The Economic Point of View

By -
Israel Kirzner, in his book after which this post is titled, is noting that to think like an economist is to see things from a certain angle. This is an important point, and I use it in teaching all the time.

For instance, if topics like pornography or addictive drugs arise, I will tell my students, "From the economic point of view, we just look at what people want, and whether they are getting it. We don't examine whether it is good for them to want what they want. We can look at that in ethics class."

So I don't need to assert something silly like "Crack addicts know what is best for themselves" to teach students why the demand curve for crack slopes downward.

Comments

  1. Samson Corwell3:20 PM

    Do you paternalism is every justified in the case of drugs? I know that you are for keeping heroin illegal, but I do not know if your reason for this is that it is harmful to the users. (Also, how does it feel to now not totally be for the legalization of currently illegal substances considering you would have been for such when you were a libertarian?)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more