L'Italia? Moderatamente libera

Lo afferma l'edizione 2009 dell'Indice della libertà economica, redatto dalla Heritage Foundation e dal Wall Street Journal in collaborazione con una rete di think tank tra cui, in Italia, l'Istituto Bruno Leoni. Qui il comunicato IBL, qui la scheda relativa all'Italia, qui il testo integrale dell'Index.

L'Italia meno libera di Mongolia e Belize

Secondo il nuovo Index of Economic Freedom.

Un (altro) Nobel a Hayek?

Su epistemes.org un articolo molto chiaro sul Nobel a Hurwicz, Maskin e Myerson. Sul tema, c'è anche un bel commento di Pete Boettke sul Wall Street Journal. La parte centrale dell'argomento di Boettke è la seguente:

Mechanism design theory was established to try to address the main challenge posed by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. It all starts with Mr. Hurwicz's response to Hayek's famous paper, "The Use of Knowledge in Society." In the 1930s and '40s, Hayek was embroiled in the "socialist calculation debate." (...)

Hayek's argument, a refinement of Mises, basically stated that the economic problem society faced was not how to allocate given resources, but rather how to mobilize and utilize the knowledge dispersed throughout the economy.

Hayek argued that mathematical modeling, which relied on a set of given assumptions, had obscured the fundamental problem. These questions were not being probed since they were assumed away in the mathematical models of market socialism presented by Oskar Lange and, later, Abba Lerner. Milton Friedman, when he reviewed Lerner's "Economics of Control," stated that it was as if economic analysis of policy was being conducted in a vacuum. Lange actually argued that questions of bureaucratic incentives did not belong in economics and were best left to other disciplines such as psychology and sociology.

Leonid Hurwicz, in his classic papers "On the Concept and Possibility of Informational Decentralization" (1969), "On Informationally Decentralized Systems" (1972), and "The Design of Mechanisms for Resource Allocation" (1973), embraced Hayek's challenge. He developed mechanism-design theory to test the logic of the Mises-Hayek contention that socialism could not possibly mobilize the dispersed knowledge in society in a way that would permit rational economic calculation for the alternative uses of scarce resources. Mises and Hayek argued that replacing the invisible hand of the market with the guided one of government would not work. Mr. Hurwicz wanted to see if they were right, and under what conditions one could say they were wrong.

Sul suo blog, Pete torna sul tema come storico del pensiero economico, e sottolinea come anche questo Premio Nobel confermi un fatto caro agli economisti 'austriaci', ovvero l'influenza di Hayek sul pensiero economico e politico del secondo Novecento:

Hayek has received more citations from Nobel Prize winners as either (a) the reason they did research along the path that was recognized, or (b) that in the later years they have come to appreciate his questions and analysis more than any other economist, than any other Nobel Prize winner. His work has proved fundamental to not only Buchanan, Coase, North, and Smith, but also Lucas, Phelps, and Stiglitz. Add Hurwicz to that list, and don't forget Koopmans from 1975.

Un giornale di mercato, sul mercato, per il mercato

L'acquisto di Dow Jones da parte di Rupert Murdoch riempie i giornali. In Italia, si scatenano i commenti. E' normale, in un Paese nel quale in molti (e molte persone intelligenti e perbene) sono convinti che il modo migliore per garantire l'indipendenza della stampa sia sostanzialmente evitare che i giornali possano essere contendibili.
Invece chi crede nel mercato si sente scaldare il cuore, leggendo l'editoriale che il Wall Street Journal stesso ha dedicato oggi al suo nuovo padrone. Questo il passo saliente:

Both the New York Times and the Financial Times have been especially aggressive in assailing the potential News Corp. purchase of the Journal. These also happen to be the two publications that Mr. Murdoch has explicitly said he might invest more to compete against. Readers can judge if the tears these papers and their writers claim to shed for the Journal's future are real, or of the crocodile variety.

The nastiest attacks have come from our friends on the political left. They can't decide whose views they hate most -- ours, or Mr. Murdoch's. We're especially amused by those who say Mr. Murdoch might tug us to the political left. Don't count on it. More than one liberal commentator has actually rejoiced at the takeover bid, on the perverse grounds that this will ruin the Journal's news coverage, which in turn will reduce the audience for the editorial page. Don't count on that either.

Such an expectation overlooks that the principle of "free people and free markets" promoted in these columns has an appeal far beyond this newspaper. We fill a market niche for such commentary that is too little met by other newspapers and media outlets. But we have every confidence that if we vanished, or let our standards fall, the marketplace would find an alternative. What ultimately matters are the ideas, and their basic truth.