Miracles do happen

When you write a book there is always the hope somewhere in the background that you will be able to sway minds by the power of your arguments and evidence. In saner moments, you admit to yourself that most minds are already firmly made up and you will be preaching to the converted for the most part.

So it is great to discover that someone whose world view is as different from mine as Arnold Kling finds considerable merit in my book.  When he writes "I might not be able to emerge from a debate with Rodrik with an unchanged mind" he pays the greatest compliment that an author can expect.

The other thing that I learn from Kling's review is that I may be a closet Austrian.  That makes me feel like Moliere's bourgeois gentleman who discovers that he has been speaking prose for 40 years without knowing it...  

Comments

[aje]

Given that much of what you write seems to reject Austrian insights (or at least conflate them with libertarianism), would you clarify what aspects of Mises' work you object to?

[wjd123]

I took exception to Arnold Kling's belief that Masonomist were on the cutting edge of the future.

"Governments lay claim to legal authority to collect taxes or impose restrictions on trade across borders. But there is no moral significance to a border. If John, Mary, and Sam all lived within the same country, the question of whether free trade is good for "us" would never arise. John's right to trade with Mary without interference on behalf of Sam would not be questioned. It is hard to see how moving Mary across a border changes the situation from a moral or economic standpoint."--Arnold Kling

Yet governments have rules and regulations governing the economy, I like to call it economic morality. In a democracy those rules and regulations don't eminate out of the government but out of different social groups. They are social in orgin not governmental.

The rules and regulations governing the American political economy are different than those governing the Mexican or Chinese political economy. There is also the question of how well institutions--if they are even in existance--can enforce the rules and how much money it takes to do so effectively.

So considering that countries have different political economies along with different levels of institutional and material capital, trading across borders isn't the same as within ones own country.

For instance the financial crises caused by sub-prime loans here has spilled over onto European investors. Part of the reason is that we have poor regulations on the financial industry. Now as the New York Times writes the "Calls Grow for Foreigners to Have a Say on U.S. Market Rules."

Sorry, Professor Kling, I don't think that Masonomist are the wave of the future. The evidence points to greater intergration and intervention.

[PrestoPundit]

Bruce Caldwell has said something like that economists keep catching up with were Hayek was in, say, 1937. And a few years later they get to where Hayek was in, say, 1941. You should be happy Dani, it looks like some of your work catches up with where Hayek was in 1946 ..

[Justin Rietz]

See, Dani, now you know why you continue to attract Austrian-leaning whackos like me to your blog :-)

Congrats on the review, and I look forward to reading your book.

[paine]

now i'm a johnny one note to say the least

but these halloween
pocket pundits
trick or treating
in heros of the austrian school masks

yikes !!!!!
to have such acolytes

only trotsky
can inspire
such cyclonic meme storms
in all the wrong headquaters

i'll steal from

E von stroheim in
"grand illusion"

" ahck ....poor hayek "

[paine]

masonomics poses a very basic question
are there
best plausible paths
to removing trade borders
and currency zones ??

starting from a world
with obviously
sub optimal borders
and zones

is border and zone removal
just like a game of pick up sticks

al removal no replacement ??

or might it be
dare i say dialectical

where bouts of border intensification
at certain stages and places
become a prefered
part of the best plausible route to a final globe
where there are zero trade borders and currency zones

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