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In this chapter, I attempt to extend insights regarding statistical aggregates from scholars, such as Hayek (1931) and Mises (1947), to the topic of inequality. Using the work of Lindert and Williamson (2016), I show that a disaggregation of inequality into some of its many subcomponents alters our reading of its evolution. While I only work with stylized facts from the field of economic history, and the authors argues that the promising implications derived from disaggregation militate in favor of more effort being directed toward decomposing the evolution of inequality.

We construct a new consumer price index for Canada covering the period from 1870 to 1900. Unlike previous indexes, it includes prices of clothing and household furnishings. This is important because these previously neglected components accounted for roughly 20% of consumers' expenditures. Moreover, the price of cotton goods, the most important textile product used for clothing and household furnishings, fell by half between 1870 and 1900 (much faster than other components of the price level). This has ramifications for both the level and trend of Canadian GDP. Because the largest changes in estimation concern the 1870s, we show that the country grew substantially faster than generally believed. It outpaced the United States so much that it entered the twentieth century with an improved economic standing relative to its southern neighbor.

This chapter is the editor’s introduction to Austrian Economics: The Next Generation, which includes a brief description of the workshop that produced the papers and short summaries of each contribution organized by sub-topic.

The son of academics Monica and Godfrey Wilson, Francis Wilson (b. 1939) was raised in a Zulu-speaking locale of rural South Africa. Despite a keen interest in history imbued by his anthropologist parents, Wilson completed his undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) before pursuing his doctorate at Cambridge University. Fascinated by the economics of discrimination and their relationship to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, Wilson spent a year in the United States as a visiting graduate fellow at the University of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy (TJC) in 1964.

Does the classical liberal emphasis on freedom of association provide an intellectual cover for bigotry? We formulate this question in economic terms using James Buchanan’s economic approach to ethics, according to which moral values can be understood as preferences about other people’s behaviors. We discuss two possible market failures associated with freedom of association: inter-group externalities and Schelling-type emergent segregation. We show that the classical liberal position about freedom of association, as elaborated in Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent, is fully equipped to deal with the first one, but not with the second. The progressive view that some preferences are so offensive that they should be dismissed rather than engaged or negotiated with can be reframed as an attempt to solve the emergent segregation problem, but it is vulnerable to political economy problems of its own, in particular to an inherent tendency to over-expand the meaning of “bigotry.”