All Posts Tagged With: "imperfect knowledge"
Destroying Value
In Cleveland and other American cities homes are being demolished because five years after the housing bust there is nothing better to do with them. Therein lies a lesson in Austrian business cycle theory. In a world of uncertainty, waste—the destruction of value—is inevitable. Human action, which aims to replace inferior circumstances with superior circumstances, [...]
4Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedNothing Lasts, Nothing Is Finished, Nothing Is Perfect
Sound economics emphasizes how the open-endedness of real time introduces imperfections into the social world but also offers opportunities for entrepreneurial discovery.
16Feb2010 | Sandy Ikeda | 9 comments | ContinuedPoker and the Free Market
Good poker players are like entrepreneurs: You need greater skill than average to anticipate the future. As Mises so cogently puts it in Human Action, “What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way.”
20Jan2009 | Robert Stewart | 2 comments | ContinuedFreedom and the Pitfalls of Predicting the Future
The prospects for freedom in America and in many other parts of the world appear dim. Government continues to grow bigger and more intrusive, imposing tax burdens that siphon vast amounts of private wealth. Extrapolating these trends out for the foreseeable future, it would seem that the chances for winning liberty are highly unlikely. There is only one problem with this pessimistic forecast: the future is unpredictable and apparent trends do change.
1Jun2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedAustrian Economics and the Political Economy of Freedom
The revival of the modern Austrian school of economics may be said to have begun 30 years ago, during the week of June 15–22, 1974, when the Institute for Humane Studies sponsored a conference on Austrian economics for about 40 participants in the small town of South Royalton, Vermont. In 1974 the Austrian school had [...]
1Jun2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Law of Supply and Demand
This is the first in a series of articles laying out some foundational elements of modern Austrian economics. The second article is here, the third is here, and the final article is here. The theory of supply and demand is recognized almost universally as the first step toward understanding how market prices are determined and [...]
1Jan2000 | Israel M. Kirzner | 32 comments | ContinuedConsumer Information and the Calculation Debate
Dr. Pasour is professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. Government intervention has been common throughout the world over the past half century, whatever the type of political and economic system. In socialist countries such as the former Soviet Union and its satellites, government assumed primary responsibility for all economic [...]
1Dec1996 | E.C. Pasour Jr. | 0 comments | Continued-
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