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There is no separate "economics of AI," Peter Klein argues, any more than there was an economics of the internet—there's just economics, applied to specific goods and services. He demystifies what today's models actually do (predict the next word), places them in a long history of "new economy" hype that never required new economic theory, and works through the industry with standard tools: subjective value, the theory of the firm, network effects, and the incumbents' lobbying for regulation to raise rivals' costs. He closes on the deeper question—whether an AI can act in Mises's sense—and argues it cannot: an AI exercises what he calls derived judgment, executing tasks on an entrepreneur's behalf, but it can never decide whether to be an entrepreneur at all.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Dr. Wanjiru Njoya argues that private property is the indispensable cornerstone of liberty and civilization, and that anti-discrimination laws—however well-intentioned—are a form of aggression against property that nudges society along the continuum toward socialism. Drawing on Rothbard, Hoppe, and Mises, she defends property rights as absolute, carefully distinguishes political philosophy from personal morality, and warns that eroding property will, in Mises's words, cause civilization itself to perish.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Record-breaking skyscrapers have a habit of opening just as the economy turns—a pattern Mark Thornton connected to Austrian business cycle theory in his work on the skyscraper curse. Lucas Engelhardt, Thornton's coauthor on the 2015 response to the curse's critics, explains the mechanism: artificially low interest rates raise land prices, and bid-rent theory shows why the effect concentrates downtown, precisely where towers get built. Add larger firms and cheap research and development to solve the engineering, and the record tower and the cyclical peak arrive together. He then works through the critics' statistical case and shows that their own results—including their finding that height and output move together—point the same way.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Everyone agrees higher education is in crisis—tuition rising ten times faster than the price level, administrative bloat, a looming demographic cliff, collapsing public confidence. Peter Klein argues these are symptoms, not the disease. Answering the claim that education is a special good beyond ordinary economic analysis, he shows that what markets actually deliver are discrete units of educational goods and services, and that standard Austrian analysis applies as readily here as to shoes. The structural problem is that there is no free market to speak of: state entities own most institutions, even elite privates draw nearly half their revenue from government, and a handful of federally licensed accreditors control entry. Following Rothbard, Klein's answer is the separation of education and state—with the Mises Institute itself as a working example.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

What can economics actually teach you about running a business? From the mainstream, Per Bylund argues, very little—its models have no room for the entrepreneur at all. Austrian economics is a different matter. Working from Menger forward, Bylund lays out the sequence every business faces: costs come first and certain, value comes last and unknown. From that he draws the practical implications—why cost-plus pricing is a recipe for failure, why no producer has "pricing power" even as a monopolist, why the firm is best understood as a temporary island of specialization, and why the entrepreneur's only real question is how best to serve the consumer.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Per Bylund takes up Mises's claim that the entrepreneur-promoter cannot be defined praxeologically and argues the opposite—that the promoter can be pinned down as the actor who breaks the economy free from what Bylund calls the "specialization deadlock." Drawing on his own work, he shows how genuine innovation (not mere task-splitting or arbitrage) drives economic growth in spasmodic leaps, placing the promoter, and the firm as an "island of specialization," at the very core of the Misesian market process.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Tate Fegley uses Joseph Salerno's work to draw out the fundamental differences between Mises and Hayek—on society, law, the family, and above all the calculation problem versus the knowledge problem—arguing that treating the two as interchangeable obscures the distinctly Misesian paradigm.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Money is never neutral. Jeffrey Degner works line by line through the passage of Cantillon's Essay that made the case nearly three centuries ago—showing how new money enters the economy unevenly, enriching those who receive it first and squeezing everyone who receives it last. Cantillon named the losers precisely: those on fixed wages, and property owners locked into leases as their costs rise. Degner then brings the analysis forward, connecting it to the several distinct patterns now described as the "K-shaped economy"—divergence between sectors, between the consumption of high- and low-income households, and between a soaring stock market and consumer sentiment that has fallen below its COVID lows.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Austrian economics did not begin in 1871. Mark Thornton traces its lineage back through the thinkers the mainstream dismisses: the Spanish Scholastics, who worked out subjective value and the effects of inflation while dismantling the case against usury; the anti-mercantilists who told Louis XIV to abolish his taxes; the Physiocrats; and above all Richard Cantillon, whom Rothbard called the father of modern economics. Drawing on twenty-five years of his own research, Thornton makes the case for why the history of economic thought is not antiquarianism but a laboratory—and notes that the good ideas tend to appear precisely when the state grows tyrannical, overtaxes, and overspends.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Norway sits on large oil deposits, yet has managed to avoid the “resource curse” that has bedeviled so many nations that have abundant natural resources, but severely mismanage their economies.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-norway-built-worlds-largest-fund-and-thriving-economy-boot