Archive for 25 August 2008
Hayek, Read, Mises in the Classroom
| Peter Klein |
Today the University of Missouri welcomes its largest freshman class in history, with 5,680 student expected at their desks for the first day of the semester. (Could the increased enrollment be the result of Mizzou football’s surprising 10-2 record, and Big Twelve North Championship, last season? Not as crazy as you might think.) I am teaching an undergraduate class, “Economics of Managerial Decision Making,” that focuses on organizational and managerial issues. Finding good readings is often a challenge, though the textbook options are much better than a generation ago (Brickley, Besanko, Froeb, Hendrikse, and more.) Here are a couple of classroom resources I discovered today:
- A short paper by Russ Roberts summarizing the (somewhat difficult) argument in Hayek’s “Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945)
- Roger Meiners’s PowerPoint version of Leonard Read’s classic “I, Pencil”
Mises is not usually considered “classroom friendly” but I have found that “Profit and Loss” (1958) works well with undergraduates. And of course Mises emphasizes the entrepreneur as the driving force behind price adjustment, an aspect missing from Hayek’s treatment (in which agents are modeled as responders, not initiators). Section I of Bureaucracy, on “Profit Management,” is also quite good, and only 20 pages.
Best Three Sentences I Read Today
| Peter Klein |
Chris Dillow, wondering why doctors have such a good reputation, and economists such a poor one:
A man who’s been cured by a doctor lives to tell everyone. A man who’s been killed by one stays quiet. Economists’ “victims” — those stupid enough to believe forecasts — don’t keep schtum.
The rest of his reasons are interesting too. I think he focuses too much on economic forecasting, which is not in my view the same as economic analysis. The economy is not, after all, a “patient” to be taken care of and “cured” by the economist.
Organizations and Markets 
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