One of the contributors to my book workshop this week was Richard Grossman, who spoke about this forthcoming book entitled "WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them". In this book, Richard looks at policy mistakes made by governments because they were blinded by ideology rather than clearly seeing the economic problem at hand. For example, he looks at how the British government's policy during the Great Famine was wrong and how Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 was wrong. He also looks at wrong economic policy in the run-up to the subprime and Euro crises. His book is due out soon and can be pre-ordered at Amazon by clicking here.
According to Robert Shiller , speaking at Davos, Bitcoin is a perfect example of a bubble - story here . Shiller sees Bitcoin as a backwards step in the evolution of money. George Selgin , a free banker, takes an opposing view - click here . Although he doesn't believe that Bitcoin is money, he sees its development as a fascinating turn in the evolution of money. In particular, he lauds the fact that Bitcoin production is constrained and cannot be infinite. There is a short video below where Bitcoin explain how it works.