Coordination Problem

Please Bear With Us

Steven Horwitz

We're in the process of making a few changes to the blog, so if you see weird stuff happening over the next 24 hours, please bear with us.  If all goes according to plan, we should be up and running smoothly for a new year and a new decade sometime on New Year's Day.  In the meantime, Happy New Year from all of us here at The Austrian Economists.

Daniel Drezner Please Meet Public Choice

|Peter Boettke|

Daniel Drezner a week ago used his forum at NPR's MarketPlace to argue that political scientists of the world should unite to stick it to the economists.  He has a cute premise --- economics post the Great Recession cannot be studied without due deligence with respect to the political and legal environment.  And he applauds the support provided to political scientists over the last year or two.

Unfortunately, Drezner makes one sin of comission and one sin of omission.  First, the sin of comission is that Drezner (while admitting that economics is not exclusively responsible for the financial crisis) blames laissez faire economics for promoting the environment of lax regulation which caused the crisis.  Ugh!  When will this error cease to be repeated?!  And keep in mind that Drezner is described as a libertarian-conservative so he should know better.  Second, the sin of omission is that Drezner (while pointing to Lin Ostrom's Nobel) fails to acknowledge the public choice tradition of scholarship in economics and political science.  Ostrom, it should be acknowledged, studied with Armen Alchian at UCLA (as she has pointed out on more than a few ocassions) and was an early contributor to public choice analysis and was a former President of the Public Choice Society.  I am going to send him a copy of my book on the Ostroms (with Dragos Aligica) next week when our offices open up.

In short, Drezner's sins of comission and omission should be easily avoided by the even a modest level of "trenchant research and critical commentary" that he claims that political scientist can provide and which presumably economists have fallen short of in his estimate.

Private vs Public Sector: Scary Vision Version

|Peter Boettke|

Public sector employees are more optimistic about their current economic situation than employees in the private sector.  But as this article by Michael Barone from AEI points out, this is not that big of a surprise since stimulus money has poured into the public sector to date. What will happen when that spout runs dry?

Hat-tip to Gerald O'Driscoll

This Week's "The Calling"

Steven Horwitz

My Freeman column is now weekly and this week's entry asks whether we should abandon the name "capitalism" a description of the unhampered market.  It comes complete with a cliff-hanger because it's a two-parter.

Required Reading for a New Decade --- Once Again

|Peter Boettke|

Tyler Cowen links to a discussion of the Fed and its role in fiscal policy.

I have argued in the past that policy makers dealing with the current set of issues before they can say anything should be required to read both F. A. Hayek's A Tiger By the Tail and James Buchanan and Richard Wagner's Democracy in Deficit.  Reading Tyler's post this morning simply reinforces that message as we prepare for 2010 and beyond.

Devil Is In the Details: Bill Easterly on Microcredit and Helping the Poor

|Peter Boettke|

Bill Easterly and Peter Singer discuss ways to help the poor.  Easterly is compasionate to the plight of the poor, but focuses on the culture of accountability, the incentives for effective giving and resource use, and ultimately the importance of helping people help themselves.

At the Mercatus Center we have been discussing microcredit programs and their effectiveness throughout the last decade.  Here is one study by Frederic Sautet and Steve Daley, by Karol Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen, and Boudreaux, Cowen and Dan Sacks.

Favorite Things 2000s

|Peter Boettke|

There are tons of lists produced at the end of the year and especially at the start of a new decade. So here are mine for whatever they are worth ...

Favorite Things in the 2000s

Economists --- Andrei Shleifer. While I disagree with different aspects of his arguments, I think there is no other economists over the past 2 decades that has made me think more seriously about my own research in comparative political economy than Shleifer.  The other nominees would be Vernon Smith (a true life-longer learner whose idea of ecological rationality is among the most significant ideas in contemporary economics), Bob Higgs (and his idea of regime uncertainty) and Avner Greif (and his development of institutional analysis).  In the 1990s, joining Shleifer would have been rational choice scholars such as Jon Elster, Russ Hardin, and Barry Weingast.

Books -- tie between Chris Coyne's After War, and Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook, with honorable mention going to Bill Easterly (both The Elusive Quest, and The White Man's Burden) and Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues.

Sports Moment --- GMU defeat of UConn to make the NCAA Final Four, followed by Yankees winning World Series in 2009.  Honorable Mention: Roger Federer's performances at Wimbledon throughout the decade, and the 2002 UConn women's basketball team led by Sue Bird (undefeated national championship season). 

Best Movie --- Lord of the Rings trilogy, with sentimental honorable mention to Juno, Superbad (I know, but I laugh at those movies), and Stranger than Fiction (I love the scene where Will Ferrell covers Whole Wide World)

"one of the most creative young economists around"

|Peter Boettke|

 
 That is the judgement of Steven Levitt with respect to Pete Leeson.  As readers of this blog know all too well, I think Levitt is actually understating how amazing an economist Pete has become.  The Invisible Hook is not only an excellent example of careful scholarship, but an amazing example of the power of the economic way of thinking.  If you haven't read it, make it one of your New Year resolutions to read it as soon as possible.

Congratulations to Pete, and a big thanks to him for reminding us all that economics is not only a deadly serious practical discipline for immediate public policy questions, but an indispensable tool for illumination and social understanding and one that in the right hands can be as entertaining and fun to read as the best literature while not losing a step in terms of educating us on how the world works.  On New Years Eve raise a glass and toast Pete's amazing 2009 and wish him an even more amazing 2010 --- with his skills I don't doubt it for a minute that tomorrow will be even more amazing than today.

Onward and upward!

More From the Horwitz Photo Archives

Steven Horwitz

I finally had a few minutes to scan a bunch of old photos I had mentioned in a post way back when.  The IHS Summer of 1987 photo is posted over at Liberty and Power.

Below the fold are a bunch of pictures taken at a Halloween party at Pete and Rosemary's apartment on Nov. 1, 1987.  As you'll see, there were quite a few folks there who are well-known names in Austrian economics and the free market movement.  And they were all 23 years younger (and it's hard to believe it was, in fact, almost 25 years ago).  Three of your hosts (Pete, Dave and I) are included.  Chris and Pete are not, as they were probably already tucked in bed, given that they were in grade school at the time - although Leeson was probably falling asleep reading some Mises.

That weekend/party is well-remembered for other reasons as well.  For me, it was particularly notable as that party was the first real "date" my now-wife Jody and I ever went on.  It's nice to have pictures from your first date with your wife of over 21 years!  Maybe not so nice for her as she was a GMU undergrad at the time - though older than me - and to this day, I'm not sure she thinks it was a good idea to go to a party where some of her professors were in costume and drinking.  In any case, below the fold is a whole slew of pictures from that party.

A note for our younger readers:  note the beer being drunk.  It is a historical fact that there was no good beer in the mid-80s.  Just another piece of evidence that things are, in fact, much better today than in generations past.

Important Ideas from ThinkMarkets

|Peter Boettke|

Rizzo on The Retreat from Reality in US policy.