“In 1940, Hayek (1940 [1972], 198-199) wrote an article that analyzed and criticized Lange’s model in great detail and explained, point by point, which implications of the model were problematic. Lange was deeply impressed by these critiques, and acknowledged that Hayek had succeeded in raising a series of essential errors and problems with the model: «There is no question that you have succeeded in raising essential problems and in showing gaps in the pure static solution given by me. I intend to work in this subject and give an answer to your paper … sometime in the fall.» (Lange, in a letter to Hayek dated August 31, 1940) Such an answer never came.”
Imagine what would have become of declaring who won the socialist calculation debate if this 1940 letter was better known. Hayek never mentioned the letter. The letter from Lange was found in Lange’s complete works published in 1973 in Polish.
I’ve written several columns (here, here, here, here, and here) detailing the folly of rent control. And now that New York City’s dilettante socialist mayor has proposed to expand rent control, I thought about doing the same thing. But I noticed so many clever comments on Twitter/X that I decided on a different approach. Here […]
Clay tablets unearthed in Asia Minor reveal a sophisticated commercial order emerging spontaneously nearly four thousand years before economists explained how markets work. By Surse Pierpoint of The American Institute for Economic Research.”A clay tablet from Kanesh, in what is now central Turkey, contains the founding charter of a twelve-partner trading company. Twelve merchants pooled thirty-three…
In 2015, I wrote a column entitled “A Nordic Nightmare for Bernie Sanders.” Today, let’s do something similar, but this time I’ll explain why economic data from northernmost Europe is bad news for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m motivated to address the issue because I just saw this tweet about how Scandinavian-Americans are much richer than their […]
Here’s the full video from my recent immigration debate at UATX with Garett Jones. Coleman Hughes moderates. (A great guy, and not only did we finally meet in person for dinner; he also came to UATX karaoke!) Here are more debate details from the UATX Substack. I’ve got multiple post-debate commentary essays in my queue,…
TweetHere’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal. Editor: Writing about U.S. trade deficits, Greg Ip declares that “by exporting so much, China effectively forces its trading partners to run deficits” (“The Global Economy Is Threatened Again by Trade Imbalances,” June 12). Wrong. U.S. trade deficits occur whenever foreigners sell more to us than they…
The Post reports: Nearly a third of the Callaghan Innovation’s $149 million Covid-era research and development loan book is in arrears, including $21.5m linked to 63 failed or insolvent businesses, as the agency enters its final months before disestablishment. Callaghan Innovation – a government entity set up to make businesses around the country more innovative…
The world’s poor deserve better than another utopia designed for them by the globalist intelligentsia. They deserve cheap energy, open markets, secure property rights, and the freedom to industrialise on terms they choose for themselves. That is what worked in East Asia. It is what will work in South Asia, Africa and Latin America. And…
Middle-class Americans have more income than they did 50 years ago, but the squeeze is realBy Roland Fryer. He is a professor of economics at Harvard. Excerpts: “Before indicting the economy, consider what 50 years of growth actually delivered. The car in your driveway is far less likely to kill you than its 1975 counterpart—traffic fatalities…
Ages ago I supervised a superb Honours thesis, which turned into a Masters, looking at the lesbian wage premium. It showed up regularly in the US data: homosexual women earned more than heterosexual women – the opposite of the pattern that obtains for men. I was curious whether the difference could in part be due to…
SpaceX may soon ask public investors to buy a piece of the future. The fine print may ask them to buy something else, too: a theory of corporate governance. The company’s reported initial public offering (IPO) has already drawn significant concern from institutional investors and corporate-governance observers. That concern is understandable. SpaceX reportedly seeks to…
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Here is one excerpt: The present and also future of mankind is a world where reasonably high levels of self-discipline are needed to do well. The journalist Daniel Akst pointed this out in his 2011 book Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess, and we…
Garett Jones is the best critic of immigration in all of social science. In fact, it’s not even close. To the best of my knowledge, he is the only such critic who has seriously tried to show that the social costs of immigration are even more astronomical than the social benefits of immigration. In fact,…
I was astounded in 2020 when I read an article in the New York Times about the economic catastrophe in Venezuela and there was not a single mention of socialism. And I was even more astounded in 2024 when the NYT published another article about Venezuela’s economic misery and once again didn’t mention socialism. Today’s […]
TweetHere’s a letter to F&D Magazine, a publication of the IMF. Editor: U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer wrote more than 2,100 words about trade yet managed to get correct approximately nothing (“Economics for the Real Economy,” June 2026). Just listing his errors would take nearly as many words, so I here address only one of…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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