Latest Blogwatch column

My Blogwatch column from the latest issue (Issue 65, August 2019) of the NZAE magazine Asymmetric Information

Latest Blogwatch column

My Blogwatch column from the latest issue (Issue 64, April 2019) of the NZAE magazine Asymmetric Information

101 great liberal thinkers

From IEA Conversations comes this audio in which Eamonn Butler talks about his new book School of Thought: 101 Great Liberal Thinkers

Economic calculation under socialism

From AIERvideo comes this video on economic calculation under socialism.

Let's assume socialist central planners have the best intentions. How will they decide what to produce, where to produce it, how to produce it, and for whom? These questions by Mises kicked off the "Socialist Calculation Debate".

The march of history: Mises vs. Marx - the definitive capitalism vs. socialism rap battle

The representative firm

Marshall's idea of  'representative firm' was created to reconcile his dynamic view of individual firms with the static view of industries. But this idea was somewhat nebulous and did not last very long in the economics literature. Marshall first wrote about the representative firm in his Principles of Economics published in 1890 but the idea was driven out of the literature by 1928, when it was replaced by A. C. Pigou's idea of the `equilibrium firm'.

Representative Firm by Paul Walker on Scribd

Becker versus Coase on consumer behaviour

From the Free to Choose Network comes this video of Gary Becker and Ronald Coase talking consumer behaviour. Half an hour very well spent.

Is the economic theory of utility a useful way of understanding consumer behaviour? Ronald Coase and Gary Becker, Nobel Economists at the University of Chicago, explain and discuss the theory of rational maximizing utility. They describe how consumers rank preferences and then attempt to choose the highest preference according to their resources, and they discuss whether firms and households operate with similar principals. They consider whether it is necessary to even have utility theory, and whether economists have been misled on this subject.

Roger Bootle: Europe is a complete disaster – Britain must leave

Economist & author Roger Bootle talks to Merryn Somerset Webb about Europe’s economic disaster, & should Britain pull out.