Saturday, April 01, 2006

Pre-publication bonus to M.E. readers

My newest essay on EconLib goes live soon.

But, it is up already, and you can check it out.

Excerpt:

The economists I talked to weren't really surprised.

"People don't understand opportunity cost. For that matter, they don't understand lots of other apparently simple economics concepts. That's why we should study economics more."

I'm not sure this is right. It reminds me of Bill Niskanen's (1971) observation about Ludwig von Mises. Niskanen argued that many people, including von Mises, were too optimistic, resting their conclusions on "the hope, almost pathetic in retrospect, that a broader education in economics will reduce the popular support for large government and the consequent pervasive bureaucracy."


ATSRTWT

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Re American Dolt: would that be American Idiot, or am I missing something?

Anonymous said...

As an undergrad, of all I've been taught, I've found opportunity cost to have had the single most profound impact upon the way I look at everyday decisions. It's such a simple thing, but gets overlooked far too often.

Chris Lawrence said...

I must not have known the secret Masonic codeword that you need to get men's basketball tickets at retail price.

Ah, well, there's always the Billikens.

Mungowitz said...

Maybe *I'm* the "American Idiot" here, but I did change the group name, the album name, and (for the real cognescenti) the song name: There is no Nader of Suburbia in *my* neighborhood. In north Raleigh, we are all heavily armed....