The opening of my latest column at EveryJoe: “A common meme about the financial crisis blames it on capitalism run amok and holds the rise of free-market fundamentalism among economists responsible for unleashing the greed. Academic economists, the argument runs, are largely free-marketers, and they convinced politicians to deregulate important swathes of the American economy, […]
The one-hour video of my lecture is at the Atlas Society site and at YouTube. The lecture starts at 3:40, after the introduction, and is about 45 minutes long, followed by a question-and-answer session. The sub-topics are: * 13 initial arguments for liberal capitalism. * Some quotations from Mises, Schumpeter, Jouvenel, Smith, Hayek, Mill, Rand,
With much thanks to Matheus Pacini for his work on the transcription, below is the text for my “13 arguments for liberal capitalism in 13 minutes.” The original videos are at YouTube. The graphic integration of the arguments in a flowchart is here. And here’s the transcript in PDF. 13 Arguments for Liberal Capitalism in
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Abstract for my talk at the upcoming APEE conference in Las Vegas: “Is Freedom a Subjective Value? Stephen Hicks Some economists speak of subjective value, by which they mean that value does not inhere in objects but rather is a function of the individual. Different individuals, for example, are willing to pay very different amounts
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Finished my taxes this year. Such joy. Along the way I noted that in the US tax code, investment income is categorized as “unearned income”. An agricultural analogy: You plant a seed and watch it grow. You pick the fruit and eat it. You’ve just enjoyed an “unearned meal.” [The cartoon is from here.]
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In an NBER paper, “Culture, Institutions and the Wealth of Nations,” Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gerard Roland compare the growth gains that individualist ethics generate compared to those of collectivist ethics. The first sentences of their abstract: “We construct an endogenous growth model that includes a cultural variable along the dimension of individualism-collectivism. The model predicts
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Here is a clear example of zero-sum thinking, this time in literature. Author Lynn Shepherd laments J. K. Rowling’s publishing another book, on the grounds that the successful writer crowds out the less successful. In Shepherd’s words: “It wasn’t just that the hype was drearily excessive, or that (by all accounts) the novel was no
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According to the 2014 Heritage index, the six most economically free nations are Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Canada. Question: Is it a coincidence that five of the six are former British colonies? Follow-up questions: * If not a coincidence, what did the British do in their colonies to enable this legacy
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