• Bruce Caldwell on The Road from Mont Pèlerin

    Updated: 2010-09-02 17:31:39
    | Peter Klein | Don’t miss Bruce Caldwell’s review of Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard, 2009). “Mont Pèlerin” refers, of course, to the Mont Pèlerin Society, the association of classical liberal academics and journalists founded by Hayek in 1947. Bruce finds [...]

  • ScienceCodex

    Updated: 2010-09-02 15:09:32
    | Nicolai Foss | ScienceCodex is the name of a great resource for serious procrastination, amusement, and — sometimes — useful inputs to research and teaching. Signing up for the feed will result in about 20 daily pieces of science news, and, at least for me, a couple of them are usually great fun and potentially [...]

  • Chris Coyne’s Austrian Course

    Updated: 2010-09-01 16:53:48
    | Peter Klein | Earlier I shared the reading list for my graduate course in the Austrian school of economics. Chris Coyne is teaching a similar class and has posted his syllabus here. Chris’s course is laid out differently than mine, with a different mix among types of readings, but I like what he’s done. [...]

  • Two Economics Papers About Culture

    Updated: 2010-08-30 15:23:31
    | Peter Klein | The New Institutional Economics focuses mainly on formal rules, both “macro” (constitutions, legal systems, written languages) and “micro” (firms, contracts, other formal agreements). But there are many studies of informal or semi-formal constraints — norms, conventions, religion, belief systems, and other aspects of culture, broadly conceived. Given their commitment to methodological individualism, [...]

  • Department of “Duh”

    Updated: 2010-08-27 15:50:22
    | Peter Klein | It must be acknowledged, however, that a researcher’s political ideology or vested interest in a particular theory can still enter even ostensibly descriptive analysis by the data set chosen for the research; the mathematical transformations of raw data and the exclusion of so-called outlier data; the specific form of the mathematical [...]

  • An Industry Study for the Beautiful People

    Updated: 2010-08-26 12:45:12
    | Peter Klein | It’s Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry by Geoffrey Jones (Oxford University Press, 2010). From the blurb: This book provides the first authoritative history of the global beauty industry from its emergence in the nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how today’s global giants grew. It shows [...]

  • Texting Victorians

    Updated: 2010-08-24 22:22:06
    | Peter Klein | I knew that the Victorians had their own Internet, that information goods and open innovation are old hat, and that S-curves go back a hundred years. But apparently the Victorians used texting language too! We instruct our students to avoid it, but apparently Victorian poets thought writing I “love U 2 [...]

  • Austrian Economics PhD Course

    Updated: 2010-08-23 19:46:40
    | Peter Klein | This semester I am teaching a PhD course in the Austrian school of economics. Here’s a preview. Visitors to Columbia, Missouri are welcome to sit in! Excerpt from the syllabus: It is difficult to cover an entire school of thought in one semester. Austrian economics, after all, is not an applied [...]

  • The Corporate Hierarchy Dies, Again

    Updated: 2010-08-23 05:14:10
    | Peter Klein | Ronald Coase described his 1937 paper on the firm as “much cited, but little used.” He was referring to the academic literature, but these days it seems to apply to the popular press as well. Almost every week brings a new article on the death of the corporate hierarchy: you know, firms [...]

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