Fifty years ago I had the honor to serve as the organizer of a conference on Austrian economics, held in the small town of South Royalton, Vermont. Recently the Mises Institute hosted a retrospective on the conference, which included a panel with five of the surviving participants in the conference, hosted by Peter Klein. The panel is posted on YouTube, along with a transcript. I recommend that anyone interested in Austrian economics take a look at it: South Royalton: Looking Back. In the course of the panel, the question came up as to why the event was held in South Royalton. The hypothesis ..read more

  A new report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), An Updated Measure of Poverty: (Re)Drawing the Line, has hit Washington with something of a splash. Its proposals deserve a warm welcome across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, they are not always getting it from the conservative side of the aisle.  The AEI’s Kevin Corinth sees the NASEM proposals as a path to adding billions of dollars to federal spending. Congressional testimony by economist Bruce Meyer takes NASEM to task for outright partisan bias. Yet in ..read more

The negative income tax (NIT) sometimes seems like the carbon tax of social policy. Both are irresistibly appealing to economists and have long pedigrees. Both are supported by blindingly persuasive logic. Yet neither policy seems capable of mustering much political support in 21st-century Washington politics. I see two things as essential in repackaging the NIT for today’s America. The first essential is to recognize the reality of path dependency — the need to start from where we are, not from a clean slate, and take things one step at a time.  Gerald Gaus calls that approach “exp ..read more

For more than a year, the Fed, led by its chair Jerome Powell, has been fighting the worst outbreak of inflation in the United States in 50 years. This slideshow, first presented at the Northport MI Lions Club on July 28, 2023, addresses three questions:  How are we doing? Why is inflation so hard to reverse? When will things get back to normal? The bottom line: The good news is that inflation is falling faster than we might think from reports in the mass media. The bad news is that things are not yet back to normal. Trying to push the inflation fight too fast could do more harm than g ..read more

The social responsibility of business has been debated for years. One point of view follows Milton Friedman’s maxim, “In a free society … there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” Others argue for the priority of ESG values, even if they conflict with profit-making. A more pragmatic perspective sees ESG simply as a set of tools that facilitates risk assessment and enhances long-run profitability.  The political responsibility of corporations has, unfortunately, received muc ..read more

Although headline inflation continues to fall and unemployment is near a 50-year low, the Federal Reserve still faces some tricky policy decisions over the next few months. Many of these have to do with the unusual volatility of relative prices during the 2021-2022 inflation, a topic that I wrote about in a recent commentary. This piece picks up where that one left off. It focuses on the behavior of the subset of prices that constitute the so-called supercorerelative to prices that are more flexible. Supercore prices have been in the news lately because some observers think the Fed is targeti ..read more

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw asks, “Can America Afford to Become a Major Social Welfare State?” By welfare state, he has in mind the Biden administration’s plan for better child benefits, improved healthcare, extending free public education to preschool and community college, and the rest. From a “narrow budgetary standpoint,” Mankiw agrees that these things are affordable. But he is concerned about the larger question of whether stronger social protections are consistent with prosperity and with our aspirations for the “kind of nation we want to be ..read more

On April 12, 2022, the University of British Columbia, Okanagen, sponsored an on-line symposium, "A Wicked Problem: Individual Freedoms and Climate Change." Here is a link to the slideshow of my presentation at the conference, which discusses four perspectives on the problem: Carbon pollution as a violation of the nonaggression principle Applying Lockean property rights to the climate problem Climate change as a coordination problem A Hayekian perspective: Prices without markets or markets without prices ..read more

The United States spends some $850 billion per year on poverty programs, yet the official poverty rate has not fallen much, if at all, over the past 40 years. What could we do better? This slideshow, originally presented at a meeting of the Northport  MI Lions Club on September 23, 2021, argues that with better policy design, we could greatly reduce the poverty rate without spending any more than we do today. The slideshow is suitable for classroom presentation and may be used without further permission. The slideshow emphasizes three major problems with the design of current poverty pol ..read more

In a promising contribution to the debate over poverty policy, the Institute on Race and Political Economy at the New School has released a major welfare reform proposal that it calls a Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century. Details of the proposal (abbreviated GI21 in what follows) are set out in a report written by Naomi Zewde, Kyle Strickland, Kelly Capatosto, Ari Glogower, and Darrick Hamilton. The proposal makes a full-scale assault on America’s social protection gap. It includes several features that the Niskanen Center has long championed, such as an emphasis on cash assistance, broad ..read more