Consider where we’ve gotten. Once upon a time a great change occurred, unique for a while to Europe, especially after 1600 in the lands around the North Sea, and most especially in Holland and then in Britain. The change had been foreshadowed in the Hansa towns such as Lübeck and Bergen and Dantzig, and in (more…)

A voluntary association disaster relief update, Lynne Kiesling, June 8, 2011 in Knowledge Problem: Commentary on Economics, Information and Human Action. Excerpt: This public good/free riding model has several flaws that make the model incapable of explaining real-world private action and voluntary association that happens in the wake of a natural disaster. The first and (more…)

From “Bourgeois Era” by Diane C. in The Enlightened Economist, 06 Jun 2011.

It is merely a materialist-economistic prejudice to insist that such a rhetorical change from aristocratic-religious values to bourgeois values must have had economic or biological roots. John Mueller argues that war, like slavery or the subordination of women, has bec The Average Joe Income Package-video Cou ome slowly less respectable in the past few centuries (more…)

- Kinsella’s entry and the interviews (posted 16 June 2011). – Deirdre’s recently updated books page.

For details, see colloquium webpage.

“Success in a Commercial Society is a Victimless Crime,” Steve Kates, Catallaxy Files, 20 June 2011.

It had never happened before. In 1798 Robert Malthus (1766-1834), an Anglican clergyman irritated by the extravagant and anti-clerical claims of the French revolutionaries and their British friends that a new day had dawned, explained for the first time why the enrichment of the poor had not yet happened. He said in his great book (more…)