Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)

Seriously. In part that’s because the economics of the twentieth century was overwhelmingly about how best to share existing “pies” of human well-being, rather than how

Taxpayers in the top 5 percent of income already pay for more than 43 percent of the U.S. government, and taxpayers in the top 1 percent pay for more than 27 percent; at some point, taking more resources from the wealthy yields diminishing returns. Many of the Obama reforms, including much of the stimulus bill, and the health care bill, redistribut

If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and, as we will see in chapter five, the

Consider what Kuhn famously argued: that a paradigm shift happens when we encounter anomalies that can’t be explained by the paradigm responsible for progress thereto. So here’s our anomaly: that industrial-age wealth hasn’t neatly powered lives lived meaningfully well; that near-term profit, gross product, and hyperconsumption haven’t produced a f