Tagged: ISI

1

Revisiting the Road to Serfdom

Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom is firmly established as one of those books you’re supposed to read. But on the spectrum of works about economics, it probably falls more on the Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital side than on the Economics in One Lesson or even Freakonomics side. If its style and language appear somewhat dated, that’s because it was published in 1944. It is also focused on conditions to be found in prewar England and Germany, which takes the book into questions of not just economics but politics too. Yet Hayek’s book has stood the test of time, because its key messages are not constricted by...

5

Leisure is a necessity, not a luxury

I can still vividly recall my semester in Rome many years ago. Among the books we had brought to study that spring was Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. I had purchased the beautifully bound Liberty Fund edition (from which I’ll quote below) and couldn’t wait to plumb these two essays that Dr. Pieper had written in the aftermath of World War II, a time in which, it might easily be thought, leisure was the last thing on anyone’s mind. While I remember enjoying Leisure, his ideas were not aimed at (and thus did not then entirely take hold...