Economics

Interview with Douglas Den Uyl on “The Essence of Capitalism”

Leave a Comment / Business Ethics, Economics, Politics /

Douglas Den Uyl spoke at Rockford College on four competing (and/or compatible?) theories of the nature of capitalism: Milton Friedman’s “Utility” account, Friedrich Hayek’s “Epistemic” account, Adam Smith’s “Aesthetic” account, and Ayn Rand’s “Self-Fulfillment” account. Here is my sixteen-minute interview with Dr. Den Uyl following his lecture: Part 1: Part 2: Cross-posted at the CEE […]

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Talk at Liberty Fund on art and free markets

Leave a Comment / Art, Economics, Philosophy /

Earlier this week I gave a talk in Indianapolis at the excellent Liberty Fund on whether free-market capitalism is good or bad for art. The question matters in today’s intellectual context because thinkers on both left and right argue regularly that art suffers under free market systems. Traditional conservatives such as Robert Bork and neo-conservatives

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Video of my lecture at the Austrian Economics conference, Argentina

1 Comment / Economics, Philosophy /

At the third 2010 International Conference, “The Austrian School of Economics in the 21st Century,” held in 2010 in Rosario, Argentina, I gave a keynote lecture entitled “Austrians, Objectivists, and the Unrequited Love of Philosophy for Economics.” The conference was co-sponsored by the Bases Foundation, the Faculty of Economics of the Pontifical Catholic University of

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Argentina, Hong Kong, and the psychology of belief

3 Comments / Business Ethics, Economics, Politics /

Over the last 80 years, the world rankings of Hong Kong and Argentina: Resource-poor Hong Kong’s relatively laissez-faire free market has taken it from poverty to riches. Resource-rich Argentina’s experiments in statism have taken it from prosperity to decline and semi-functionality. In this Wall Street Journal/Heritage ranking, Hong Kong is currently first in the world

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APEE update — Deirdre McCloskey

1 Comment / Business Ethics, Economics, Ethics, Philosophy of History /

Why did the modern economic revolution in production and trade first happen in north-western Europe? At the APEE conference, Deirdre McCloskey delivered a plenary address based on her new book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Her argument is that neither material resources nor technology nor capital accumulation nor geographical factors drove

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