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Niels Bohr once said: “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” I say: Prediction is not about the future, it’s about the present. Now that I’m fairly old, I can look back on a wide range of visions of the 21st century, many of which now seem obsolete. Here are just a .. MORE
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Economic and Political Philosophy
A strange story echoed in Newsweek suggests that many people have not reflected on how democratic politics works, or perhaps they confuse politics as they wish it should be with what it actually is. The magazine writes (“Donald Trump Threatened With New Investigation,” May 11, 2024): Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, has threatened .. MORE
Economics and Culture
Spontaneous order is one of those ideas you can find in all areas of life once you understand it. But equally interesting is witnessing people noticing the phenomenon who have never studied the subject but find examples of it in seemingly obscure domains. I found an example of a video game reviewer and journalist noticing .. MORE
Free Markets
Over time, ideologies can evolve in unforeseen ways. Consider the following four public policy developments: 1. The Biden administration has attempted to forgive many student loans for college education.2. Several cities in California have imposed rent controls.3. Florida recently banned lab grown meat.4. North Carolina is attempting to ban mask wearing in public. While the .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
We should be careful about words, expressions, and catchphrases, especially those political hyperboles that buttress the statist zeitgeist of our time. You are a product of greedy corporations. The author of the May 16 Economist newsletter “The World in Brief” says it in passing: Walmart’s ad operation is much smaller than that of Amazon, which .. MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Brickbat: Robot’s Day of Rest by Charles Oliver, Reason, May 10, 2024. Excerpt: A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
In his book Minority Report, H.L. Mencken writes: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel [sic] to foreign parts.” With a .. MORE
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Brickbat: Robot’s Day of Rest by Charles Oliver, Reason, May 10, 2024. Excerpt: A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut .. MORE
Adam Smith
Click-a-ty-clack, click-a-ty-clack . . ., click-a-ty-clack. Those were the sounds that regularly echoed down the second-floor hallway of Clemson University’s Sirrine Hall in the 1980s and before. Those sounds of metal-on-metal could be expected by the economists on the floor at 10:00 in the morning, carrying a clear message: “Time for coffee!” The sounds .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
I live in Alabama, where college football is the major religion. The two major denominations are the University of Alabama Crimson Tide and the Auburn University Tigers. They have fought a storied and ludicrously overwrought rivalry since 1893, except for the four-decade gap between 1907 and 1948 when they didn’t play one another because the .. MORE
H.G. Wells Best known today for science fiction novels such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells was in his own day widely regarded as a prophet. Trained in science, he predicted the wireless telephone, directed energy weapons such as the laser, and the production of human-animal .. MORE
“A camping trip is, in fact, the opposite of an economic setting. The camping-trip setting is one of high endowment, low improvement.” I believe there is a basic misrepresentation pervading economics, starting with introductory textbooks and permeating even the most advanced topics in microeconomics and macroeconomics. Economic education gets off on the wrong foot by .. MORE
Ludwig von Mises The works of Ludwig von Mises and James M. Buchanan reflect the best of the classical liberal intellectual tradition. Given the centenary of the publication of Mises’ Socialism,1 and since 2023 marked the tenth anniversary of the passing of Buchanan, it seems an excellent time to remember their contributions. Both defend methodological .. MORE
A common misconception is that if a person has an incentive to do something, that incentive will influence his behavior… people are incentivized against smoking… Almost every smoker knows the costs and risks of their habit, even if they downplay them. The problem is that, roughly speaking, the part of the brain that stores knowledge .. MORE
Art: Profit-seeking free enterprise, however, mutes the darker angels of our nature by making it more costly to act on prejudice. In 1955, the bus boycott in Alabama lasted for a year, and cost the National..
David Seltzer, May 16