Links

My New Book

Michael Adamson Current Events, History, Links , ,

Don’t think I’ve mentioned my book on the history of Pasadena-based Charles Pankow Builders, a “design-builder” of many commercial buildings, mostly in LA, SF, and Honolulu, including the MTA tower at Union Station; it is forthcoming from Purdue University Press in January. It combines a study of entrepreneurship and best practices in construction. Check out its page in the Purdue UP catalog.

It’s gotten some good advance praise by industry leaders, as you can see from its Amazon page.

Of closer interest, perhaps, to this group, I also have an essay (Chapter 4: see TOC) on Columbia “money doctor” Carl Shoup’s financial missions to Cuba (in the 1930s) in “The Political Economy of  Transnational Tax Reform: The Shoup Mission to Japan in Historical Context,” forthcoming in March 2013 from Cambridge UP.

I’ve now cracked open Why Nations Fail. . . . Will get back to you as I make progress.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Links ,
  1. Must Libertarians Be Amoral?
  2. Monkey Jesus  (h/t Angus) I know what I’m going to be for Halloween!
  3. An Interview with the world-renowned Edward Luttwak

I have a post I’ve been working on for like, three weeks now, and I just can’t seem to finish it. Stay tuned!

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. How Government Sort Of Created the Internet. Fascinating read from the Freeman.
  2. What Happened? Will Wilkinson asks the tough question in the aftermath of a debate which I missed, but heard that Romney roundly is perceived to have won.
  3. The Next Industrial Revolution (it’s going to be in goods and services). Arnold Kling has written about this before. (h/t Tyler Cowen)
  4. Beirut: Security, Surveillance, and Navigation. As I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into anthropology, I’ve found that many anthropologists never get past the glorified journalism aspect of the discipline associated with introductory courses. This is a good example of that, but still worth a gander.

New Issue of Econ Journal Watch is Out

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, Links , , , , , , , , ,

For those of you who don’t know, co-editor Fred Foldvary is an editor for the Journal, and Warren Gibson is the math reader. From the website:

James Tooley on Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics: Banerjee and Duflo propose to bypass the “big questions” of economic development and focus instead on “small steps” to improvement. But, says Tooley, they proceed to make big judgments about education in developing countries, judgments not supported by their own evidence.

Why the Denial? Pauline Dixon asks why writers at UNESCO, Oxfam, and elsewhere have denied or discounted the success and potentiality of private schooling in developing countries.

Neither necessary nor sufficient, but… Thomas Mayer critically appraises Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey’s influential writings, particularly The Cult of Statistical Significance. McCloskey and Ziliak reply.

Was Occupational Licensing Good for Minorities? Daniel Klein, Benjamin Powell, and Evgeny Vorotnikov take issue with a JLE article by Marc Law and Mindy Marks. Law and Marks reply.

Mankiw vs. DeLong and Krugman on the CEA’s Real GDP Forecasts in Early 2009: David Cushman shows how a careful econometrician might have adjudicated the debate among these leading economists over the likelihood of a macroeconomic rebound.

Rating Government Bonds: Can We Raise Our Grade? Marc Joffe, a former Senior Director at Moody’s Analytics, discusses limitations of the methods employed at the credit rating agencies and problems in trying to infer default risks from market prices, suggesting another approach.

Also, if you’re unsatisfied with the status quo in terms of political parties, including the Libertarian party, Dr. Foldvary has established the Free Earth Party for you to look at. Be sure to check it out!

“Happyism”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, History, Links , ,

If a man tormented by starvation and civil war in South Sudan declares that he is “happy, no, very happy, a regular three, mind you,” we have learned something about the human spirit and its sometimes stirring, sometimes discouraging, oddity. But we inch toward madness if we go beyond people’s lips and claim to read objectively, or subjectively, their hearts in a 1-2-3 way that is comparable with their neighbors or comparable with the very same South Sudanese man when he wins an immigration lottery and gets to Albany.

From Deirdre McCloskey in the New Republic. It’s about the mismeasurement of happiness. Read the whole thing, but don’t you dare smile!

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , ,

Marxists’ Apartment A Microcosm of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work. From the Onion.

Slavic Feminists in Paris (Not Safe for Work)

Is Peronism back in Argentina? Pay attention to the Left’s rhetoric

The Myth of the Failure of Capitalism, 1932 edition

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , ,

Matt Steinglass has a couple of great posts over at Democracy in America:

  1. Mitt Romney on Israel: Kicking the Can
  2. Mitt Romney’s Problems: Elite Defections

Paul Pillar of the National Interest picks on Romney as well

As I keep saying over and over: Mitt Romney is going to win the election. Why? Because the economy sucks. If it gets better within the next seven months, then Obama will get four more years to urinate on the rule of law and our federal republic.

K.I.S.S. Keep it simple, stupid.

And last but definitely not least, Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko sets the historical record straight on Herbert Hoover and his supposed laissez-faire policies: The New Deal Illusion. This is a must read (h/t Steve Horwitz).

The Lonely Libertarian

Brandon Christensen Liberty, Links , ,

In my elementary school, we began every day with the Pledge of Allegiance. Each morning, I and 29 of my ten-year-olds colleagues would tramp to school around 8:45, hang up our coats, take off our boots or rubbers when the weather was bad, put our books in the old-fashioned lift-top desks with attached chairs, and fool around while waiting for the bell to ring at 9:00 a.m. When it did, we would all quiet down, stand in line to the right of our desks, place our right hand over our hearts, and look at the upper right-hand corner of the classroom. Hanging there was an American flag next to a loudspeaker attached to the school’s public address system. Immediately after the bell, the school principal’s voice would emanate from the loudspeaker and lead us in the Pledge. Every school day for each of the last five years, we had mumbled the same meaningless words in unison, continually reaffirming our allegiance to the republic for Richard Stanz. But this day, something was different.

Immediately following the Pledge, our teacher instructed us to take out our “social studies” books. This was the day we were reading about the Soviet Union and why it was such a bad place. Our book explained (in language appropriate for fifth graders) that the Soviet Union was bad because its government enforced conformity on its citizens. To drive this point home, the book contained a picture of an elementary school class in the USSR showing the boys and girls lined up beside their desks (all wearing uniforms and hats with little red stars on them) reciting something in unison. Looking at the picture, something clicked in my ten-year-old brain and I thought, “Hey, didn’t we just do that? If government-enforced conformity is bad in Russia, why isn’t it bad here?”

From John Hasnas. Do read the whole thing.

I’ve been on summer break for the last few days, but I’ll be back on here regularly. Soon. 🙂 Hope you’re all enjoying the last remnants of a most memorable summer.

Around the Web: Cato Unbound Edition

Brandon Christensen Economics, Links , ,

The response essays to Dr. Horwitz’s Cato Unbound lead-off essay are now up.

Horwitz, Economy and Empirics by Bryan Caplan, a very good critic of the Austrian School

Free bankers George Selgin asks: How Austrian Is It?

And Antony Davies plays nice by saying “come to the middle!”

My own quick thought: none of these guys are hostile to the Austrian School the way a Keynesian would be. I take this as a sign that Keynesianism is dead intellectually, rather than any sort of selective bias on the part of Cato Unbound’s very good editors.

More on Secession

Brandon Christensen Links , ,

Secession is not just a means of creating new countries, but can become a central element in governance in general. The general principle is that at any level of government, lower-level governments or individual residents may secede in part or in whole.

This is from a paper by our own Dr. Foldvary. Do read the whole thing. One thing I get tired of dealing with is the “confederate!” slur that is inevitably hurled my way when I bring up secession as a legitimate political function. In other parts of the world, secession is just as hotly debated (if it is not a forbidden subject to talk about).

I think there is a good case to be made that secession would get better reception once a larger (and lighter) federal or confederal system is place, and then allowing for mechanism of decentralization to happen. This way the polities under each system are still bound to each other economically or in some small political way, and would thus likely keep the threat of violence to a minimum.

Dr. Foldvary’s fascinating paper touches on this, too. Just read it!

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gene Callahan breaks down social thought through the ages.

The auto industry’s success story since Obama’s union vote-buying bailout.

Debt: the first 500 pages. An economist from Australia reviews David Graeber.

Daniel Larison laments the terms of debate in regards to US foreign policy this election.

Methodology, Theory and “Real” Sociology

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , ,

Co-blogger Jacques Delacroix writes the following (in 1995!):

Organizational ecology is the other major open system school of thought. Organizational ecology (sometimes called “population ecology”) is built around the concept of structural inertia. In the ecological view, organizations in general have little latitude for effective structural change. Indeed, accoriding to some ecologists, important structural forms are often recipes for disaster and more likely lead to organizational demise than to organizational adaptation, as assumed by managerial schools of thought […] Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , ,

Political scientist Jacob Levy shares his thoughts on unions

Social liberalism and the drug war, in which Bill Clinton and the Left gets taken to task for its hypocrisy

Austrian economics and anthropology: what’s the connection?

Friedrich Hayek: Champion of Liberty

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, Links, Politics , , , , ,

From Richard Epstein:

Thus Hayek’s 1940 contribution to the “Socialist Calculation” debate debunked the then-fashionable notion that master planners could achieve the economic nirvana of running a centralized economy in which they obtain whatever distribution of income they choose while simultaneously making sound allocations of both labor and capital, just like in Soviet Russia.

Hayek exposed this fool’s mission by stressing how no given individual or group could obtain and organize the needed information about supply and demand conditions throughout the economy. The virtue of the price system was its use of a common unit of measurement—money—to allow various actors to compete for a given resource without having to lay bare why they need any particular good or service. The seller need only accept the highest bid, without nosing around in other people’s business. The interaction between buyers and sellers allows for constant incremental adjustments of both price and quantity. Old information gets updated in a quick and reliable way, thereby eluding the administrative gauntlet of the socialist state.

This essay, which y’all should read, was sparked by the attacks on Rep. Paul Ryan’s supposed intellectual influences F.A. Hayek and Ayn Rand.

Revamped and Reenergized

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , ,

I’m going to begin some pretty intensive research and writing projects over the next month and a half, so you probably won’t hear from me much (keep the hooting and hollering to yourselves, please!).

A couple of quick items of blogging business:

One of our loyal readers, Hank Moore, has generously volunteered to become the administrator of our revamped Facebook page. You can check out what he has been doing here. Thank you so much Hank! Honorable men are hard to come by these days.

I’ve been listening to this one song over and over again for the past three weeks. Sometimes I’ll even listen to the rest of the album, too.

If you haven’t heard yet, the ‘Recommendations‘ section has been in a steady process of renovation since the blog launched, and now I like what I’m beginning to see. let us know what you think. I think it does a good job of flexing the intellectual firepower of the libertarian movement (broadly construed).

Have a great weekend everybody!