Online IP Course Starts Monday

 Cross-posted at the Mises Economics Blog.

See below for weekly topics.  Read instructor Stephan Kinsella's article about the course.  Click here for more details and to enroll.

Tom Woods on Nullification, this November at the Mises Academy

The Mises Academy is pleased to announce Nullification: A Jeffersonian Bulwark Against Tyranny, a four-week, online course with Thomas E. Woods, starting November 16. From the description:

Nullification, the Jeffersonian mechanism of state resistance to unconstitutional acts of the U.S. government, has returned to the news in recent years, and is the subject of a new book by the instructor of this course. The course will cover the historical, constitutional, and moral arguments that have been raised for and against the idea of state nullification. Students will examine the major sources and documents that comprise this tradition of American political thought, and read and discuss the famous debates in American history over nullification and the nature of the American Union: Daniel Webster vs. Robert Hayne, Andrew Jackson vs. Littleton Waller Tazewell, and Joseph Story vs. Abel Upshur. To understand this topic is to gain an intimate knowledge and understanding of American history. (The book Nullification is the only required reading that is unavailable to read online.)

Analysis vs. Asinine Analogy

 Cross-posted at the Mises Economics Blog.

Robert Murphy just finished his weekly office hours session for his online class, Principles of Economics.  As I mentioned previously on the Mises Academy blog, this week, he’s been covering supply and demand charts.  The educational opportunities that web conferencing software makes possible are really amazing.  Over video broadcast, he was able to field question after question about supply and demand from the student posts in the chat window, and in the main display window, he was able to pull up, on the fly, just the right chart to use to demonstrate what he’s talking about.

Supply and demand curves seem to be one of the economic concepts that is the most abused by pundits. Once when I was in a political science class at Berkeley, some guest lecturer (I believe he was a journalist) came in purporting to explain the 2000/2001 California energy crisis, blaming market manipulation. He made his two hands (which were supposed to represent supply and demand curves), rise up, and come together like the top of a triangle saying that “at the point where supply and demand meet”, there is a “market tweak” that insiders can perform that makes the price explode upward.  As he said that last part he made his “supply/demand curve” hands bump into each other and then shoot up like a volcanic eruption.

That was the extent of his analysis.

And when a student asked him what the heck that was supposed to mean, he didn’t elaborate at all; h just impatiently repeated the whole little hand routine.  I think he expected the students to just sit there in awe at his brilliant mechanistic analogy and apparent mastery of economics, and was irritated that a student wanted him to actually make sense.

I still have no idea what he was trying to say, and even he probably didn’t know.  But I do know now that his little hand play was nonsense.  A single pair of S/D curves represents possible price/quantity relationships in a single snapshot of time; so representing them as slithering toward each other across time, like two snakes meeting in the desert, is a complete mischaracterization of what they represent.

As Professor Murphy helps his students (many of whom are in high school) understand how to accurately interpret S/D graphs, they will be able to spot mischaracterizations like that one, and economic charlatan-pundits will have a few less dupes in their broadcast audience.

Supply and Demand Curves in Econ101

Cross-post from the Mises Academy Blog.

Professor Murphy covered supply and demand curves in his Econ 101 lecture today.  He covered common misunderstandings.  For one, even professional economists will from time to time mix up the idea of movement ALONG a curve, and a shift of the curve ITSELF.  Another thing forgotten is that the curves represent various hypothetical price/quantity pairs.  Here is Mises on supply/demand curves, from Human Action, Chapter 16, section 2:

"It is possible to visualize this interaction by drawing two curves, the demand curve and the supply curve, whose intersection shows the price. It is no less possible to express it in mathematical symbols. But it is necessary to comprehend that such pictorial or mathematical modes of representation do not affect the essence of our interpretation and that they do not add a whit to our insight. Furthermore it is important to realize that we do not have any knowledge or experience concerning the shape of such curves. Always, what we know is only market prices--that is, not the curves but only a point which we interpret as the intersection of two hypothetical curves. The drawing of such curves may prove expedient in visualizing the problems for undergraduates. For the real tasks of catallactics they are mere byplay."

A New Class on Intellectual Property with Stephan Kinsella at the Mises Academy

Starting November 1 at the Mises Academy: Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics, a 6-week course, with Monday evening lecture/question-and-answer sessions.