Archive for Mark Skousen
Mark Skousen is the editor of Forecasts & Strategies, author of The Making of Modern Economics, and producer of FreedomFest. He is a former president of FEE.
Where Are the Best Schools in Austrian Economics?
Here in the United States most colleges and universities have a goodly number of “neoclassical” economists with a free-market bent. (There are a number of “free market” colleges and universities in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, a topic I shall pursue in a future column.) The American schools include the University of Virginia; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); Florida State University; and the University of Chicago.
1Jul2001 | Mark Skousen | 35 comments | ContinuedPulling Down the Keynesian Cross
In his third and final volume on John Maynard Keynes, Robert Skidelsky comes to the shocking conclusion that the Keynesian revolution was temporary, that Keynes’s General Theory was really only a “special” case, and that “free market liberalism” has ultimately triumphed. This is all the more amazing given that Lord Skidelsky has spent the past 20 years of his professional career studying Keynes and resides in Keynes’s old estate, Tilton House. Few scholars would have the guts to repudiate the theory of the man they adore.
1Jun2001 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedIt All Started with Adam
Adam Smith, that is. Having just completed writing a history of economics,[1] I have concluded that, despite the protestations of Murray Rothbard and other detractors, the eighteenth-century moral philosopher and celebrated author of The Wealth of Nations deserves to be named the founding father of modern economics.
1May2001 | Mark Skousen | 1 comment | ContinuedBeyond GDP: A Breakthrough in National Income Accounting
“It is apparent that a large part of a country’s total production serves for the production of capital goods and not for the production of consumer goods, and that the production of capital goods must itself become a specialized branch of manufacturing.” —Wilhelm Röpke1 Good news! The U.S. Department of Commerce, which compiles Gross Domestic [...]
1Apr2001 | Mark Skousen | 3 comments | ContinuedSocial Security Reform: Lessons from the Private Sector
“Of all social institutions, business is the only one created for the express purpose of making and managing change . . . . Government is a poor manager.” —Peter F. Drucker1 Mark Skousen (www.mskousen.com; mskousen@aol.com) is an economist at Rollins College, Department of Economics, Winter Park, FL 32789, a Forbes columnist, and editor of Forecasts [...]
1Mar2001 | Mark Skousen | 1 comment | ContinuedYour One-Stop Source for Sound Economics
Walk into any bookstore and you’ll usually find two or three dictionaries of economics. Like any scientific discipline, economics has its own insider terminology, schools of thought, and famous experts. If you haven’t taken a course in economics, you may need a reference guide when a writer uses the term externality, liquidity preference, Laffer curve, or Keynesian economics.
1Feb2001 | Mark Skousen | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Imperial Science
But attitudes are rapidly changing as we enter the 21st century. Economics, no longer dismal, has come a long way toward reinventing itself and expanding into new territories so rapidly that another descriptive phrase is needed.
1Jan2001 | Mark Skousen | 1 comment | ContinuedEconomics on Trial
“There is a strong case for reducing the role of the government budget in providing health services beyond a minimum.” —Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht[1] How Many of You Are on Food Stamps? At the recent San Francisco Money Show, I asked an audience of several hundred investors, “By a show of hands, how many [...]
1Dec2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedPublic Finance and Public Choice: Two Contrasting Visions of the State
So there I was in the late ‘60s, an undergraduate economics major at BYU, a very conservative institution. My introductory textbook was Paul Samuelson’s Economics; my history of economic thought textbook was Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers; and for my public finance course we used The Theory of Public Finance by Richard A. Musgrave. In [...]
1Nov2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedEconomics on Trial
“In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man.” —E. F. Schumacher[1] The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Updated In 1956, Ludwig von Mises countered myriad arguments against free enterprise in his insightful book, The Anti-Capitalistic [...]
1Nov2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedEconomics on Trial
“The duty of ‘saving’ became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.” —John Maynard Keynes[1] Having Their Cake In his 1920 bestseller, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes made a profound observation about the success of capitalism before the Great War. He lauded “the immense [...]
1Oct2000 | Mark Skousen | 1 comment | ContinuedEconomics on Trial
In today’s robust global economy, the wheat represents genuine prosperity—the new products, technologies, and productivity generated by capitalists and entrepreneurs. It represents real economic growth and when harvested, reflects a true higher standard of living for everyone. Under such conditions, stock prices are likely to rise.
1Sep2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedEconomics on Trial
The lighthouse example has been highlighted as a classic public good in Paul Samuelson’s famous textbook since 1964. “Its beam helps everyone in sight. A businessman could not build it for a profit, since he cannot claim a price for each user.”[1]
1Aug2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedNeither Left nor Right
The problem with the pendulum approach is that Adam Smith is characterized as “extreme” as Karl Marx. By implication, neither economist is sensible.
1Jul2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedIn Defense of the Rich
“The substantial canons of the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous waste of time and substance and a withdrawal from the industrial process.” —Thorstein Veblen[1] Ever since Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, wealthy Americans have been under assault. Veblen had nothing good to say about the so-called idle [...]
1Jun2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedIs Greed Good?
“Unbridled avarice is not in the least the equivalent of capitalism, still less its ‘spirit’.” —Max Weber[1] Recently greed has become a popular term of endearment. There’s even a TV game show by that name. In 1987, Oliver Stone released a popular movie called Wall Street, in which Gordon Gekko, the fictional dealmaker extraordinaire, declares, [...]
1May2000 | Mark Skousen | 1 comment | ContinuedWhat It Takes to Be an Objective Scholar
“It was the facts that changed my mind.” —Julian Simon1 During the 1990s, we watched the Dow Jones Industrial Average increase fourfold and Nasdaq stocks tenfold. Yet there were well-known investment advisers—some of them my friends—who were bearish during the entire period, missing out on the greatest bull market in history.2 How is this possible? [...]
1Apr2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | Continued-
The Latest
Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable
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The Snow Plowers’ Petition
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Super Bowl versus Education?
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Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are... Read More
Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
Picking on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of the largest participation sports on the Internet.... Read More
