The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton

The point is not that all banking is a fraud, but rather the more subtle point that we rely on the judgments of others when we decide whom to trust. For years, Madoff had been a well-respected figure in the investment community. Madoff’s fraud was possible only because so many people trusted him. The more people trusted him, the easier it was for M

How did we make so many bad mistakes at the same time, all pointing in more or less the same direction? Here is the eight-word answer: We thought we were richer than we were.

There was a common view that while financial institutions had made large bets, key decision-makers had their own money on the line, previous crises had turned out okay, ergo things couldn’t get so bad. Most market players, including regulators, proceeded on some version of those assumptions. The course of history appeared to validate this excess tr

what I want is that most people really care about science and view scientific achievement as a pinnacle of our best qualities as leaders of Western civilization. This is one point that Ayn Rand, the novelist, philosopher, and oft eccentric worshipper of individual excellence got right, namely that we should all revere creators and scientific innova

Factories, smokestacks, power plants, and assembly lines are difficult to move, once put into place. These large and immobile assets provided tempting targets for taxation and regulation.

If we go back to the peak time for innovation, estimated by Jonathan Huebner to have been the mid- to late nineteenth century, government at all levels was usually in the range of about 5 percent of U.S. GDP. Most of GDP was spent in a way that resembles how we spend today in apple markets. Most people think that’s too little government compared to

That is one reason why we have been seeing a “jobless recovery.” It’s also why unemployment is so concentrated among the relatively unskilled. If you want to get a job in the new and growing sectors of the economy, or the parts of the old economy that are regearing, it really helps to be skilled with information technology. but still those jobs are

Krugman is pushing policies that require high real income growth, precisely when real income growth is relatively low. He is putting the cart before the horse and asking for some burdensome policies precisely when they would be toughest to bear.

Only lies and exaggerations can promise voters and other citizens a much higher rate of real income growth, and so our politics has become increasingly full of . . . lies and exaggerations. The options are the “tax cut exaggeration” and the “redistribution exaggeration.”