In Brief

• Jeffrey Sachs as underpants gnome.

• Fever-swamp milliners: tin foil lining optional extra.

• Milton Friedman on the dangers of Austrian business cycle theory.

• Marxism in China: not dead yet.

posted on 21 January 2006 by skirchner in Misc

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In Brief

• Saul Eslake’s five-year outlook.

• Some predictions for prediction markets.

• Barry Ritholtz updates the gold bugs’ favourite Rorschach tests.

• David Smith on the dovish UK Shadow Monetary Policy Committee.

• Former Treasury Secretary John Stone on the politicisation of the National Archives.

posted on 10 January 2006 by skirchner in Misc

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A Little Christmas ‘Bubble’

As usual, blogging will be light at best over the Christmas-New Year period. Thanks to IE readers, tipsters and advertisers for their support throughout the year. Hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it.

Having spent much the last 12 months rubbishing the notion of ‘bubbles’ in asset prices, I should draw readers’ attention to a bit of asset price inflation in which you are all implicated. Here is the Institutional Economics stock price at Blogshares since April this year:

It’s all due to fundamentals! Back in January for another year defending capitalist acts between consenting adults against fever-swamp Austrians, Roubini-Setser doomsday cultists, the AEI’s resident evils, and Economist leader writers.

posted on 23 December 2005 by skirchner in Misc

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Affiliate News - Laissez Faire Books 15% Off Everything Sale

Laissez-Faire Books has a 15% off everything sale through to 15 October. LFB claim to be 30% cheaper on average than Amazon and offer to match Amazon prices on available titles.

posted on 24 September 2005 by skirchner in Misc

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Tagged by Soon

It was only a matter of time before I would be tagged in relation to my reading habits. I have listed the five books that have been the most influential on my own thinking and that are likely to be of most interest to readers of this blog.

posted on 19 June 2005 by skirchner in Misc

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CIS Liberty & Society Seminar in Sydney

The Centre for Independent Studies is recruiting for its July Liberty & Society Seminar. As a graduate of both the IHS and CIS L&S programs, I can highly recommend the experience:

Liberty and Society, a unique programme for young people living in Australia, New Zealand and other surrounding countries. The goal of Liberty and Society is to create an intellectual environment where ideas and opinions about what makes a free society can be discussed, argued and learnt.

Liberty and Society is for young people who may be questioning the standard answers they are getting regarding social, political and economic issues. You may not see yourself as a fitting into the ‘left’ or ‘right’ mould. This is an opportunity to consider the classical liberal perspective. Classical liberalism promotes individual freedom, private property, limited government and free trade.

In other local seminar news, Bruce Caldwell, author of Hayek’s Challenge, will be speaking at the 18th HETSA Conference at Macquarie University, 5-8 July.

posted on 18 May 2005 by skirchner in Misc

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Wireless Broadband in Sydney

A temporary lapse into tech blogging. I recently decided to try wireless broadband with Unwired, mainly because I want to encourage the process of disintermediating traditional telcos from broadband distribution. I can’t say I have been overly impressed. The problem is not necessarily that the signal is weak, but highly variable, even though I am well within the notional coverage area and in a reasonably elevated position. Using Unwired’s own diagnostics, the signal strength bounces around anywhere from 1-6 out of 10 from the best location in the house. Drop outs are frequent enough to be annoying, and even though only very brief, they can be enough to require a manual refresh of the connection and generally slow things down to a crawl.

Unwired are not lying when they say that the best place for the modem is parallel to a window. I find the modem will only work reliably right up against the window. A few centimetres inside and signal strength deteriorates rapidly. The best place for the modem is actually outside. This is obviously a widespread problem, because I have found one Sydney company that already produces dedicated kits to house the Unwired modem externally.

Unwired offer only a very narrow 14 day window in which to trial the service. Unless you are getting a very reliable signal in the first few days, my suggestion would be to cancel the service immediately.

The university’s wireless broadband service is also flaky, from my very limited experience of it, but then again so is mobile reception (I had to get a CDMA mobile to get a signal at my UNSW office). Perhaps it is due to Sydney’s undulating topography. In any event, it’s back to ADSL for me.

posted on 15 April 2005 by skirchner in Misc

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Affiliate News - LFB 15% Off Everything Sale

Affiliate relationships are an important source of support for Institutional Economics, so we will occasionally highlight special offers from affiliate sites.

Laissez Faire Books is having a 15% off everything sale through to 30 April. Laissez Faire Books claim to be 30% cheaper than Amazon on average and offer to match Amazon prices on any item. Orders placed during March and April will also go in the draw to win free tickets to Freedom Fest in Las Vegas!

Note that LFB accept Paypal.

posted on 22 March 2005 by skirchner in Misc

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The New Institutional Economics

The new site is up and running. Please email if you experience any difficulties using the address shown on the Contact page, or in comments.

As mentioned previously, comments are only open to registered members (click on ‘Register’ at the top right), but once registered, you need never login in again and you can use your registration to obtain email notification of other comments (email notification of posts in general will unfortunately have to await the next iteration). New members will need to be approved. I will not generally approve unidentifiable persons, especially those with free email accounts. You are welcome to use a screen name to conceal your identity when commenting and can suppress your email address.

Posts from the old site have been turned into pdf files and posted below and in the archives. This was the quickest way to bring across the old content. There is still some content to be brought across.

Those who want to read the site via an aggregator can now do so with the various feeds provided at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. Note that it may take a while for some sites and search engines to index the new site configuration. Again, if you experience any problems, let me know.

As readers will be aware, there has been enormous growth in economics-related blogging in the last year or so. The days when you could count all the economics blogs on one hand have gone and keeping up with all these sites would be a major undertaking. Fortunately, Professor Bill Parke has taken on the task of aggregating economics blogs at his Economics Roundtable. Since Bill has done all the work, I have linked to his site, rather than attempting to maintain a comprehensive blog roll of related sites.

I have also put up my Technorati Link Cosmos, which is my rather cheap way of returning the favour if you have taken the trouble to link to me. Readers should go visit these sites, since they are obviously run by people of taste and discernment! I have linked to a few other sites of interest, but otherwise intend on maintaining a parsimonious set of links. My failure to link to your site is not necessarily a comment on its worthiness, just a reflection of the burden blog roll maintenance.

posted on 08 February 2005 by skirchner in Misc

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Changes at Institutional Economics

The web site is undergoing a few changes, which should come on-line in the next week or so. This also involves a host migration, so there may be some minor discontinuity in service. The new site will add a number of features readers have been asking for, including permalinks, RSS syndication and comments, among others.

Readers will be familiar with the problems associated with open comments facilities. As with all problems associated with the public sphere, the solution is to turn public space into private space (privatisation is the solution to everything!) Those wanting to post comments will need to register as members of the site via a double opt-in email procedure. While I appreciate that yet another registration is the last thing you all need, it has some advantages, including allowing you to set your own user preferences for things such as email notification of posts. Members are welcome to use screen names to preserve their anonymity when commenting and can hide their email address, but I will need to be convinced that you are legit before approving your registration. Since I know many of you personally (or at least know of you), this should hopefully not be a major problem. If your attempt at registration gets bounced, just send me a note introducing yourself. Rest assured your email address will not be made available to third parties.

I will make a further announcement when the new site is on-line.

posted on 03 February 2005 by skirchner in Misc

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