Author Archives: Rafe

Session 9 The Path to Development A Peter Bauer Memorial Lecture by William Easterly. No text in hand, refer to his previous publications such as this review and his Blog. How foreign aid was invented by accident, and misreading the Marshall … Continue reading →

Plenary session 7, New Developments in Economics. The Mont Pelerin Society Conference program had papers on happiness in society by Jason Potts, the economist as guru by Geoffrey Brennan and behavioural economics, law, liberty and the quest for the Third Way by … Continue reading →

C Wright Mills on Intellectual Craftsmanship.  Mills wrote an important critique of the prevailing fashions in sociology during the 1960s, notably “grand theory” which was represented by Talcott Parsons in his post-1937 “general systems theory”,  and “abstracted empiricism” which piled … Continue reading →

Thanks to the Questia on-line library, where text can be easily cut and pasted (unlike Google books) some sections of The Poverty can be found here. The sections are on the practical aims of the critique of historicism, the technological or … Continue reading →

This is the last book that Mises wrote. It has been released by the Mises Institute in a new edition and it comes with a very big pitch. There are two senses in which this book is indeed ultimate: it deals … Continue reading →

The theme of this conference is “Getting over the advantage line”. This is for people who can’t get to the live Mont Pelerin Society program. Most of the themes of the live program are duplicated, and there are some additional strands.  The … Continue reading →

Next week the Mont Pelerin Society meets in Sydney (Australia). An all-star cast of speakers will address a range of topics under the general theme of The 21st Century Liberal Enlightenment. The speakers include some locals, among them Sinclair Davidson (academic … Continue reading →

Heads up on a new blog created by Troy Camplin, a frequent contributor to the site of the Austrian economists, now Coordination Problem. This close to my interests as you saw from the post on the wider agenda of classical … Continue reading →

This is a 1400 word summary and go here for a more extended account of the main arguments and evidence.  Summary of Terence Kealey, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, Macmillan, 1996. pb, 380 pages. The take-home message from this book is that … Continue reading →

Playing around with the idea of a Preface or maybe an addendum to attach to several essays in the Rathouse that were written years ago. The idea is to give a sense of the bigger picture of Popper’s ideas before … Continue reading →