Speaking at Cato on The Price of Everything

I hope you'll consider charging people to ask questions. A by-the-word tariff would disincent speechmaking. Or perhaps award the microphone by auction, so that market forces would cause only the highest-valued questions to emerge.

Does this mean there really IS such a thing as a free lunch? :)

T L Holaday,

You should read Hayek's The Fatal Conceit. I think the relevant quote is on p. 18.

Alas, my son took my copy of The Fatal Conceit. Google Books has not scanned it yet, and the Amazon preview is "Look Inside" not "Search Inside" so I cannot get to an arbitrary page. I lacked the foresight to scan page 18 myself and must suffer the consequences.

By the way, what's the current standing of The Fatal Conceit? Is it considered canon?

According to Cubitt, when Hayek received a copy of the published "The Fatal Conceit," he told her that Bartley's changes were so significant that he hardly recognized it. (source)

"For valid causal conclusions, we need an experiment; we need a control group and a

treated group. When all we have are non-experimental data, correlation is in the data but


causation is in the mind of the observer.





With only temporal orderings and no experimental evidence, we do what empirics do: we


rely on stories. To each temporal ordering we attach a predictive narrative or a causal


narrative or both. We draw firm causal conclusions from the temporal orderings when


the causal narrative is compelling and when there is no equally compelling predictive


narrative. This is literature and wisdom, not science. "

and then here is my favorite part:

"So there you have it: It’s faith-based decision making, which is much influenced by the rhetorical skills of the advocates."

That's a pretty harsh assessment of economics as a field of study. at least of macro. Nevertheless, I think Leamer has a point. It seems that the only people with valuable things to say about this crisis are finance experts

I have taken 4 macro courses so far, 3 as an undergraduate and 1 as a graduate student

One would expect that the graduate macro course would provide the most insights into what is going on, but, strangely enough, it was the first macro course that did (at least these days there is talk of fiscal stimulus, tax cuts, more spending...)

in graduate macro it was Solow and Ramsey, then RBC's then New Neoclassical Synthesis....

What knowledge I have of the current situation comes from online blogs and articles of mostly FINANCIAL economists. none of whose knowledge is to be found in standard macro textbooks

I hope you'll consider charging people to ask questions.

Why not just steal a page and refuse to answer questions.

Microeconomists are wrong about specific things, while macroeconomists are wrong about everything.

P. 18:

“Among the most important of these innate characteristics which helped to displace other instincts was a great capacity for learning from one’s fellows…”

…


“Moreover, the structures of the extended order are made up not only of individuals but also of many, often overlapping, sub-orders within which old instinctual responses, such as solidarity and altruism, continue to retain some importance by assisting voluntary collaboration, even thought they are incapable, by themselves, of creating a basis for the more extended order.”

I wish I could attend.

Started reading The Price of Everything once again and am enjoying the read after getting deeper into it. I still like [as of right now; I'm in chapter 11 -- the Weaver of Dreams] The Invisible Heart better. The dialogue between characters was better in the Invisible Heart and more believable. But probably the most striking contrast between the two books is the amount of humor that you inserted. For example: the subtle humor on page 156 when Ruth is doing her NY Times crossword puzzle and she, of all people, is stumped by one of the answers. You had quite a few placed into IH and in this book you, not so much. See, for me, that stuff is really funny because it is so well-placed and unexpected. Why the reduced amount in this book?