Tag Archives: Schumpeter

Teaching two history of thought classes this semester. One more traditional, focusing on the evolution of the theories of value and distribution, and another one, my regular senior seminar, on the co-evolution of ideas and policy in the United States. For the former I used a short piece by Peter Boettke on the reasons for reading the original sources (and they do read a fair amount in my class). The blackboard (pictured above) is based on his discussion. I changed the titles and the...

Friedman's adviseesZachary Carter, of Price of Peace fame (a good book that I recommend, btw), wrote an interesting piece on Milton Friedman's legacy, which I think is, as Hyman Minsky said of Joan Robinson's work, wrong in incisive ways. But even before we get to his main point, that the era of Friedmanomics is gone, it is worth thinking a bit about the way he approaches the history of ideas. This is clearly a moral tale for Carter, with good guys and bad guys. Gunfight at high noon. It is...

The figure from the New York Times shows the changes in spending by category. More defense and less social spending. Not a surprise there. Schumpeter long ago (in his The Crisis of the Tax State) suggested that it is the fiscal history of a society that explains the spirit of the people and the character of the government, since it is there plain to see by those that can read it what they are trying to achieve. The surprise to me, at least so far, is that the increase in defense seems to...