Not much today. We held our pumpkin-carving family party last night. I'm whipped. I did, however, salvage enough time to read this neat little essay by Lew Rockwell: What We Can Learn From the Middle Ages. The School of Salamanca has interested me for a few years now. If you're unacquainted with the School and its ties to the Austrians, Lew's essay is a decent starting point. Four excerpts:
1. “The real founders of economic science actually wrote hundreds of years before Smith. They were not economists as such, but moral theologians, trained in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, and they came to be known as the Late Scholastics.”
2. “Joseph Schumpeter gave the Late Scholastics a huge boost with his posthumously published 1954 book, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press). “It is they,” he wrote, “who come nearer than does any other group to having been the 'founders' of scientific economics.”
3. “Mises was right: the development of economics began much later, and the reason for this is rather straightforward. The appearance of widespread economic opportunity, social mobility driven by material status, the dramatic expansion of the division of labor across many borders, and the building of complex capital structures only began to be observed in the late Middle Ages.”
4. “But it is especially striking that the major resurgence of Scholastic ideas came out of Austria in the late 19th century, a country that had avoided a revolutionary political or theological upheaval. If we look at Menger's own teachers, we find successors to the Scholastic tradition.”
My apologies that I don't have more to offer today. For some reason, I've been depleted of all energy lately. It's all I can do to drag myself to the office and just plod through the day. Very odd. I searched the Web for an answer, but "Lazy Sloth of a Human Being" didn't Google-up anything useful.
