The Unbroken Window

I wished we’d see more of this, not just for an academic journal, but in the major press and blogosphere.

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When a world class economist makes a comment like this: But even building bridges to nowhere would create jobs, not destroy them, as the congressman from nowhere knows. To be sure, that is not a valid argument for building them. Dumb public spending deserves to be rejected—but not because it kills jobs. I am sure [...]

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I recently waded through Veblen’s famous Theory of the Leisure Class. I found it tough reading, far more of a slog than reading Hayek, and on par with reading some of the great philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th century. In an essay that you simply must read, HL Mencken describes the writing [...]

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I’ve just finished reading Joe Stiglitz’s account of the financial crisis.  In it he makes the following comment: Competition, in this case, had a perverse effect: It caused a race to the bottom — a race to provide ratings that were most favorable to those being rated. Ughh. I guess being a Nobel Prize winner [...]

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Nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist — and I am tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger. – Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics

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“Many advocates of free trade claim that higher productivity growth in the United States will offset pressure on wages caused by the global sweatshop economy, but the appealing theory falls victim to an unpleasant fact. Productivity has been going up, without resulting wage gains for American workers. Between 1977 and 1992, the average productivity of [...]

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Now, at age 36, I am at a stage of intellectual development that I should have had as a 22 year old. In other words, all of the stuff you read on this site is really of no better quality than any well-educated person in the old Western tradition would have been able to produce [...]

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I was just reading an excerpt from Joseph Stiglitz’s The Roaring Nineties. In it, Stiglitz makes his usual argument that market failures are everywhere and that wise government policy can and has stepped in to the rescue. An illustration he uses is that during the 1930s when Fannie Mae was organized by the government, it [...]

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Parts of this piece from Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman accurately capture some of the difficulties facing policymakers as they think about bank “re”regulation. Here is an example: A second version of reform calls for a full recreation of the Quiet Period banking system. We’ll reinstate Glass-Steagall, protect the depository institutions, and let the investment banks [...]

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Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz has a new piece in the Economists’ Voice. Here are a few examples of his use of scientific economic language: But despite protests by yesterday’s proponents of deregulation, who would like the government to remain passive, most economists believe that government spending has made a difference, helping to avert another Great [...]

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