From Greg Mankiw: “Economics in One Picture“

Paul Krugman of the New York Times on “An Irish Mirror” and Constantin Gurdgiev of Trinity College, Dublin on “Replying to Prof Krugman”

Hat Tip: Cyril Morong

Third Wheel, by Prabodh.

The Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization with which I work has just published their first book, a Dari edition of Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, by James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee.

Thanks, Reason.tv, for a clear explanation!

Thanks to the good work of Pierre Garello and Philippe Maitre, a great journal lives again. (Click on the image to the left for more details.)

My friend Emmanuel Martin sent me this interesting link from Les Echos on how, among the top forty regions of Europe for wealth, only one is in France, and that is the region that includes the capital city, Paris: “Une seule région française figure parmi les quarante et une plus riches de l’Union européenne“. It may be amazing to some, but wealth is not widely available in France, despite the glories of French life, which I don’t deny. It would just be even more glorious if the French people were richer, too, and that just might be more likely if there were fewer bureaucrats and less interventionism keeping people from gainful employment through minimum wage laws (Germany has none) and taxes.

Some years ago I was interviewed on an ABC TV Special with John Stossel, with the provocative title “Is America Number 1?.” Here’s a part of the discussion:

STOSSEL: (VO) Another reason she won’t go back [referring to a French entrepreneur who left for California to start her business] is that French bureaucrats, to try to protect workers, are so busy passing labor laws that stifle entrepreneurship. One seemingly worker-friendly law says employees may not work longer than 35 hours a week.

TOM PALMER: They actually come to businesses, and stop people from working.

STOSSEL: (VO) Tom Palmer, of Washington’s Cato Institute.

STOSSEL: They’re protecting people from overwork.

PALMER: What they’re doing is turning the whole country into a big theme park. You go to Franceland. You have the cheese, you have the wine, you look at some castles, it’s a lovely place to visit.

But does much new come out of France anymore, is it dynamic? No.

I got some interesting hate mail from that exchange, from French government employees. (And yes, I do love France, the French language, and French culture. I just wish that they had a more liberal government and more freedom to enjoy all of those wonderful things.)

In preparation for my talks in Moscow and St. Petersburg on the financial crisis and the risks of protectionism, I did a lot of additional reading, focusing on serious scholarship and insight into why the asset bubble caused a worldwide recession and a crisis of the financial system, rather than on religion. I found the papers in the special “Causes of the Crisis” issue of Critical Review especially helpful. The editor, Jeffrey Friedman, really did a great job. His own article was quite good at tying together a great many threads. I recommend the issue highly. (I understand that it will be coming out soon as a book, as well. There is a blog on the issue here.)

Note: Jeff and I had a healthy debate on the nature of libertarianism some years back. Click here for “Debate on Libertarianism.”

One of China’s most prestigious and influential magazines, Caijing, today ran my article on free trade: “Weaken Our Trade Barriers: It is not only America’s leaders who are erring, Chinese leaders must also change their trade policies.” It was based on a presentation I made at a seminar on trade policy at the Unirule Institute in Beijing. (Note: Click on the images to enlarge them to readable size.)


At the bottom of the page is a comment, expressing agreement, by Prof. Feng Xingyuan of the China Academy of Social Sciences and the Cathay Institute of Public Affairs.

Note: Careful readers of the Chinese text will note on page 1 references to “Lou Dobbs” and “Jack Cafferty,” two notorious China bashers on “CNN” whom I set straight. And further note: I can’t read Chinese, either. I wish I could.

John Stossel on Energy Independence

“Although world population has increased by about 80% over this time (World Bank 2009), the number of people below the $1 a day poverty line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006. In the past 36 years, there has never been a moment with more than 1 billion people in poverty, and barring a catastrophe, there will never be such a moment in the future history of the world.”

From “Parametric estimations of the world distribution of income” by Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Copyright Voxeu.org; © voxEU.org)

HT: Bruce Barlett

Robert Higgs in Investor’s Business Daily: “The Disappearing Private-Sector Jobs“

I have just received the PDF of the Dari (the Persian spoken in Afghanistan) version of the book Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, by the outstanding economic educators James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee. The new think tank, the Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization, will also publish in Dari Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” David Boaz’s Libertarianism: A Primer, and other books. Translations into Pashto are underway. I was in Afghanistan in June and in December and I am very, very happy to be associated with such outstanding libertarians.

I’m also pleased to say that just north of Afghanistan, the Tajikistan Free Market Centre has been started, is honing its business plan, and is preparing to unveil their website and their first projects. (That thanks to the great work of the Central Asian Free Market Institute, headquartered in Bishkek, which provided assistance to their Tajik neighbors after the Fall Free Market School in Issyk Kul. I lectured at the school, and gave a series of lectures in Tajikistan, in Dushanbe and Khudjand, in February of last year.)

Anyone who’d like to provide financial support for these brave people is welcome to contact me.

NOTE: If you click on the link for the Central Asian Free Market Institute, you can get their very impressive 2009 report, in either English or Russian. Please note that the group was formally started in April of last year and had a really brilliant first (partial) year. I’ve gotten several donations for CAFMI already today, so if you’re interested, you won’t be alone. (I’ll bundle them and send them, with no “fee” or “charge” for wiring the money. A dollar donated to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation for CAFMI will be a dollar in their account or spent on projects, equipment, and the like that they designate.) This is a very impressive group of young libertarians and they’re doing a lot to promote freedom in a region that has known very little of it.

My old friend Danny Shapiro on Book TV on his very good book of the same name: “Is the Welfare State Justified?”

The book is a very serious and — a nice surprise! — readable treatment of the subject. I recommend it highly. Is the Welfare State Justifed?, by Daniel Shapriro (Note: People looking for angry denunciations of statism will not find it in this book; it is a sober comparison of the various foundational reasons for supporting policies with the empirical evidence.)

Moscow Tea Parties! – Protesting the Kremlin’s New Trade Law

From Investor’s Business Daily, “How Data On Income Distribution Are Misunderstood And Misapplied“

I’ve finished a careful reading of James C. Scott’s really fascinating, deeply insightful (and occasionally oddly not-very-insightful) book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. I’ll be reviewing it shortly.

I also read a few other books lately, including Malcolm Gladwell’s really fun Outliers: The Story of Success. His writing is so elegant and enjoyable that you have to catch yourself and not be swept away into his conclusions just because of the sheer pleasure of the reading. (I was not convinced of several of his points, notably the discussion of the relationship between intelligence, achievement, and “threshold effects,” especially on pp. 77-90. He might be right, but I was not convinced. The other material on the role of sheer luck in having access to opportunities, however, was quite persuasive.) Another very pleasurable book on luck that I’ve been reading in little bits of down-time standing in lines and the like (but haven’t finished yet) is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.*

Besides some other works I’m working through, I’m hoping to get through Ian Carter’s A Measure of Freedom, which should be helpful for a project on the development of metrics of liberty.

*I admit that I bought the Gladwell and Taleb books from a street cart in Shanghai. I rather suspect that they are pirated editions, which I find dodgy, so I considered (for a few seconds) sending small payments to the authors and to their publishers, but decided instead that I’d buy clearly non-pirated editions in the US.