Sublime

The technocrats represented a moral principle, however nonideological they wished to appear. That moral principle was the imperative toward efficiency in governance and all other spheres. It was therefore the expertise not of the plumber that was praised but of the manager, the professional, and the intellectual whose expertise was certified by the

In essence, we’ve been making plans—whether consciously or not—as if we would have ongoing productivity growth of 3 percent or more, along with the asset prices that would accompany such a boom. When you combine plans based on 3 percent gains with a reality of much inferior performance, sooner or later you get a crash.

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.

Technology companies drove the survivors into a mindset of engineered efficiency—the belief that data tells you everything of value. “Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism,” Franklin Foer writes in World Without Mind. “Once journalists come to know what works, which stories

But they are not static or permanent. They require constant renewal. The express agenda of the New Liberalism is a vast expansion of social services—massive intervention and expenditures in energy, health care and education—that will necessarily, as in Europe, take away from defense spending.

The man that the Times article reported as being both “sadder” and “wiser” than when he was first imprisoned went on to construct one of humanity’s darkest regimes, ignited a war that killed tens of millions of people, and engineered the world’s first program of mechanized genocide, making him the last person a reader of the Times should think “was