Archive for Peter J. Boettke
Contributing editor Peter Boettke is a professor in the economics department at George Mason University, the deputy director of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy, and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center.
Why Those Who Value Liberty Should Rejoice: Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize
Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is also one of the most iconoclastic thinkers to win it. (She shared it with Oliver Williamson.) Professor Ostrom’s work focuses on the mechanisms of self-governance that operate in different societies. Her intellectual curiosity led her to study local public economies—in [...]
18Nov2009 | Peter J. Boettke | 2 comments | ContinuedElinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Economics
Elinor Ostrom is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. She is also one of the most iconoclastic thinkers to win the prize. (She shared the prize with Oliver Williamson.) Professor Ostrom’s work focuses on the mechanisms of self-governance that operate in different societies. Her intellectual curiosity led her [...]
20Oct2009 | Peter J. Boettke | 0 comments | ContinuedHuman Action: The Treatise in Economics
“Next week we will discuss the master’s work.” So stated Dr. Hans Sennholz to close his graduate seminar during my junior year at Grove City College. I had owned a copy of Human Action since my freshman year, but the book was too daunting for me to really study it. I preferred to read Henry [...]
19Aug2009 | Peter J. Boettke | 0 comments | ContinuedPerspective: Economic Research and Economic Education
In 1948, Ludwig von Mises wrote a memorandum to FEE President Leonard Read on the objectives of economic education.[1] In this memorandum, Mises laid out the main fallacies . . . which economic education must unmask. Exposing economic error requires a transcendence of the practical problems of the day: The urgent tasks of the daily [...]
1Jan1997 | Peter J. Boettke | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: Human Action: A Treatise on Economics by Ludwig von Mises
Yale University Press, 1949; Contemporary Books, 1966; The Foundation for Economic Education, 1996
Dr. Boettke teaches economics at New York University.
The most important work published since FEE’s founding in 1946, in my opinion, is Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, published in 1949. Human Action is the English rewrite (not just [...]
Perspective: Whose Economics, Which Economic Liberalism?
Robert Lucas, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economic Science in October. The Swedish Royal Academy of Science declared that Lucas was “the economist who has had the greatest influence on macroeconomic research since 1970.” To economists of my generation, Lucas’ approach to economic science [...]
1Dec1995 | Peter J. Boettke | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Knopf • 1994 • 192 pages • $23.00
Gertrude Himmelfarb is Professor Emeritus of History at the Graduate School of the City University of New York and the author of numerous studies in intellectual history (such as her studies on Acton and Mill) and the history of Victorian England. She is a wonderful writer who [...]
The Story of a Movement
Dr. Boettke teaches economics at New York University. He would like to thank Mario Rizzo and Edward Weick for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
In June of 1974 in the little town of South Royalton, Vermont, the modern resurgence of Austrian economics began. George Pearson, who had graduated from Grove City College and was [...]
Book Review: Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics by Jane Jacobs
New York: Vintage Books • 1993 • 236 pages • $12.00
Ever wonder what it would have been like to sit in on a conversation with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and Leonard Read? Sitting in the backyard at FEE’s compound in Irvington or around the library table, they must have engaged in the give-and-take [...]
Book Review: Classics in Austrian Economics, 3 volumes Edited by Israel M. Kirzner
London: William Pickering and Chatto Publishers, Ltd., 1994 • xxxii + 355 pages; xx + 340 pages; xviii + 312 pages
When Carl Menger published his seminal book on economic theory in 1871 he established a tradition of economic scholarship that is still attempting to come to terms with his revolutionary insights into human action [...]
Perspective
An ancient legend has it that a Roman emperor, asked to judge a singing contest between two entrants, heard only one contestant and gave the prize to the second under the assumption that the second singer could be no worse than the first. The problem with the Emperor’s judgment, of course, was that his assumption [...]
1May1994 | Peter J. Boettke | 0 comments | ContinuedFrom Marx to Mises: a Review Essay
Peter J. Boettke, a 1992-1993 National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, teaches economics at New York University. Dr. Boettke would like to thank Dr. Robert Hessen for his thoughtful criticisms of an earlier draft of this essay.
In 1989 we collectively sat and watched the .defining ideology of the twentieth century die an [...]
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)
Peter J. Boettke is a professor of economics at New York University and the author of The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism and Why Perestroika Failed.
Friedrich A. Hayek, who died on March 23, 1992, at the age of 92, was probably the most prodigious classical liberal scholar of the 20th century. Though his 1974 [...]
Why Perestroika Failed
Peter J. Boettke is an assistant professor of economics at New York University and the author of The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism (Kluwer, 1990)
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he inherited a political and economic mess. The Novosibirsk report prepared by Soviet sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya, published in the West in the [...]
Book Review: To Promote The General Welfare: Market Processes vs. Political Transfers by Richard E. Wagner
Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 177 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94108 • 1989 • 239 pages • $29.95 cloth; $12.95 paper
Economic theory is analogous to a pair of corrective eyeglasses. Whereas the world appears unclear and indistinct without a pair of glasses, the correct prescription lenses will clarify and bring our vision [...]
Book Review: The Road To A Free Economy by Janos Kornai
W. W. Norton & Company, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 • 1990 • 224 pages • $16.95 cloth
The heady events of 1989 in Eastern Europe have given way to the sober reality of the 1990s. The road from serfdom will not be easy. As Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier recently said: “It [...]
Book Review: Market Socialism: A Scrutiny by Anthony de Jasay
London: Institute of Economic Affairs; North American Distributor: Atlas Foundation, 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, VA 22032 • 1990 • 35 pages • $8.00 paper
In this brilliant essay, Anthony de Jasay critically examines the proposals for “market” socialism offered by a leading group of British socialist academics. With the failure of “real existing” socialism evident [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
