I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.
The great thing about fiscal policy is that it has a direct impact and doesn’t require you to bind the hands of future policymakers.
The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time.
The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.
The French, unfortunately, actually believe what they say, and that has been very destructive.
Evidence and expertise have a well-known liberal bias.
When stock prices are rising, it’s called “momentum investing”; when they are falling, it’s called “panic”.
And when the chickens that didn’t hatch come home to roost, we will rue the day when, misled by sloppy accounting and rosy scenarios, we gave away the national nest egg.
Democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.
The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn’t based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.
Republican candidates had to appeal to their base, which is by and large elderly white people arguing with empty chairs.
One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the ‘high school movement’ made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education.
The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.
Under the gold standard America had no major financial panics other than in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1907, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933.
Not all private equity people are evil. Only some.
Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst.
When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.
America’s political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas – beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity.
If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.
The federal government is basically an insurance company with an army.