Today would have been Norman E. Borlaug’s 102nd birthday. He died in 2009 after an enormously productive life of helping others to help themselves. Known as the “father of the Green Revolution” for introducing high-yield wheat varieties to impoverished economies, his work was recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize among other awards for “the man who saved a billion lives”. I like the photo here because it evokes the academic scribbler side of his entrepreneurship but also…
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“ The Seismic Shift in Irish Values, and One Reason It Happened ” Huffington Post 5/24/2015 James Peron Historically, the more market-oriented the economy, the more the well-being of LGBT people increases. Politicized markets require political power, something sexual minorities rarely have, but depoliticized economies only need an entrepreneur willing to cater to a minority. Soviet-style, top-down economies would never allocate paper for books on gay issues, let alone for a thriving gay media. That required a bottom-up, depoliticized or less-politicized economy, where entrepreneurs only had…
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A delightful story , “Our night as an Uber driver — Using a $500,000 Rolls-Royce,” appears in the current issue of Car and Driver. One passage, in particular, reveals that the writer may have read Madmen. Either that, or the writer has arrived at sound public choice and political change analysis through reasoned examination: In Uber’s mind, the company is Doing Good. In the eyes of the cabbies, their lunch is being eaten by a bunch of amateurs not subject…
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Did you know that Oklahoma is ranked 28th in population but in 2011 had one of the nation’s largest unfunded pension liabilities? The Reason Foundation’s Pension Reform Newletter carries  an interview  with Oklahoma state legislator Randy McDaniel, who explains: OPERS is the state’s second largest retirement system. In 2010, the system had a $3.3 billion unfunded liability, … The big picture is the state had over $16 billion in total unfunded liabilities. In a reform process entering its fifth…
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As much as I and many other economists at teaching institutions take pride is having former undergraduate students go on to earn their PhD in economics and enjoy the “family” photos at professional conferences, the vast majority of students with which we interact will go on to pursue other professions.  This certainly suggests that we academic economists should not evaluate our success purely–or even mostly–as a function of students who go on to earn their…
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Here is James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) writing in “The Moral Dimension of Debt Financing,” Economic Inquiry, January 1985. Economists have almost totally neglected moral or ethical elements of the behavior that has generated the observed modern regime of continuing and accelerating government budget deficits. To the extent that moral principles affect choice constraints, such neglect is inexcusable. It is incumbent on us, as economic analysts, to understand how morals impinge upon choice, and especially how…
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The reviewer for Publishers Weekly did not like Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers. Annoyed evidently with the fact of economics — it’s very existence — the (anonymous) reviewer twice associates Madmen with “the dismal science,” hoping the reader shares every negative and objectionable connotation the reviewer seems to cast on that association. Madmen, we’re told, is dismal because it is a work of economics, because it is a difficult read, and because it recounts the life and works of “unheralded”…
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As I do each April, this past week I attended the meetings of the Association of Private Enterprise Education. You can find my brief overview here , where I mention that the Association recognized me with this year’s Distinguished Scholar Award . It’s customary for the recipient to say a few words. My “acceptance” remarks were a brief reflection on APEE’s motto, “Work Hard, Play Hard” (in that order), and afterward several people had supportive things to say and…
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The Association of Private Enterprise Education is alive and well. This year’s conference was held earlier this week at The Wynn Las Vegas and was attended by about 530 scholars, practitioners, and students from 12 countries. It was the largest attendance in the Associations 39-year history. To put that in perspective, my notes say that the 2001 meeting in Washington, DC, was attended by 142, and the 2000 meeting at Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas drew attendance of 206. So APEE…
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“Intellectuals” are middlemen of ideas. They influence the world views of large numbers of people, both in designed and spontaneous ways. In general, we can say that people’s worldviews affect their positions about the proper role and scope of government. So when people’s worldviews change, this in turn can be an impetus to political change. Video as a medium of communication, be it film or television or YouTube or other, is a powerful tool for the…
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