As I sat down to read Thomas Piketty’s bestselling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I must admit I was not well disposed toward the book. Here is a voluminous 700-page tome written by a Frenchman that has garnered scathing reviews from the conservative press and glowing praise from liberal economists. What can you expect … Read more
While the science of economics basically deals with material matters, the modern mistake is to reduce it only to these matters through formulas and statistics. Actually, economic thought must deal with all aspects of material resources and goods and especially the underlying ideas that regulate their acquisition, consumption, supply and distribution. Is Technology Ruining Your … Read more
Though often cited as inventing the concept of planned obsolescence, American industrial designer Brooks Stevens actually only popularized the term. The expression is generally understood to mean the practice of artificially shortening product lifecycle with the intention of getting people to buy new replacement products sooner. A product with a limited useful life soon becomes … Read more
The need for private property is hardly a mystery. From time immemorial, property has existed and can be justified by simple common sense. Aristotle gives four such reasons that can be applied to both his times and our own. We quote from economic historian Odd Langholm who summarizes these four reasons: First, if property is … Read more
Jesuit Fr. Bernard Dempsey warns against the use of the word “capitalism” in economic debate. The principal reason is that there is really no such thing as capitalism. He claims the word cannot be defined scientifically and really only exists in a Marxist dream world. F.A. Hayak declared that the word is largely the “creation … Read more
The ability of huge companies to secure massive government contracts through lobbying and cronyism is not a development of the free market but a distortion of it. It is a kind of corporate welfare that ends up redistributing wealth not creating it. Scholar Samuel Gregg explains that crony deals redistribute “risk in a given society … Read more
Author Douglas Rushkoff suggests that the idea that time is money came from different perceptions of looking at and measuring time. He makes the distinction between calendar-driven and machine-driven civilizations. He writes: “Thanks to the clock tower, the rhythms of daily life were now dictated by a machine. Over time, people conformed to ever more … Read more
I have wondered how student groups would react to Return to Order. After all, the socio-economic concepts in the book are very conservative and traditional. And the modern myth is that students are neither conservative nor traditional. It was hard to know what to expect. Such concerns were in mind at the first student-only meeting/signing … Read more
The present day economic crisis is nothing new. In fact, since the dawn of modern economy in the late eighteenth century, crisis is a permanent fixture. As the book, Return to Order states, this is in part due to the frenetic intemperance found in sectors of modern economy that are constantly throwing things out of … Read more
Modern economics tends to reduce economic activity to formulae and equations. This is not the true subject matter of economics. Economic activities deal with human actions that are not predicable and thus cannot be reduced to the equations of an exact science. As economic historian Odd Langholm states: “The subject matter of economics is properly … Read more
