On Monday, June 11, I was on Paul Molloy’s Freedom Works show to discuss tariffs.
I was also on the Alan Nathan Show to discuss tariffs. My segment starts at about three minutes in.
On Tuesday, June 12, I was on the David Webb show on Sirius/XM, with Kerry Picket guest-hosting. I couldn’t find audio, but maybe they’ll put it up here.
The short answer: no. But the new and upcoming tariffs certainly don’t help matters, here or abroad. I tackle that question in a piece for Inside Sources:
The president’s threats must be fought, but the good news is America’s fundamental institutions will withstand Trumpian bluster. For one thing, our economy remains a powerhouse. America’s $19 trillion economy already withstands an annual $1.9 trillion in annual regulatory costs from Washington. On top of that, Trump’s tariffs will cost “only” a few billion dollars. In short, the economy is dragging along a big, deadweight burden, but it can still get the job done…
Even in trade, where the Trump administration poses the greatest threat to free enterprise, America has been liberalizing for more than 75 years. The Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of 1930 raised America’s average tariff to more than 60 percent and worsened the Great Depression. But today tariffs are closer to 5 percent (source: Douglas Irwin, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy,” p. 8), and Trump’s targeted tariffs likely won’t raise that figure more than a decimal point. Trump is reversing a long history of openness, but so far it’s small potatoes. If economists, Congress, and the World Trade Organization all do their jobs, it will stay that way.
In the meantime, defenders of the classical liberal enlightenment traditions of international openness and free trade will be very busy standing up to the administration’s latest populist outburst. Read the whole thing here.
For more CEI tariff coverage, see here by Iain Murray and here by me. For more on Trump’s threat to the values that made America great, see Steven Pinker’s book “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”
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Posted in Economics, Media Appearances, Publications, Trade
Trade and regulation have both been hot issues lately. Since those are two of the main issues on my beat, I’ve been pretty busy lately:
[00:25:07] To put it another way, it cost about $400,000 per job saved in the steel industry. OK, and the outcome this time doesn’t look much better. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the levies could save as many as 33,000 jobs in the steel and aluminum industries, this comes at a great cost. Downstream industries that use steel and aluminum such as automobiles, construction (inaudible) will face higher costs, passed on to consumers with higher prices, could cost those other industries 179,000 jobs.
I’ll post more as they come.
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Posted in Economics, Media Appearances, regulation, Trade
A new 25 percent steel tariff and a 10 percent aluminum tariff have come into effect. The levies are aimed at our allies, such as Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. They are a bad idea for three reasons:
Tariffs hurt more than they help. While the levies could save as many as 33,000 jobs in the steel and aluminum industries, this comes at a great cost. Downstream industries that use steel and aluminum, such as automobiles, construction, and food and beverage production, will face higher costs. These will be passed on to consumers with higher prices, and could cost those other industries an estimated 179,000 jobs. In other words, the Trump administration is willing to shed five jobs to save one job.
Tariffs invite retaliation. Mexico has already announced it will introduce retaliatory tariffs. Affected goods range from pork bellies to cheese and steel. Europe is placing levies on iconic products such as Kentucky bourbon (Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state), blue jeans (Levi’s is from San Francisco, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s hometown), and motorcycles (Harley-Davidson is from Wisconsin, Speaker Paul Ryan’s home state). Canada announced intentions to impose $12.8 billion in retaliatory tariffs against U.S. goods.
The Trump administration’s unpredictability is creating economic uncertainty. And uncertainty has a chilling effect on investment. While the economy is doing well right now, this uncertainty could hurt down the road. After all, there’s no sense making a long-term investment if there is a very real possibility the administration might pass some policy out of the blue that kills your market. It is hardly surprising that the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 200 points when the new tariffs were announced, despite steel stocks going up.
Economists are virtually united as a profession against the new tariffs. A March 2018 University of Chicago Booth School survey of professional economists found not a single respondent agreeing with the statement “Imposing new US tariffs on steel and aluminum will improve Americans’ welfare.” When the National Taxpayers Union circulated a letter opposing the Trump administration’s protectionist turn, more than 1,100 economists signed on (I am one of them).
One of the Trump tariffs’ few defenders is Peter Navarro, one of the president’s economic advisers. Even in the White House, Navarro cuts a lonely figure, with other presidential advisors such as Larry Kudlow openly preferring more open trade policies. Still, if Navarro has only one ally, he has the one who counts: President Trump.
Navarro defended the new steel and aluminum tariffs in a May 31 USA Today piece. Both what he said and what he didn’t say are revealing.
By way of background, Henry Hazlitt’s famous Economics in One Lesson is a simple one, and very relevant to this discussion: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” (p. 17)
If you want the even shorter version: look at how a policy affects all people, not just some; and look at both short-term and long-term effects. Not one or the other; both. Hazlitt’s Lesson is a must-read for any aspiring economist. It is regularly assigned in college courses, and has remained continuously in print since 1946. The paperback edition published in 1988 boasts of having sold a million copies—and that was thirty years ago. Despite Hazlitt’s ubiquity, Navarro, who was a college economics professor before taking his current job, makes it clear he has either never read, or never understood Hazlitt’s basic lesson.
Navarro opens by praising his boss, then segues to a story about a new aluminum mill opening up in Ashland, Kentucky. He also gives examples of several other plants that will be opening in the near future.
In fact, the groundbreaking ceremony at the Ashland mill will be held today. While this is great timing for an op-ed newshook or a press conference, if the groundbreaking is only happening now, that means that the planning process for opening this mill began long before the new aluminum tariff was proposed, and likely before the Trump administration itself. Infrastructure and environmental impact reviews, among other regulatory hurdles, often take years to complete. So Navarro’s lead anecdote does not actually help his case.
The larger problem is that this anecdote and the others Navarro shares look only at how the tariffs affect some people, and not all people; he forgets his Hazlitt. There is a reason Navarro argues by anecdote, and not with data: the data say that tariffs are bad policy. This particular round of tariffs will cost roughly five jobs for each one saved or created. To benefit 33,000 steel and aluminum jobs, Navarro must be willing to destroy 179,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, and charge higher prices to more than 300 million consumers, and reduce by billions of dollars the amount of capital available to other economic sectors. This is all because he forgets to look beyond those immediate short-run benefits to a favored few. The wider costs to the rest of the economy in the long run are less visible than the freshly cut ribbon in Ashland, Kentucky, but they are no less real.
Navarro also ignores consumers. And remember, the whole point of economic production is to create things consumers want. Producers exist for consumers’ sake, not vice versa. He does mention consumers once in his piece: “Critics at the time warned the move would hurt consumers, but the tariffs have been a boon to the U.S. worker.” By the time Navarro is done with the economy, it may well have just one worker left with a job, who then literally would be “the U.S. worker.”
Grammatical gripes aside, notice that Navarro deliberately chooses the word “worker” and not “consumer” when he says who gets the boon. He then goes on to not describe how tariffs help consumers. He can’t, because they don’t. So he changes the subject. But Navarro’s elision doesn’t change the fact that higher steel prices mean cars will be more expensive, construction costs will be higher, and so will rents for stores and apartments.
Higher aluminum prices will likely add about a penny to the cost of a twelve-ounce aluminum can. Paying an extra quarter or so for a 24-pack of Diet Coke doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up on a family’s grocery bill, especially in the long run that Navarro ignores.
The craft beer industry is scared that its comparatively expensive products will become still more expensive compared to its larger competitors, costing the industry jobs, and depriving consumers of choices they might otherwise enjoy. For smaller producers who operate on thin margins, Trump’s tariffs are an existential threat. Producers are already looking at alternative packaging materials such as plastic and glass bottles, which would hurt the very aluminum industry the administration intends to help. Navarro does not mention these downstream industries harmed by the tariffs.
One of the strongest arguments at Navarro’s disposal is the national security argument. For example, the Defense Department requires an enormous amount of steel for its aircraft carriers, fighter jets, military bases, and more. That’s why the U.S. steel industry needs to be healthy and vibrant—if, during a war, steel imports get cut off, domestic production could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Fortunately, some simple math defuses this bomb, assuming it wasn’t a dud in the first place.
Imports currently account for roughly 30 percent of steel used in the United States. That means domestic production is roughly 70 percent. The military needs roughly 3 percent, or less than a twentieth of domestic production alone. In fact, without the new tariffs, domestic steel production is already above its 40-year average, and U.S. manufacturing output as a whole is near a record high. So the national security implications of the new tariffs are approximately zero. They can safely be called security-unrelated tariffs.
It is possible that Navarro knows better. In a May 31 conference call about the decision to enact the tariffs, one caller asked Navarro if he was open to retrospective review of the tariffs. In other words, once the tariff has been in place for a few years and there is real-world data on how it is working, would Navarro be open to analyzing what the effects have been, and whether they were good or bad on net? He refused to answer.
If Navarro was truly confident that steel and aluminum tariffs would benefit the economy, he’d be eager to put them to the test. Since his own profession is almost unanimously against him, surely he would welcome the chance to rub it in his opponents’ faces. But he isn’t, and that says a lot.
I’m not sure which possibility says worse of Navarro: if he genuinely believes what he says, or if he doesn’t. Either way, while a small constituency will benefit in the short term from the new tariffs, the larger American economy will suffer, as will our allies. And as Hazlitt reminds us, this will be true in both the short run and the long run. Someone really should send Navarro a copy of Hazlitt. The White House’s address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20500, c/o Peter Navarro.
For more in-depth looks into Navarro’s mistaken trade ideology, see here by me and here by Adam Smith. An Investor’s Business Daily editorial quotes me on the new tariffs here. And CEI’s press release on the new tariffs is here.
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Posted in Economics, Trade, Uncategorized
Even trade economists are not immune to making the occasional awful pun.
“Poland’s exports of golf carts to the United States were challenged on anti-dumping grounds… the Poles did not even play golf, so there were no domestic prices to work with: the Poles had put the cart before the course.”
-Jagdish Bhagwati, Protectionism (1988), p.51.
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Posted in Books, Economics, General Foolishness, Trade, Uncategorized
Following in George W. Bush’s footsteps, President Trump increased tariffs on foreign-made steel and aluminum by 25 percent in March. But he exempted U.S. allies such as Canada and the EU from the additional levies until May 1. While exemption extensions are possible, they are far from certain.
Economists estimate the tariffs could save roughly 33,500 jobs in the steel and aluminum industries. But consumers tend not to buy ingots of steel at the grocery store; steel and aluminum are useful mainly as inputs for other industries. From automobiles to canned foods to construction, higher steel and aluminum prices mean higher prices for goods throughout the economy, and the costs will ultimately fall on consumers. At the same time, sheltering domestic producers from competition can lower product quality.
All in all, the tariff increases are expected to cost five jobs for each one saved according to a Trade Partnership study. The net loss is expected to be as much as 146,000 jobs. Politically, this is not a winning strategy in an election year. More importantly, that’s a lot of families that will be asking tough questions about how to pay the rent and put food on the table, through no fault of their own.
Not only are our trading partners not lowering their trade barriers against U.S. goods, they are raising them. The EU in particular is targeting bourbon and blue jeans, two staples of Americana. It is obvious that the motivation for these retaliatory tariffs is political and not economic. Kentucky, home state of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, produces 95 percent of the country’s bourbon. And Levi Strauss, the iconic blue jean company, was founded in San Francisco, home city of House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.
Factoring in these and other potential tariff increases, and the administration’s blustery posture could end up costing American workers a lot more than 146,000 jobs.
If the intention of raising our own tariffs is to get our trading partners to lower theirs, then someone in the administration has made a huge negotiating error. One of the wisest quotes on trade is attributed to Cambridge economist Joan Robinson: “Even if your trading partner dumps rocks into his harbor to obstruct arriving cargo ships, you do not make yourself better off by dumping rocks into your own harbor.”
As I noted recently, U.S. steel and aluminum production are both over their 40-year running averages. The industry is healthy, and maintaining an open, competitive global market is necessary to keep it that way. Rather than throw still more rocks into U.S. harbors, the administration’s top priority on trade should be dredging them out. For America to truly be a leader in the world economy, it must lead by example.
Trump economic adviser and Death by China author Peter Navarro’s recent column in The Wall Street Journal, “China’s Faux Comparative Advantage,” is a doozy. This is not a compliment; it is dangerous that someone so uninformed about basic economics has the president’s ear. Navarro’s mercantilism is the economic equivalent of Ptolemaic astronomy, and should be treated as such—a historical curiosity and an obstacle to human progress. Navarro’s thinking on trade suffers from three big-picture errors. This post will look at those, then see how they apply to his column. The result is not pretty.
The first big picture flaw is that mercantilism. It is an old economic doctrine, rooted in nationalism and what is euphemistically called anti-foreign bias. Mercantilist policies usually take the forms of trade barriers against foreign businesses, special favors for domestic businesses, and sometimes currency manipulation. They aim to maximize exports while minimizing imports from abroad. The result is that people have more money in their pockets from selling all those exports.
The tradeoff is that there is less stuff people can buy with that extra money, since imports are restricted and more goods and services are going overseas. Mercantilist policies not only reduce consumer choice and standard of living, but having more currency without more wealth to match it causes inflation and distorts the price system.
Adam Smith, as far back as 1776, wrote of “those vulgar prejudices which have been introduced by the mercantile system,” (pp. 597-98 of the Modern Library edition of “The Wealth of Nations”) and the “mean and malignant expedients of the mercantile system,” (p. 660), while noting that “in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer” (p. 715). Note that the word “consumer” does not appear in Navarro’s column.
Second, Navarro badly misunderstands the theory of comparative advantage. This has been a standard piece of the economist’s toolkit ever since David Ricardo published “Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,” 201 years ago. Yes, Navarro is that far behind the curve. Fortunately, Ricardo spells it all out in a mere nine pages (pp. 133-41 of the Liberty Fund edition, available for free here), using an easy-to-understand example of England and Portugal trading cloth and wine. And if that’s too much, George Mason University’s Don Boudreaux explains comparative advantage even more concisely here. The lesson is simple: do what you’re good at, and don’t do what you’re bad at. That way everyone can make more wealth using the same amount of resources.
Third, Navarro thinks in aggregates, not individuals, joining the Keynesian and Harvard-MIT traditions in error. Countries don’t trade with each other, people do. “China” and “America” do not trade with each other; people who live in China and people who live in America do.
Remember this every time Navarro’s boss tweets something like “We are on the losing side of almost all trade deals. Our friends and enemies have taken advantage of the U.S. for many years. Our Steel and Aluminum industries are dead.” As Ludwig von Mises points out on p. 44 of “Human Action,“ “It is always single individuals who say We”. Also, domestic steel production is above its 40-year running average, according to the St. Louis Fed. Ditto aluminum.
Individuals would not trade with each other unless both parties expect to be better off. Otherwise they’d never make a deal in the first place. And in a world of more than two countries, those aggregate figures between any two countries almost never perfectly balance out in a given year. Americans don’t just trade with Chinese, they also trade with Canadians, Germans, Brazilians, Kenyans, and more. And those trades make a lot of sense for the people involved in the deals, even as they confuse and enrage aggregate-thinkers such as Navarro.
Now to go through Navarro’s column point by point.
“In large part because of China’s dominance in manufacturing, the U.S. last year ran a bilateral trade deficit in goods of $375 billion, or more than $1 billion a day.”Two things to pick apart here. One, China’s manufacturing output is roughly $5 trillion per year. The U.S., despite having roughly a quarter of China’s population, generated more than $6 trillion of manufacturing output last year, just shy of 2014’s all-time record. Moreover, China has to devote nearly half its GDP just to manufacturing to reach that figure, while the U.S. economy is so diversified that its manufacturing sector is less than a quarter of its GDP, even as it exceeds China’s by a trillion dollars in absolute terms.
So even with the Chinese government’s own mercantilist policies helping to increase exports, they do not dominate U.S. manufacturers. Also, much of what goes on in Chinese factories is simple assembly of components designed and manufactured elsewhere—my tablet, for example, says on the back, “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China”. Are such products really Chinese-made if the design and components all come from elsewhere? That is a difficult question to answer.
The second flaw in Navarro’s single sentence—an impressive achievement—is the trade deficit fallacy. For example, I run a massive trade deficit with my local grocery store. I purchase thousands of dollars of groceries from them every year, but I don’t remember them ever buying a single thing from me. And yet, we’re both better off. I get groceries, and my grocer gets money to stay in business and make a profit. If this wasn’t a win-win relationship, we would not consent to trade with each other. My trade deficit with them has no bearing on human well-being; it is an accounting artifact. Writ large, the same reasoning applies to U.S.-China trade. If it didn’t, there would be no trading.
“Contrary to the textbook model, whereby currency adjustments help rebalance trade, the U.S. trade deficit with China has been persistent—more than $4 trillion cumulatively since 2002—and growing.” Navarro can use the word textbook as much as he wants—and he uses it four times in the span of 700 words—but it doesn’t mean what he says is true.
If anything, the Chinese government’s currency adjustments have had the opposite effect. An artificially cheap yuan means that not only do Chinese companies send more of their products overseas where Chinese consumers can’t use them, but imports become artificially expensive, even without additional tariffs. The result of these real-world currency adjustments is less consumer choice and higher prices for Chinese consumers. America’s government should not compound the Chinese government’s mistakes with its own. I don’t know what textbooks Navarro has been reading, but none that I’ve come across say anything remotely like what he alleges.
“To protect its market, China erects high tariff barriers—e.g., its auto tariff is 10 times that of the U.S. China has high nontariff barriers, too, including intrusive licensing requirements and foreign-ownership restrictions that keep the playing field tilted in favor of Chinese companies.” Navarro rightly wants the Chinese government to lower its trade barriers and open its markets. Current policies obviously hurt the Chinese people, though they seem of little or no concern to Navarro; he neglects to mention them in his article. China’s mercantilism also puts U.S. producers at an artificial disadvantage in one of the world’s biggest markets, which does concern him.
“China’s faux comparative advantage is the result of its state-directed investments, nonmarket economy, and disregard for the rule of law.” These three things are precisely the opposite of advantages for Chinese consumers and producers. State-directed investments prioritize politics over people, and usually have a lower rate of return to boot. China’s recent growth only began post-Mao, when its near-total state slowly began to tolerate some form of a market economy.
And until a reliable rule of law does arrive in China, legal uncertainty will limit what its wealth creating sector can achieve. The Chinese people still suffer from what economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call “extractive institutions.” Until the Chinese government becomes less predatory, Western living standards will elude hundreds of millions of deserving people. Time will tell which direction the Chinese government chooses, but all three of Navarro’s assertions here are wrong.
“Because high-technology acquisitions often generate spillover benefits for the Chinese military, its SWFs [Sovereign Wealth Funds, basically government-run investment portfolios] are often willing to pay distortive prices, far above what the free market would dictate.” The Chinese government is no saint when it comes to foreign policy, or how it runs its state-owned enterprises. But this is no reason for Navarro to get a case of the vapors—or to offer support for starting a trade war.
Regarding actual war, since Navarro seems to think is part of the Chinese government’s economic aims, not only does the U.S. have a larger, better-equipped military than China, it outspends the next eight largest militaries combined. Navarro’s national security arguments might appeal to some conservatives—and defense contractors. But mercantilism’s economic harms mean fewer resources are available for defense than would otherwise be the case. And as a foreign policy gesture roughly equivalent to a middle finger, mercantilism raises the risk of a war happening in the first place.
Many businesses love mercantilist policies. Trade barriers hobble foreign competitors, while subsidies, sweetheart financial deals, and other domestic favors let executives sit back in their chairs instead of rolling up their sleeves and making the best possible products for consumers at the lowest possible price. This is why nearly all economists agree that mercantilism hurts people.
“It is in the name of fair, reciprocal and ultimately free and prosperous trade that President Trump is standing up to China’s intellectual-property theft and other unfair trade practices.” Not by repeating the Chinese government’s mistakes, he’s not. Navarro and Trump’s belligerent, zero-sum approach to trade hurts both the U.S. and China. Rather than copying China’s failed policies, the U.S. government should lift its trade restrictions and encourage other governments to do the same. Sadly, this does not seem to be the current path, and Navarro is partly to blame.
He should take the same advice that Brett Favre once gave to a referee: take two weeks off, then quit.
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Posted in Economics, International, Trade
Modernity is the most beautiful process in the world. As Deirdre McCloskey explains in great detail, since 1800 or so life expectancy has doubled, infant mortality is down more than 90 percent, incomes are up at least 16-fold, transportation is anywhere from ten-fold to a hundred-fold faster, we can instantly communicate with loved ones even if they’re thousands of miles away, and virtually the entirety of human knowledge and culture are available to nearly everyone for free or close to it, thanks to the Internet.
We truly do live in amazing times. And according to Michael Munger, who directs Duke University’s multidisciplinary PPE program (it stands for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), we are on the cusp of a revolution that could accelerate the ongoing betterment of humankind. He makes his case in the new book Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy.
If the first major revolution in human history was the Agricultural Revolution and the second was the Industrial Revolution, Munger’s new book argues that a third, technology-based revolution is just getting underway. Imagine an economy that has an Uber for nearly everything, and renting and sharing are more common than ownership.
Munger uses the example of a power drill. Most people have a bunch of tools sitting in their garage or basement, sitting idle almost all the time and doing little more than taking up space. The average drill, for example, might have a cumulative lifetime use of a half hour, even if it’s owned for decades. This drill, along with unused cars, housing, and more, is idle capital that people could be making use of. So what’s stopping them?
Transaction costs are. A student of the late Nobel economist Douglass North, Munger observes about his old teacher that “for Doug North, it did not really matter what the question was. The answer always starts with ‘transaction costs.’” Transaction costs are the costs of doing business. In addition to the price of a good, the consumer pays, with time if not money, the cost of finding a good in the first place, waiting in line for it, verifying its quality, shopping around for a good price, and so on. According to Munger (and Doug North and Ronald Coase, no doubt, if they were still with us) transaction costs are key to understanding the third economic revolution now underway.
Going back to the drill example, Munger says, “I don’t need a drill. What I need is a hole in this wall, right here.” If you own the drill, problem solved. Just fetch it from the closet when you need it. But what about the other 99 percent of the time when the drill does nothing but collect dust? Drill-less people who need holes in their walls could be using it, and you could profit from it. Everyone would benefit.
So why don’t these win-win arrangements happen more often? Because the transaction costs are too high. The new economy being born doesn’t depend so much on making stuff as it does on lowering transaction costs so win-win deals can happen more often and more easily.
The drill owner needs to solve three problems—triangulation, transaction, and trust. Triangulation is finding a renter in the first place, and figuring out how to get her the drill. Transaction is making sure money changes hands. And trust is being confident that the other person will make good on their end of the deal. Both owner and renter have to solve all three of these transaction cost problems, or else they will never get together in the place.
Companies like Uber and Airbnb work by lowering transaction costs. If I need a ride, Uber’s app can connect me with a driver in seconds. That solves the triangulation problem, especially compared to waiting for a cab in the rain during rush hour. Uber also solves the problem of the transaction itself. It has both the rider and drivers’ credit card info, making payment so easy neither rider nor driver even need to carry a wallet. And the trust problem is solved by a ratings system that incentivizes both rider and driver to treat each other honestly and well.
In the years to come this type of business model will expand, lowering transaction costs across the economy, opening new opportunities people haven’t even thought of yet, and making life cheaper and more convenient for nearly everyone. It will also greatly reduce waste and idle capital. People won’t need as much stuff, and the stuff there is will be used much more intensively and efficiently.
It is too early to see all the positive and negative consequences this third revolution will have, but change is inevitable. Modernity is a never-ending process; people are always looking for ways to make things better. The transaction cost revolution is the next step, and it is already changing lives. With Munger’s help and a little Econ 101 knowledge, that change will be much easier to navigate.
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Posted in Books, Economics, Innovation
From p. 5 of Frank Knight’s 1951 book The Economic Organization:
Civilization should look forward to a day when the material product of industrial activity shall become rather its by-product, and its primary significance shall be that of a sphere for creative self-expression and the development of a higher type of individual and of human fellowship. It ought to be the first aim of economic policy to reduce the importance of economic policy in life as a whole.
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Posted in Books, Economics, Uncategorized
“No university will ever have at one time four economists of the quality of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Irving Fisher, and Alfred Marshall, to say nothing of a dozen of their best colleagues—but they can all reside in one’s library. Their subtle minds are ever ready to instruct and tease and baffle.”
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Posted in Books, Economics, Great Thinkers, Uncategorized
Inertia Wins! 