich supply of fallacies they provide. Some stuff, like the idea of spare capacity, heavily emphasised by post-war Keynesians or by more modern Post-Keynesians, is completely NUTS. But, by phrasing their exposition in certain ways and using particular not-so-obscure assumptions, their approach seem fairly coherent and convincing – one of the reasons that so many economists and non-economists pick it up, and among the reasons the public believes so many mistaken things about economics (The below refutation is not to say that there is no value of Post-Keynesian Economics – PKE – in general, an approach that has many virtues; the idea of pricing and spare capacity just isn't one of them).

How University Signalling Value Is Falling

My darling University of Glasgow just released the final grades for many of its last-year students, and consequently my Facebook feed is filled with status updates reporting (read: bragging) over various First Class classifications – the highest kind of degrees awarded for undergraduate studies in Britain. Congratz to all of them, and I'm sure you worked very hard for it. However, as I mindlessly scrolled through the feed, the number of such status posts seemed to go wild: do I really have so many clever friends? Or is there something else going on? Obviously, I decided to have a closer look. 

The Sassy Mises

Obviously Ludwig von Mises was the greatest economist of the 20th century – and, unfortunately, among the least influential when it comes to shaping the future of the the economics profession. Good thing that's about to change. After all, we have the Mises Weekend podcast, we have the Mises Reader (both in limited and unabridged versions) and the The Quotable Mises. The set is now even closer to completion: I present to you, The Sassy Mises – the unofficial yet totally comprehensive collection of the best and most arrogant quotes and insults by Mises. In the highly unlikely event that some quote worthy of this list has been left out, you as a reader are obliged to provide me with it. Enjoy!

Challenge Accepted: How to Read 6500 Pages in a Summer

Off-handedly I started writing down the books and articles I wanted to read over the summer. The ones I still haven't finished, of course (Mokyr, McCloskey, Dekker, Eichengreen), some interesting reading for a couple of the side-projects I'm doing this summer (Vienna, de Soto on 1844 and Goodspeed), as well as the rest of my Adore List. After a few days, this pretty list of mine grew rather large, and I wondered if I even could finish it. A few minutes before lunch, I started counting the total number of pages to find out if the target was even remotely feasible.

Why Climate Change Matters

If we have to list my generation's biggest delusions and misunderstandings, the obsession with Climate Change would definitely rank up there, probably together with incessant emphasis of (phoney) "inequality" or beliefs that the "poor are getting poorer". So let's discuss why and how Climate Change actually matters. No, we're not all gonna die. And no, runaway climate change is not a disaster for humanity or the end of the world. Can we please just move beyond such empty hysterical demagoguery for a change?