After a libertarian candidate took first place in Argentina’s presidential primary back in August, I wrote that the runoff would be the most important election of 2023 (even more important than the fortunately failed referendum to weaken TABOR in Colorado). Amazingly, Argentinian voters opted for the libertarian by a strong 56-44 margin. To understand President-Elect […]
TweetWant to get a few hours’ worth of solid learning in less than 35 enjoyable minutes? Listen to my Mercatus Center colleague David Beckworth’s podcast (from October 2022) with George Selgin on the New Deal. Seriously. It will be 34-plus minutes very well spent. George’s book – False Dawn – is forthcoming from the University…
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode description: Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The […]
The rebel-controlled Yemeni rial is made up entirely of a fixed supply of notes printed prior to 2016. In the chart below you can see it appreciating in value (the blue line) against the dollar, issued by the world’s most powerful state. pic.twitter.com/vioXHmz2wQ — John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) November 15, 2023
It was in mid-August that this particular bit of shameless Reserve Bank spin got going. From a post in late August It proved to be nonsense of course. Once we had access to the short little IMF piece, published at the back of the Fund’s Article IV review, it was clear that it all amounted […]
One of my goals when launching this blog in 2011 was to revive interest in the important, but unfortunately neglected and largely forgotten, contributions to monetary and macroeconomic theory of Ralph Hawtrey. Two important books published within the last year have focused attention on Ralph Hawtrey: The Federal Reserve: A New History by Robert Hetzel, […]
When writing GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does It Matter? I vowed I would write the whole truth. Not just that I agreed with everything I wrote (the case with every book), but I that I would relate all that I was thinking. Here is one part of the […]
On Saturday dozens of candidates for the governing Labour Party stood for election to Parliament. The aim was to form (at least a big part of) the next government. They didn’t succeed. People will debate for decades precisely what motivated the public as a whole to vote as we did, but having governed for the […]
That was the title of a ten page piece published last week by the ANZ economics team (chief economist Sharon Zollner and one of her offsiders, who appears to be a temporary secondee from the Reserve Bank). You can find a link to the paper here. The gist is captured in the paper’s summary I […]
Monday’s post was on the important place effective accountability must have when government agencies are given great discretionary power which – as is in the nature of any human institutions – they will at times exercise poorly. My particular focus is on the Reserve Bank, both because it is what I know best, because it […]
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.
“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.
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