Suchergebnisse

|Peter Boettke| Steve passed away a year ago this month. Still hard for me to process that. This past year was a year of loss for me — first one of my oldest and dearest friends, and then my brother....

Allin Cottrell's criticisms of my paper fall into three general categories: criticisms of the paper I did not write, criticisms of the paper I claimed to write, and criticisms of the paper he thinks I was really writing. Let me try to address each of these categories, emphasizing the more substantive points he raises about the paper I claimed to write.

Despite a few lapses into over-the-top liberal bashing, conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg mostly attempts a sober identification of key intellectual connections between contemporary American liberalism and early twentieth-century European fascism in Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (2008). His chapter on Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal is particularly effective because it documents leftist intellectuals approval of aspects of the New Deal they considered similar to Italian fascism. Adapted from the source document

AbstractBehavioural economics offers a critique of modern neoclassical economics by providing empirical evidence that the model of rational choice does not accurately describe human decision‐making processes. The existence of cognitive biases, what we might term 'agent failure', becomes reason to doubt the efficacy of unhampered markets, and is seen by some as a sufficient condition for government intervention. This article offers a critique of this argument from an Austrian and public choice theory comparative institutions perspective. Agent failure arguments are analogous to market failure arguments of the mid‐twentieth century and the same kinds of responses made against the latter are applied to the former. Behavioural economics arguments for intervention ignore the cognitive biases of political actors, neglect the comparative perspective that results from such biases, and do not examine the ways in which markets are superior to politics in providing the information and incentives actors need to become aware of their errors and correct them. The existence of imperfectly rational agents, like the existence of imperfect markets, is therefore not a sufficient condition for government intervention into the market.

The Great Recession was not a failure of free markets. Rather it was a classic example of the undesirable unintended consequences of government intervention, both through expansionary monetary policy and misguided attempts to bolster the housing market in the USA. Getting government out of banking is the best way to end the disastrous boom and bust cycles that have characterised the last century and a half.