Vaclav Klaus -- the great Czech president and free-market reformer -- will keynote at the 2012 Heartland Climate Change Conference in Chicago. If you share Klaus's views about the threat of environmentalism as a veiled form of central planning, you should attend this conference. It's a fascinating event with great speakers and lots of food for thought. The Heartland conference is also the culmination of powerful scholarship and a decade's worth of sane thinking that has served to counter a conserted power grab by the radical environmental left.
Interestingly, the conference takes place just after one of the world's leading climate alarmists, James Lovelock, admits to being an "alarmist"...
Are we going to run out of food, resources and green space? Does trade make one party worse off? Is inequality the root of the world's problems? Is the world going to overheat and cause catastrophe?
Matt Ridley answers these questions and more in the best writing on the relationship between resources, markets and well-being since Julian Simon. What's superb about Ridley's work is that he not only slays the doommongers with flair, but he explains the beautiful processes set in motion by people serving each other creatively.
When the original 1980 Free To Choose was aired, inflation was starting to make life tough in the U.S. We were in the waning days of the Carter era. And the economy wasn't looking so good. It's interesting that Friedman was able to augur a long era of relatively low inflation in the U.S.
That said, a lot of people are under the impression that Friedman was perfectly happy with the Federal Reserve System we have today. But it's better to say that Milton was a pragmatist on such matters. As with many other issues, Friedman understood that well entrenched systems don't just get trashed with a penstroke. One might say Friedman was an early, pragmatic inflation Hawk.
Rory Sutherland is always a delight to listen to. (Well, by my lights anyway. Value is subjective.) If you've ever been interested in the psychology of advertising -- and if you love liberty, perhaps you should be -- then you could do much worse than Sutherland, one of the top brains at Ogilvy.
What's always fascinating to me is that while a few of us Mises and Hayek lovers are busy trying to learn a few tricks from Madison Ave., Sutherland and Co. are determined to learn a thing or two from the Austrian economists (and the behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman). So what does this cross-pollination yield?
The international banking system is set up to benefit private interests, but when those interests fail, they socialize the losses in the form of bailouts -- bankrolled, as it were, by taxpayers. The Europeans are getting hosed right now. (Watch the Irish reporter in the video above.)
Because these private interests are so big and so powerful, they can always argue that their failure will cause economic catastrophe. But the socialization of losses will eventually cause catastrophe, too. In fact, we're now seeing Europe -- starting with Greece -- teeter at the precipice. So where does that leave us?
So the truth is out. And it really is inconvenient: The earth is probably warming a little bit -- and man probably doesn't have that much influence. If we were to take draconian measures to change our minscule contribution, we'd be shooting ourselves in the economic foot (especially when we can currently do absolutely nothing about the behavior of the sun).
Indeed. Have you seen Unstoppable Solar Cycles? Free To Choose Network produced this video to tell the other side of the story.
There are two major stories of the Great Recession: one is of capitalist excess carried out in an environment with too little regulation. This supposedly created a need to regulate and intervene in the economy, so we got stimulus spending and financial "reform." Indeed, this master narrative has been offered by behemoth and its supplicants on the left to justify more state intervention. The other narrative is that the Great Recession was caused by multiple factors -- all of which originated with government. It's time more people knew this latter story, because it has the benefit of being true.
If you're going wear the Nobel Laurels, you'd better know what you're talking about. I don't think Joseph Stiglitz does in this case. And you can only hide behind those fading laurels for so long.
Occasionally I break my 'five minute' rule for videos. Today I'm going to break it with Adrian Bejan's discussion of the constructal law at a TED Bucharest talk. Now, if you get through the talk I want to ask: How do you explain the gap between the few rich and many poor?
I came across this great little presentation on Google+ The speaker, Lanny Goodman, discusses the basic idea of self-management, which has become more than a trend due to some proven successes.
But editor, you may be wondering, why do you sometimes put up these videos on organization theory?
