“I hate to say it, but before TV people spoke better and were better read than we are,” Terence Winter tells the New York Times. “They were probably more literate.” What Winter, who along with Martin Scorsese, is an executive producer of HBO’s upcomingBroadway Empire, is referring to is, “Books, of all things, are prominent props in Boardwalk Empire. One of the characters is reading a novel by Henry James; another keeps a copy of Sinclair Lewis with him.”
In the trailer for the 12-part series set in 1920 Atlantic City, Nucky Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi, proposes a toast “to those beautiful, ignorant bastards” in Washington who passed alcohol prohibition. “We’ve got a product a fella’s gotta have,” Thompson says in another clip and talks about the price of his product exploding.
prohibition results in more, not less, crime and corruption. The black markets that result from prohibitions represent institutionalized criminal exchanges. These criminal exchanges, or victimless crimes, often involve violent criminal acts. Prohibitions have also been associated with organized crime and gangs. Violence is used in black markets and criminal organizations to enforce contracts, maintain market share, and defend sales territory. The crime and violence that occurred during the late 1920s and early 1930s was a major reason for the repeal of Prohibition
Econtalk host Russ Roberts interviews author Daniel Pink on the topic Drive, Motivation and Incentives in last week’s podcast. Pink’s message is that a substantial body of empirical evidence shows that people are only motivated to a limited extent by money to increase their production in a work situation. Once employees are paid “enough”, other motivators take over, such as “autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose.”
Some thoughts I had while listening to this.
As I understood Pink’s synthesis of the research, a given individual may not increase their work production by the incentive of more money beyond a level they are satisfied with. What I think that this shows is that offering the same set of employees marginally more money may not improve output. However, the way I suspect that the labor market works is that different individuals who produce a higher level of output find their wages bid up as they move around the labor market.
Around 19:00, Pink raises the question of whether a large bonus for producing a new idea that succeeds in the market would produce more and better products. Roberts points out “Dan, that is the way our economy actually works”. Roberts points out that this is how entrepreneurial competition works. The market rewards entrepreneurs who produce a great new product with a large “bonus”, known as “profit”. The prospect of this reward stimulates many entrepreneurs to try new ideas, some of which fail. Thank you Russ Roberts for not letting that point get by.
However, the point Roberts makes is slightly different than what I think the research shows. For a company, holding the set of employees constant, the research questions whether offering a bonus to those employees will result in more innovation. It might or might not; maybe the employees of that company are not very entrepreneurial or are highly risk-averse. But what the market for new products and new firms does is to select those individuals — employed or otherwise — who are motivated by the possibility of earning profits.
Pink is not convinced, citing the example of people who have accumulated a large amount of wealth from profits on one company who start another company because the marginal value of the additional money is insignificant to that person. He interprets this to mean that entrepreneurs are not primarily motivated by money. I believe that Pink is correct, that we are all motivated by many things including, but not limited to money. But I don’t think that his example proves the point: successful entrepreneurs may still be motivated by earning money.
The following is an elaboration of Jeremiah Dyke’s informative September 4, 2010 posting, “Keynes, The Intellectual Lightweight.”
I am certainly not qualified to assess Keynes’s overall learning and intellectual capabilities. However, his education in and knowledge of economics was rudimentary and insular, hence the collection of errors that comprise his General Theory and earlier Treatise on Money. As Ludwig von Mises observed, the great success of Keynes’s General Theory was due to it providing a pseudo-scientific justification for the policies that virtually all governments of major countries had been pursuing for several years prior to its publication in 1936.
As for what Keynes was like as an individual, Murray Rothbard’s essay “Keynes, the Man” is an illuminating and critical assessment. The following are the opening and concluding paragraphs of Rothbard’s essay:
“John Maynard Keynes, the man—his character, his writings, and his actions throughout life—was composed of three guiding and interacting elements. The first was his overweening egotism, which assured him that he could handle all intellectual problems quickly and accurately and led him to scorn any general principles that might curb his unbridled ego. The second was his strong sense that he was born into, and destined to be a leader of, Great Britain’s ruling elite. Both of these traits led Keynes to deal with people as well as nations from a self-perceived position of power and dominance. The third element was his deep hatred and contempt for the values and virtues of the bourgeoisie, for conventional morality, for savings and thrift, and for the basic institutions of family life.”
“Later economists continued to hew a revisionist line, maintaining absurdly that Keynes was merely a benign pioneer of uncertainty theory (Shackle and Lachmann), or that he was a prophet of the idea that search costs were highly important in the labor market (Clower and Leijonhufvud). None of this is true. That Keynes was a Keynesian—of that much derided Keynesian system provided by Hicks, Hansen, Samuelson, and Modigliani—is the only explanation that makes any sense of Keynesian economics. Yet Keynes was much more than a Keynesian. Above all, he was the extraordinarily pernicious and malignant figure that we have examined in this chapter: a charming but power-driven statist Machiavelli, who embodied some of the most malevolent trends and institutions of the twentieth century.”
Human betterment, civilization’s advancement, and scientific truth and progress are significantly hindered as a result of Keynes’s General Theory and its numerous fallacies continuing to occupy a dominant place in the economics profession and to form the foundation of government “macroeconomic” policy.
“Between the years of 1911 to 1915 John Maynard Keyes was the principal reviewer of German Books for Economic Journal (see footnote 12, here)” It was during this time frame that “Maynard”, as Rothbard often referred to him, reviewed Mises path breaking 1912 book Theory of Money and Credit to which his primary response was “it is critical rather than constructive, dialectical and not original”
Though it may sound quite odd that Keynes would utter such words about one of the most rigorous treatises on money to ever appear in print we would later read about how horrible Keynes’ German actually was.
In his book John Maynard Keynes: Critical Responses Robert McCann states “That he could not speak German with any fluency is well attested by those who heard him once open an English lecture to a German audience with a brief apology in German” and “He [Keynes] read German indeed, but not with any great facility, and he said on one occasion that he never comprehended through the medium of German an idea that was new to him”
Given the above accounts of Keynes we might say that he ranks at a level 2 on the ILR scale for language proficiency
able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements
can handle with confidence most basic social situations including introductions and casual conversations about current events, work, family, and autobiographical information
can handle limited work requirements, needing help in handling any complications or difficulties; can get the gist of most conversations on non-technical subjects (i.e. topics which require no specialized knowledge), and has a speaking vocabulary sufficient to respond simply with some circumlocutions
has an accent which, though often quite faulty, is intelligible
can usually handle elementary constructions quite accurately but does not have thorough or confident control of the grammar.
So why would an educated individual such as Keynes, who clearly lacked the command of the German language formally engage in offering critical responses for books in German? I will leave you with what McCann calls a “characteristic quotation” to display Keynes’ pretensions pursuit to truth.
“In writing a book of this kind the author must, if he is to put his point of view clearly, pretend sometimes to a little more conviction than he feels. He must give his own argument a chance, so to speak, nor be to ready to depress its vitality with a wet cloud of doubt”
Of all things you might consider this quote applied to, Keynes was actually speaking to his writings on probability.
The New Deal: History, Economics and Law taught by Thomas Woods. The technology is incredible, the content even more so. No matter where you are, you can be a student of Thomas Woods.
Patent-enforcement madness often seems to have much in common with terrorism, but there is a bright side. It is helping more and more people think through the nature of competition, marketing, government privilege, what can and can’t be property, and other important considerations. It has been an educational opportunity for everyone, and here is a an excellent example: a beautifully argued and well-written post in The Register explaining that commerce isn’t built on ideas as such but on actual production and marketing. “Anyone can think up a brilliant idea. The difficulty is in doing something with it.”
Jeff Riggenbach’s extraordinary article today recalls the revealing results of the Milgram Experiment in 1961, and describes the political implications. Here is a documentary showing a repeat of the experiment. The results are reproduced time and again.
If the learner made an error, the teacher would administer an electric shock to the learner by remote control, pressing a button on a control console. Each electric shock administered would be stronger than the one before. FULL ARTICLE by Jeff Riggenbach
The Austrian theory of the trade cycle explains why the Fed’s below-market interest rates invariably lead to a correction known as the bust. The theory is not new. Why has it been so out of favor with most economists? FULL ARTICLE by George F. Smith
By eliminating the analytical straightjacket imposed by neoclassical economics, economists could have a lot more to offer about how to improve the world. They would start thinking about changing preferences, not just incentives. FULL ARTICLE by Edward Strigham and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
David Gordon covers new books in economics, politics, philosophy, and law for The Mises Review, the quarterly review of literature in the social sciences, published since 1995 by the Mises Institute. He is author of The Essential Rothbard, Resurrecting Marx, and The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics. He has also edited Secession, State and Liberty and Strictly Confidential
If you were not a scholar then what do you think you would be doing now? Do you have any hobbies?
I’d probably be in some menial job. I’m really not much good for anything else besides reading and studying. On hobbies, I like Crossword and Sudoku puzzles.
What drew you to the Austrian school?
When I was in junior high school, I used to go to Poor Richard’s Bookshop in Los Angeles, which featured a large variety of classical liberal books. Man, Economy, and State and Human Action influenced me the most.
Who is your greatest inspiration?
Definitely Murray Rothbard. His intelligence and vast range of knowledge were amazing. You’ve written or edited several books on Murray Rothbard including a new work concerning Murray Rothbard’s memos at the Volker fund. You have also been called a great friend of Dr. Rothbard. What was the personal Murray Rothbard like and will readers get a new found sense of him in your recent work?
He was a very warm and friendly person; whatever your mood when you started to talk to him, you would soon be laughing. He was interested in everything and no matter what the topic, you would always learn something new from him. One thing that especially impressed me was his quickness in argument. Readers of the collection Strictly Confidential that I edited will get a good idea of his breadth of learning and his commitment to liberty.
Mises Academy Presents: Freedom Verus Authority: Europe 1789-1945
Do you have any new works on the way?
I’m working on an article with my friend Ronald Hamowy on Nozick’s derivation of the minimal state.
How do you think history will see you and your efforts in life?
I don’t think that history will remember me at all. I hope that I’ve encouraged a few students to study libertarian and Austrian ideas, especially as taught by Rothbard. Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Try to do as much reading as you can. Also, remember that coming up with a good philosophical argument is difficult: don’t assume that there is some quick and easy way to prove libertarianism and refute its critics.
If you have a chance to try it, Mises.org works really great on the iPad. With the new Stanza catalog, all the audio and most video, and of course the full website, it makes for a great Austrian economics consumption device. Please comment below if you have any other ideas for sharing our content with the world.
“Keynes had an agenda that included using his influence to obfuscate anything that potentially could undermine socialism, which he reveled in in his …”
If the learner made an error, the teacher would administer an electric shock to the learner by remote control, pressing a button on a control console. Each electric shock administered would be stronger than the one before. 
The Austrian theory of the trade cycle explains why the Fed’s below-market interest rates invariably lead to a correction known as the bust. The theory is not new. Why has it been so out of favor with most economists? 
By eliminating the analytical straightjacket imposed by neoclassical economics, economists could have a lot more to offer about how to improve the world. They would start thinking about changing preferences, not just incentives. 
David Gordon covers new books in economics, politics, philosophy, and law for The Mises Review, the quarterly review of literature in the social sciences, published since 1995 by the Mises Institute. He is author of The Essential Rothbard, Resurrecting Marx, and The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics. He has also edited Secession, State and Liberty and Strictly Confidential
