EconoSpeak

 This is not news, but yet again we see the old phenomenon of people whining a lot when something gets worse but then saying nothing when it gets better.  The latest example of that involves gasoline prices.  They were rising and got into the range of near real highs seen in times like 2008, 1981, and 1918.  But now they have slid backwards, down in the neighborhood of 20 cents per gallon where I am.  Crude prices are down as well, with WTI having gotten near $120 per barrel it is now below...

 I have just learned from Louis-Philippe Rochon that Alain Parguez has died.  He was a French economist long based at the University of Besancon before he retired some years ago.  He was long perhspa the main leader of the "circuitist" school of monetary economics, a distinctively French approach that never really caught on in the US, although it has had adherents in Canada.  It is a sort of kissing cousin of the MMT approach, but with more of a Marxist bent to it.  Ironically for a...

I have always enjoyed chapter 10 of Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom -- "Why the worst get on top." Always referring to the last quarter century or so since I first read it. Hayek's argument struck me immediately as  watertight but I was puzzled that he seemed to exempt his own preferred collective from his argument. Maybe he just wanted to slip it past the unwary?Individuals may be individuals but individualists are a collective. Harold Rosenberg coined a fine phrase for such collectives:...

McCulloch, J. R. (John Ramsay). Outlines of political economy : being a republication of the article upon that subject contained in the Edinburgh Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica : together with notes explanatory and critical, and a summary of the science / by John M'Vickar. New-York, 1825. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.Rasbotham, Dorning. Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton Manufacture. Addressed to the working people in that manufacture, and to the...

Two weeks ago Back in 2011 a hunch about Charles Dickens and Edward Carleton Tufnell led me to the discovery of what I surmised might be the prototype of the idea that has come to be known to economists as "the lump of labor." To my surprise, it was a subtle and articulate defense by a fairly prominent early 19th century political economist of the proposition that "...there is a certain quantity of work to be done; and this quantity, generally speaking, does not admit of being much extended,...

 It is always annoying to have to admit one has been wrong.  But I was among those who a year ago or so was going along with those who argued inflation was transitory and the rate would probably come down later in the year.  The annoying Larry Summers, along with the somewhat less annoying Olivier Blanchard, prominently argued the contrary, hauling out old-fashioned conventional macroeconomic arguments why this might be the case, replete with implicit Phillips Curves and the like.  A major...

In previous posts, I discussed the Senate confirmation hearings plagiarism by Keisha Russell of a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen and the shoddy scholarship of the former history professor, Allen C. Guelzo that underwrote the bizarre claim that "critical race theory is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant." In the latter post, I stuck to source that Guelzo cited in his published writings. There is much speculation that Guelzo's Kant to critical race theory...

[embedded content]The grinning mug on the right of the YouTube Fox News screen above is Allen C. Guelzo, a historian of the Civil War and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Guelzo is also a purveyor of a bizarre theory that Immanuel Kant was the progenitor of critical theory, critical race theory, Marxism, Jim Crow, and "every dictatorship in between":But critical race theory may also be the most irresponsible way to think about race in America, and I think that's really because critical race...

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. -- VoltaireKeisha Russell is a propagandist for the "First Liberty Institute" who they grace with the title of "counsel." It looks from her resume that the counsel she provides consists of appearing on right-wing cable news and doing speaking engagements. Her bio at First Liberty doesn't mention any litigation experience and emphasizes her "commentary."Today Russell appeared before the Senate confirmation...

 An unfortunate reason the current war in Ukraine might go on longer than it should (with the should here being that it should never have happened in the first place, and the sooner it stops the better, with the onus here clearly on V.V. Putin to stop it as he started it without any justification), is that wartime leaders get a puff in their popularity at least for awhile and are let off the hook on domestic problems.  From the outside it may look that V.V. Putin is indeed in trouble with...