Search results for ""Author Israel M Kirzner""

Stressing verbal logic rather than mathematics, Israel M. Kirzner provides at once a thorough critique of contemporary price theory, an essay on the theory of entrepreneurship, and an essay on the theory of competition. Competition and Entrepreneurship offers a new appraisal of quality competition, of selling effort, and of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary welfare economics. Kirzner's book establishes a theory of the market and the price system which differs from orthodox price theory. He sees orthodox price theory as explaining the configuration of prices and quantities that satisfied the conditions for equilibrium. Mr. Kirzner argues that "it is more useful to look to price theory to help understand how the decisions of individual participants in the market interact to generate the market forces which compel changes in prices, outputs, and methods of production and in the allocation of resources." Although Competition and Entrepreneurship is primarily concerned with the operation of the market economy, Kirzner's insights can be applied to crucial aspects of centrally planned economic systems as well. In the analysis of these processes, Kirzner clearly shows that the rediscovery of the entrepreneur must emerge as a step of major importance.

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In Essays on Capital and Interest, Israel Kirzner offers a consistently ‘Austrian’perspective on the problems of capital and interest theory. In the three classic essays featured in this book, Professor Kirzner argues that an Austrian approach based on the pure time preference theory offers an attractive alternative to both the orthodox neoclassical and the heterodox Sraffian approaches to economics. The author takes a subjectivist point of view with all capital and interest phenomena traced to individual multi-period plans. Capital is seen, in this perspective, not as an objective mass of tools and equipment, but as the interim state in which inter-locking multi-period plans have manifested themselves at a particular point. This consistent subjectivism makes it possible to present the pure time (Fetter-Mises) preference theory of interest in understandable terms. Essays on Capital and Interest begins with an introduction by the author placing his life’s work in the context of twentieth century economics and the decline and revival of the Austrian school. This volume makes Professor Kirzner’s seminal work available to a wider audience in a major new edition. It will be welcomed by Austrian economists and all those concerned with capital and interest theory.

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