Showing posts with label Henry Hazlitt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry Hazlitt. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Economics - and Nobel Prizes - Aren't What They Used To Be

In 1946, with the world recovering from the devastation of a global war, Henry Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson. It's become a classic of Austrian Economics.

There's a free PDF HERE, that would be a good place for the 98% (probably more) of the population that has either never even heard of Henry Hazlitt nor read any of his material.

Since then, the study and application of economics has taken a path which mirrors that of the value of the US dollar. In other words, it's taken a fairly precipitous decline.

So it is that this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for economics is one Richard Thaler, a pop psychologist masquerading as an intelligent person. Thaler's prize-winning contribution to the field stems from a 2015 book he had published, called Misbehaving. Thaler's enormous discovery was that people don't always react to economic conditions in the ways Keynesian economists expect.

That revelation is so deep (sarcasm) that Thaler is being mocked in the comments section of an article in that bastion of higher learning, Yahoo! Finance.

It's not necessary to go into how insipid and uninspiring Thaler's work is. All that is necessary to understand the superficial nature of his "scholarship" is that he has been bestowed with the title of father of behavioral economics, whatever that's supposed to mean.

Now wonder central banks control the world. The rest of us are stupid.

At the Close, Monday, October 9, 2017:
Dow: 22,761.07, -12.60 (-0.06%)
NASDAQ: 6,579.73, -10.45 (-0.16%)
S&P 500: 2,544.73, -4.60 (-0.18%)
NYSE Composite: 12,293.95, -23.74 (-0.19%)