An instructive trio of essays by economists at Cato Unbound about Austrian economics’ reputation — especially Mises’s praxeological version — for being strongly a priori rationalist: Is Austrian economics anti-empiricist? Steve Horwitz says no. Bryan Caplan says yes. George Selgin also says yes. To Selgin’s series of quotations from Mises, I’d add this one from […]
Are Austrian economists anti-empirical? Read More »
I was struck by this philosophical economist’s connecting the Aristotelian solution to the so-called naturalistic fallacy to the question of the value of money. “This approach hints at the fact that a key element in this work is the treatment given to questions surrounding the ‘naturalistic fallacy.’ The basic reasoning here is that in regard
Zelmanovitz on philosophy of money Read More »
Over the years I’ve enjoyed and learned from many of Carlin Romano’s articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He can do good philosophical reporting. So I picked up America the Philosophical, and I was disappointed. Romano’s thesis is that the United States is a nation of vigorous philosophical activity and — contrary to the
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Two economists channel Miss Manners and Robert’s Rules of Order — or why good time-management manners have practical value. Mike Munger on lateness and punctuality. (I need to get me a terrifying assistant.) And Alex Tabarrok on the economics of punctuality.
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Jumping into the debate about “bleeding-heart libertarianism” (Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, Bryan Caplan and again, David Friedman, David Henderson, and others), which seeks to integrate libertarianism with social justice. “Social justice” is one of those vaguely-specified, usually suspect phrases, defined by one defender of BHL as the position that “the moral justification of our
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On my trip home from Brazil, I had a lengthy layover in Panama, made enjoyable by two fun and smart young people who took me to the canal (awesome) and to lunch at a Panamanian fusion restaurant. Tasty — I’d never had fried plantain before. I was struck by Panama City’s skyline — it’s experiencing
An impression of Panama Read More »
The Bases Foundation has announced its Fourth International Conference, to be held in August in Rosario, Argentina, on the theme of “The Austrian School of Economics in the 21st Century”. The conference has an impressive lineup of speakers, including Lawrence White of George Mason University, Christopher Lingle of Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Karol Boudreaux of the
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Part of a work-in-progress in philosophy of economics, here is the video of a seminar I led on “Economics as a Value Science.” Part of my argument is that there is a large, problematic gap in economic theory about the relationship between economic facts and economic values. Along the way I discuss Friedrich Hayek, David
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