Misc. Economics Updates ...

Dr. Taleb minces no words when expressing his disdain for most economists and MBAs. ;-)

Don't miss this week's EconTalk interview w/ Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Interview With Nassim Nicholas Taleb - washingtonpost.com: "Options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb made his name and career anticipating the powerful historic events he calls 'Black Swans,'which include World War I, the rise of the Internet and the stock market crash of 1987. In two books published in 2001 and 2007, he urges readers to concentrate more on what they don't know than on what they do. More recently, Taleb has blasted bankers and economists who issued reassuring forecasts right up to the brink of the current global financial crisis. He spoke recently with Washington Post reporter Peter Whoriskey. ..."

Reassuring words from Dr. Gary Becker.
Nobel Economist Gary Becker: Now Is No Time to Give Up on Markets - WSJ.com: "As a young academic in 1956, Mr. Becker wrote an important paper against conscription. He was discouraged from publishing it because, at the time, the popular view was that the military draft could never be abolished. Of course it was, and looking back, he says, 'that taught me a lesson.' Today as Washington appears unstoppable in its quest for more power and lovers of liberty are accused of tilting at windmills, he says it is no time to concede. Mr. Becker sees the finger prints of big government all over today's economic woes. When I ask him about the sources of the mania in housing prices, the first culprit he names is the Fed. Low interest rates, he says, were 'partly, maybe mainly, due to the Fed's policy of keeping [its] interest rates very low during 2002-2004.' A second reason rates were low was the 'high savings rates primarily from Asia and also from the rest of the world.'"

This one from Dr. Boudreaux is excellent.
The Daily News Record: Op-Ed: Open Forum Opinion: "Keynesian economists also fail to understand what the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek understood; namely, that markets allocate resources by relative prices. For example, suppose consumers’ taste for fish intensifies while their taste for beef weakens. Consumers will then spend more money buying fish and less buying beef. The resulting higher price of fish relative to the price of beef will signal to entrepreneurs, investors and resource owners to produce more fish and to produce less beef. This change in production patterns is precisely what should happen."

Good column.
Star Parker: We've legalized theft in America: "I have been looking through a new study, released by an organization called the Property Rights Alliance, called the International Property Rights Index. The study examines 115 nations worldwide and examines the correspondence between prosperity in a country and how secure private property is there. It shows a practically perfect correlation. The more secure private property is in a given country, the more prosperous it is. Countries rated in the top 25 percent in secure and safe private property have on average nine times more income per person than those in the bottom 25 percent. It's one of those things that makes so much sense that you wonder why you have to do a study to show it. The easier it is to steal in any given country the less likely the economy will function well there."

Related links:
All previous Nassim Nicholas Taleb related posts