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Summaries
May 5, 2008--Down the Memory Hole? There is no point in continuing to try to deny the Republicans credit for their “Reagan revolution.” The best reason to expect that Democratic Party elders will award the nomination to Obama is that they recognize that the Clintons’ attempt to dwell on the past would gravely threaten their future. The next phase in the cycle of American history already has begun. April 27, 2008--A Longer Goodbye? If you believed everything you read in the newspapers, you might think that working Americans had fetched up in a kinder, gentler age in which they could expect to take one encore after another. One recent “Retirement” supplement, headlined ‘”A Longer Goodbye,” describes how “shorter hours, lighter duties and other perks entice older workers to […] April 20, 2008--An Almost American Attitude to Risk If the speculators had beaten Iceland, which carry-trade economy would have been next? Hungary, Turkey and New Zealand all have high current-account deficits, high interest rates and capital inflows. A spiral of lost confidence could have begun to make the global financial crisis of the late 1990s, when when the Asian crisis spread to Russia and Brazil, look like a qualifying round. April 13, 2008--Politics, Economics and the News The differential play that the Greenspan story received last week in each of four major newspapers in the US was interesting for what it reveals about the relationship of each with its audience – that is to say, about its politics. The real news, however, was the entry onto the scene of former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, and the light he shed on what monetary policy migh look like during an Obama presidency. April 6, 2008--Might the Worst Be Over for Africa? The forty years since independence have been mostly bad ones for most of Africa. Latin America, too, suffered fifty years of internecine warfare, political instability and economic stagnation, after it gained independence from European rule in the first half of the nineteenth century, according to Robert Bates and Jeffrey Williamson, of Harvard University, and John Coatsworth, of Columbia University. At a certain point it stabilized and began to grow. Africa’s experience may turn out to be the same, for many of the same reasons. Indeed, the possibility exists that Africa’s evolution could avoid some of the worst side effects of Latin America’s successful transition, they say. Might the worst be over for Africa? March 30, 2008--The Dis-Integration of the News The Internet and the telecommunications revolutions have meant that more news is produced today than ever before. But that doesn’t mean it is easy to follow. And many wise voices have been rendered silent by the bumpy dis-integration of news. March 23, 2008--The Properties of Property Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk, a new book, by James Bessen, a software developer turned economic savant, and Michael J. Meurer, a professor at Boston University School of Law, argues that the problems plaguing the patent system rest on the flawed analogy between technology and real property. “If you can’t tell the boundaries, then it ain’t property,” they write. March 16, 2008--How Did It Become So Dangerous? This was the week that the sub-prime lending debacle turned into a full-blown financial crisis. Look beyond the Federal Reserve Board’s new $400 billion special lending facility for the holders of mortgage-backed securities that was announced last week; look beyond its bailout of Bear Stearns. Look beyond the scheduled Tuesday meeting of the Federal Open […] March 9, 2008--Mineshaft Canary Business Week raised a ruckus last December with a cover story on ”The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League.” Provosts from eleven public universities in the Midwest wrote to protest sentiments attributed to Harvard University president Drew Faust, who was said to suggest that land-grant universities should compete less intensely for federal research dollars in basic science. […] March 2, 2008--EP Is Not Writing This Week Economic Principals is traveling and not writing this week. February 24, 2008--Climate Change? With the Russian presidential election coming up next Sunday, I have been paying more than usual attention to Johnson’s Russia List (JRL), which arrives nearly every morning at my desk via email, with the complete texts of yet another thirty or forty news stories about what is happening in Russia, mostly from the English- and […] February 17, 2008--On Dynasties David Landes on legendary business dynasties; Jacob Weisberg on “The Bush Tragedy:” why do dynasties fare so poorly in politics? Perhaps for the very reason that they cannot deal with their problems internally, “within the structure of the business.” February 10, 2008--The Coin of Your Life (and the “U-Index”) Economist Alan Krueger and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, of Princeton University, want to produce a “U-index” to measure the proportion of time individuals spend in what they consider an “unpleasant” or “undesirable” or “unhappy” state. Is the sum of all blue moods really a measurable quantity? February 3, 2008--Revealed Preferences The presidency of the National Bureau of Economic Research is worth much more than its $750,000 annual paycheck. It is the most prestigious and powerful job in all of American economics. Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw says he took himself out of the running because he’s looking for ways to cut his tax bill. January 27, 2008--Was There a Better Time for a Recession? Put yourself in Ben Bernanke’s shoes. Assume that a recession was inevitable. When was the right time to take it? At seventy-two months, the current expansion is already longer than any of the thirty years before Volcker, except for the inflationary nine-year Vietnam boom. Meanwhile, the problems awaiting the next president are simply enormous, whoever it is who takes office in January 2009 – budget deficits, the war in Iraq, health care reform, climate change. Would the Fed chairman be doing the new administration a favor to push ahead a recession, too, into its first couple of years? January 20, 2008--The Partisan New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is right more often than not about economic issues. Is he right about this year’s election? Probably not. Plus, more on in defense of tax-shielded ESOPs. January 13, 2008--Dancing With Tycoons? One of the things that news reporters learn early in their careers, if they are fortunate, is not to take anyone’s claim to authority too seriously. For example, I remember meeting Louis Kelso in the early 1980s. January 9, 2008--Down In New Orleans There was plenty of interest in the economy when the Allied Social Science Association met last week in New Orleans. And there was the usual fluff. But the deepest excitement had to do with the fundamental argument among economists about how to view the prospect of industrially-induced global warming: Dire emergency? Or manageable threat? December 30, 2007--The Shape of the Cities After the golden age of automobiles, metropolitan areas will depend much more on railroads to curb congestion and pollution. Beads-on-a-string cities will fade, hub-and-spoke arrangements will thrive, according John Stilgoe, a prominent student of the American landscape. December 23, 2007--What is Better Than Beating the Yankees? Meet Wellesley College professor Chip Case, discoverer of the housing bubble, father of the Case-Shiller-Weiss Index (on which residential housing futures and options trading is based), best-selling text-book author and teacher extraordinaire. December 16, 2007--When the Facts Change Is the long political cycle in the United States about to turn? In the run-up to the 2004 election, Economic Principals saw Hillary Clinton as a likely bet in 2008. Barack Obama seems the better candidate today. Meanwhile, a surprising gridlock of epic proportions during a snowstorm presages congestion pricing for Boston. December 9, 2007--Extreme Arithmetic The Swedes should do the world a favor and award the economics prize to the environmental economists who have created the tools to talk meaningfully about taking precautionary action in uncertain circumstances, before the physical science can be nailed down. December 2, 2007--A Nation Once Again? On the eve of parliamentary elections in Russia, Anders Aslund explains why he thinks the collapse of Harvard’s Russia Project in 1997 amid charges of corruption was no big deal. The incident isn’t mentioned in his new book. November 25, 2007--Greenspan Shrugged Is it possible that Alan Greenspan is gradually following George W. Bush down the “worst ever” path into history? If he was so prescient, why did permit the housing bubble to get so out of hand, before retiring as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 2006? November 18, 2007--Strong Medicine Sovereign wealth funds are in the news these days mainly because of the possibilities of strategic behavior that they offer their owners. As long as these vast sums of money are managed professionally and transparently, they will be no different from any other large pool of wealth — pension funds, insurance portfolios, mutual funds. But opportunities for mischief exist. And the risk that these trust funds pose to their eneficiaries are not trivial, either. November 11, 2007--A Necessary Profession, Re-Invented “New” growth theory all but eclipsed development doctrines for a time in the 1980s and ’90s. With the appearance of One Economics, Many Recipes, by Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, a similarly “new” development economics has acquired a rallying point, and a new leader. November 4, 2007--Spook Country: An Introduction For those who don’t know it, Neuromancer is the book that in 1984 coined the term “cyberspace” and introduced to the Internet generation a forward-looking fictional landscape that, for a time, captured their imagination as completely as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four enthralled readers for well over a decade after it appeared in 1948. Its author, William Gibson, is still ahead of the curve. October 28, 2007--Economics for Adults The vogue for economics primers exemplified by Freakonomics caught everybody by surprise. The primer I have enjoyed most, the one I would recommend to a friend who wanted to learn how economists think about the world right now, is one that passed almost completely unnoticed into the stream, perhaps because it is so slight. But then, that is the point of Economics: A Very Short Introduction, by Partha Dasgupta, the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at Cambridge University. October 21, 2007--The Road to a System that Works (Without Shooting People) So “mechanism design” has entered the language of everyday economics, as described by newspapers. It is a truism that most Nobel Prizes are won by researchers who tumble onto their topics in their twenties and often have all but nailed them down by their late thirties. What is Leo Hurwicz, at 90, the oldest person ever to be recognized in any discipline, doing on the citation for this year’s prize? October 14, 2007--An Enormous Pearl, a Little Giant, a Vanishing Hand The “visible hand” of hierarchical corporate management began disappearing almost as soon as Alfred Chandler made it famous. That doesn’t diminish Chandler’s achievement much; he was the greatest of business historians (nor that of James W. Michael, probably the most influential buisiness editor of the times). Get ready, though, for organizational economics. October 7, 2007--The Generation of 1958 Fifty years ago last week, the Soviet satellite known as Sputnik roared into orbit around the Earth, catching the United States completely by surprise. The real watershed came the next year, however, when Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. September 30, 2007--From Zig to Zag Michael Perelman, professor of California State University at Chico, author of The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression, and 16 other cranky and original books, is the most completely unrepentant populist economist around, a regular Howard Zinn for the economics class September 23, 2007--The Road since “The Mechanics of Economic Development” No single event in the last quarter century has been more transformative of technical economics than a lecture series about the nature of economic growth delivered by Robert Lucas, of the University of Chicago, to a skeptical audience in Cambridge, England, in December 1985. Here’s the how and why. September 16, 2007--The Second Century of the Boston Evening Transcript What remains of The Boston Evening Transcript? Once prized as “the country’s thought of Boston” devoted to literature, science, art, music, Harvard, the wool market, genealogy and a half dozen other peculiarly Boston institutions, the afternoon daily gave up the ghost in 1941. But certain of its traditions linger on — at The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and Economic Principals. September 9, 2007--In Which Those Troublesome “Black Swans” Find a Champion in Economics Global warming alarmists may be right for the wrong reasons. A pair of papers by Harvard University’s Martin Weitzman make the case that the standard treatment of rational expectations equilibrium conceals a hidden assumption, which, if unwarranted, means that economists confront a future permanently more uncertain than previously believed — a “thick tail” of probabilities, in the language of the bell curve, instead of the comforting thin tail of a normal distribution of probabilities, which describes possibilities that are evermore small. September 2, 2007--A Most Useful Citizen At 95, Daniel Aaron is going strong. He first appeared on the national stage in 1951 with Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives, a portrait-gallery of eight middle-class reformers — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Edward Bellamy, Henry George, Henry Demarest Lloyd, William Dean Howells, Thorstein Veblen, Brooks Adams (and their generally unreliable executor, Theodore Roosevelt) — that conveyed, as he described it, a vision of ”a serene and humane society where ‘costs’ would be calculated under a different accounting system and ’success’ be weighed on a different set of scales.” But it is a little book that he edited in 1952, America in Crisis: Fourteen Crucial Episodes in American History, that is of current interest. August 26, 2007--Putting the (Molecular) Clock on Development For the first hundred and fifty years or so after 1788, when James Hutton firmly […] August 19, 2007--Dealing with “Sympathetic Bias” Blame for the crisis in real estate lending seems to be zeroing in on the […] August 12, 2007--Sink or Swim? Economic Principals is a news-oriented weekly, not a newspaper or a book review. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History […] August 5, 2007--Science, Economics and the News These are dark times for newsfolk. The Wall Street Journal has been sold to Rupert […] July 29, 2007--Good Old Cal? The year was 1940. Germany had invaded Poland. The United Kingdom and France had declared […] July 15, 2007--Swept Away by the River of Money The Wall Street Journal, which the heirs of the Bancroft family are in the process […] July 8, 2007--Everything You Wanted To Know (But Were Afraid To Ask) About Two-Sided Markets The task facing a certain kind of entrepreneur these days is no more unfamiliar than the engineering of a successful […] July 1, 2007--The Upside of Bubbles Towards the end of his life, the economist Charles P. Kindleberger tumbled with great excitement on to […] June 24, 2007--From Mister Johnson to Beta, and Back Again For the last few years, my favorite way of keeping tabs — very loose tabs — on the heavy waves […] June 17, 2007--More European Voices The supply of economics commentary is growing. Europe’s Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) […] June 10, 2007--The Daily Diary of the Impartial Spectator Weighs a Buy-out Even before I spent the weekend at the meetings of the History of Economics Society, […] June 3, 2007--Flung On Their Own Catapult When Kenneth Sokoloff died at 54 last month, of liver cancer, the economic history profession […] May 27, 2007--Outside, Inside The world’s largest association of heterodox economists meets next weekend in Salt Lake City. […] May 20, 2007--Kornai’s Choice One of the most striking features of the years after the collapse of communism has […] May 13, 2007--Turn, Turn Alfred Chandler, the distinguished historian of business, died last week at 88, in Cambridge, […] April 29, 2007--The Un-Marshall Plan The death last week of Boris Yeltsin called to mind an important truth — policy never gets made in a vacuum. The US seriously […] April 22, 2007--Clark Medal to Susan Athey In was in 1995 that Susan Athey made her debut as an economist, in The New York Times. […] April 15, 2007--And Besides, the Wench is Dead When the Pulitzer Board this week awarded its gold medal for public service to The Wall Street Journal for its “creative and comprehensive probe” into backdated stock […] April 8, 2007--Beyond Coordination and Control Is… Transformation By any measure, Michael Jensen is an interesting figure. After graduating from […] April 1, 2007--In the Schumpeter Wing Joseph Schumpeter died in 1950, a few weeks before his sixty-seventh birthday, and since then, […] March 25, 2007--When the Attorney General Was a Mensch The resolution of Harvard’s Russia scandal last year sheds some light on the recent unpleasantness […] March 18, 2007--Ceci N’est Pas Un Blog After five years, people still ask, “What do you envisage for your blog?” The short answer is, “It’s not a blog; […] March 11, 2007--Fifty Years On The year 1957-58 was a good one for global self-understanding. Taking a leaf from the […] March 4, 2007--New Pathways, Dense Thickets It is difficult to imagine more of a hornets’ nest than the etiology of mental illness. So when Cornell University economist […] February 25, 2007--What’s News A new online Internet news magazine has appeared, covering 22 Asian nations from Afghanistan to […] February 18, 2007--Take a Deep Breath So federal legislation to establish carbon caps and emissions trading is suddenly all but a […] February 11, 2007--Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Knowledge “A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment […] February 4, 2007--On Being Invisible The United State filed a complaint last week against China with the World Trade Organization. […] January 28, 2007--Unintended Consequences Monday evening, most Public Broadcasting System stations in the United States will broadcast The […] January 21, 2007--A Week, Long Ago, in Biarritz We take for granted now so much of what is new: personal computers and cell […] January 14, 2007--Closed Standard: The Secret of The Wall Street Journal The Boston News Bureau and What Became of It “Kicking over Waste Baskets and […] January 7, 2007--Ten Years Later The American Economic Association met for three days over the weekend in Chicago. In some respects, its meetings remain […] December 31, 2006--The Year in Economics There’s a toplofty headline if ever there was one. You would have to range freely over all the globe to make good on […] December 24, 2006--On the Influence and Authority of Conscience (and Other Considerations Not Found in Any Economics Textbook Duncan Foley, of New School University, in New York, is very close to being a […] December 17, 2006--Bad Apples and Good Bets Something like 150 years have passed since the emerging industrial economies of Europe began systematically […] December 10, 2006--It Isn’t All in Adam Smith There’s nothing like staking out an extreme position to get the juices flowing. Take Harvard […] December 3, 2006--Brave New World? A rare decline in November sales, its first in a decade, last week landed Wal-Mart […] November 26, 2006--Settling the New Continent A pair of top political reporters, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, quit The Washington Post […] November 19, 2006--The Zigzag of Politics There are many theories of how shifting involvements among generations might create a cycle in […] November 12, 2006--The World is What? Popular books in recent years have offered some striking vocabulary for talking about the changes […] November 5, 2006--The Light Gray Curse So Harvard University has taken away Andrei Shleifer’s endowed chair and its privileges — stripped […] October 29, 2006--CSI: Economics A friend asked at lunch the other day what I thought accounted for the phenomenal success of Freakonomics. […] October 22, 2006--Value Added In the run-up to the Nobel Prize in economics, usually someone is willing to go out on a limb. A few days after dark horse […] October 15, 2006--The Realist When economists gathered in 2001 at Columbia University to honor Edmund Phelps with a festschrift, […] October 8, 2006--Two Models for Newspapers The newspaper industry has been experiencing a series of profound technological shocks, especially in America. […] October 1, 2006--Separatism, Defeated College students have returned to the classroom. Still selling briskly, at least in Cambridge, Mass., […] September 24, 2006--How to Fly a Helicopter and Other Useful Skills When I was a boy, a “Butter and Egg” man lived down the street in […] September 17, 2006--A Cautionary Tale It was a somber August day in 1995 when Fischer Black died of cancer. He […] September 10, 2006--A Story with Everything but an Ending It’s a commonplace in science that we care about the last word, not the first. […] September 3, 2006--Boston and New York Driving back to Boston from the Midwest, I am always struck by the extent to which geography is destiny — specifically, […] August 13, 2006--Supply-side Economics at 25 When I bought some stamps at the post office the other day, around the corner from former […] August 6, 2006--The Most Happy Nation? Of all the national economic transformations that began during the 1980s — China, Brazil, Russia, […] July 30, 2006--Gauging the Costs of the War Like a lot of Americans this week, I have been reading Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco: […] July 23, 2006--Breakdown! People in Boston are talking about the Big Dig. Many of them have been inconvenienced […] July 16, 2006--At the Summer Institute The first week of the Summer Institute of the National Bureau of Economic Research unfolded last week in Cambridge, Mass., mostly uneventfully, 80 papers given over six days, the first of some 365 papers to be presented […] July 9, 2006--The $2 Billion Men Ever wonder how Chicago got to be the city that it is today? Not because it’s situated […] July 2, 2006--Would You Like a Belt with Those Suspenders? I’ve been reading the annual report of the Bank for International Settlements. Economic Principals generally […] June 25, 2006--The Best Economics Columnist You’ve Never Heard Of Slate, the online magazine, has been celebrating […] June 18, 2006--Nine Different Ways to Make a Living “Overcoming what we intuitively ‘know’ requires disciplined analysis.” That is the underlying strategy of Yale […] June 11, 2006--Choosing the Right Pond “Out of His League,” was the headline on the Financial Time’s May 14 post-mortem on […] June 4, 2006--On Re-inventing the Public Realm As Harvard University gathers for its graduation ceremonies this week, an eight-member committee […] May 28, 2006--That People are the Same and Different A major challenge in the current age of globalization has to do with deciding how […] May 21, 2006--When Auction Theory Was Put to Work What has been the most single exciting province of applied economics these last dozen years? […] May 14, 2006--Stuff, Fluff and Tristram Shandy Towards the end of The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of […] May 7, 2006--Broader, Deeper It was a big step last week when the executive committee of the American Economic […] April 30, 2006--Hail and Farewell It is always good to learn that some new citizen has joined the ranks of […] April 23, 2006--Back To the Future? […] April 16, 2006--In Which, At Last, We Meet, Perhaps, Andrei Shleifer’s Evil Twin Missing in the controversy over Harvard’s Russia scandal has been any attempt to explain, much less place a favorable […] April 9, 2006--Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht and Other Citizens of the Twentieth Century The National Bureau of Economic Research held its 21st Annual Conference on Macroeconomics last week […] April 2, 2006--A Case of Protesting Too Much A lot of finger-pointing is going on amid the bitter disappointments stemming from the US […] March 26, 2006--Secrets of Silicon Valley If you look carefully on the back way into Stanford University, you can still see the barn on Stock Farm Road that is all […] March 19, 2006--The Turbulent World of News […] March 5, 2006--Gangsta-nomics Clarifying the impact of Harvard University’s Russia scandal and the Andrei Shleifer/Lawrence Summers affair on […] February 26, 2006--Those Three Weeks in March […] February 19, 2006--Big Box Ecology […] February 12, 2006--Warming Up for Life David Colander is a member of a rare and valuable tribe — an insider to […] February 5, 2006--The Annals of Evil: From One Extreme to the Other, with Pretty Good Results That didn’t take long. After a decade of astonishing growth — from zero to $10 […] January 29, 2006--When the Watchdog Doesn’t Bark A persistent riddle of the Andrei Shleifer case has been the failure of three of […] January 22, 2006--The Tick-Tock Should Harvard University president Lawrence Summers travel this week to the World Economic Forum in […] January 15, 2006--What Has Changed in Economics? When the American Economic Association met in New York City in December 1965, the sessions […] January 8, 2006--What Next for “The Quiet Revolution?” […] January 1, 2006--If You Believe This… (A Litmus Test for Credulity) Among those who work for newspapers, the inevitability of bias is a widely acknowledged problem. […] December 25, 2005--Down, Not Out To a certain strand of argument, the news last week from Dover, Pennsylvania, was a […] December 18, 2005--Nobody’s Perfect The great promise of economics is that it enables us see things relatively whole. Sometimes, […] December 11, 2005--In Which Economics Enters a Period of Critical Self-Examination
What’s behind the spate of public criticism of the work of a number of prominent […] December 4, 2005--On Post-Modern Corruption […] November 27, 2005--Remembering the Old Colony […] November 20, 2005--New Kids on the Block […] November 13, 2005--Leading Indicator The arrival last month of Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth […] November 6, 2005--It’s Worth What You Pay For It The proposition behind Economic Principals always has been that all those who are interested in the production and distribution of economic ideas should have access to its journalism, especially those around the world who are far removed from economics’ major research centers, and the lively conversations that go on around them. October 30, 2005--Feeling the Elephant, Coming to Blows […] October 23, 2005--Special Run-Amok Edition: The Fed, Columbia University October 16, 2005--The Complementary Task […] October 9, 2005--When the Wolf Is Real […] October 2, 2005--Fast Forward […] September 25, 2005--Reversal of Fortune? […] September 18, 2005--Rooting for Leipzig […] September 11, 2005--In the Turbulence Lab […] September 4, 2005--Wanniski-ism, RIP […] August 28, 2005--The Riddle of August […] August 21, 2005--The Virtual Corridor […] August 14, 2005--Who Wants to Know? (Or, Why This Is Not a Blog) A lot of ink and pixels have been spilled recently over the relationship between journalism and blogging. As a working journalist who is frequently mistaken for a blogger, I have some ideas. August 7, 2005--Andrei and Rafael The last great […] July 31, 2005--The Great Can-Opener […] July 24, 2005--Front-Runner for the Fed? […] July 17, 2005--Up in Michigan […] July 10, 2005--The Best Kind of Help […] July 3, 2005--Highways for Africa? […] June 26, 2005--A Dinner Party is Not a Revolution […] June 19, 2005--What Happens Next? […] June 12, 2005--Third Summer in Iraq […] June 5, 2005--The Ever-Present Threat […] May 29, 2005--Adult on Board […] May 22, 2005--Paul Samuelson, Columnist Paul Anthony Samuelson turned 90 last week, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (his long-time employer) and McGraw Hill Co. (his long-time publisher) threw him a grand party in Boston. Some 400 of his friends from […] May 15, 2005--A Bigfoot Enters the Harvard Story
In the dénouement of the US government’s successful lawsuit against Harvard University for its failed Russia project in the 1990s, a scheduled conference again has been postponed, this time until June 2, while the various parties’ continue their four-month-long attempt to agree on appropriate damages. May 8, 2005--Down, Not Out […] May 1, 2005--How to Fight AIDS in Africa […] April 24, 2005--The Man Who Succeeded Gerschenkron […] April 17, 2005--Breaking the Other Monopoly […] April 10, 2005--The Best (Macro)economics Columnist There Is […] April 3, 2005--Housekeeping Matters […] March 27, 2005--A Theory of the Harvard Mess […] March 20, 2005--Dangerous Games […] March 13, 2005--The Two Traditions It is now […] February 27, 2005--Mr. Shoot-the-Moon […] February 20, 2005--Nature, Nurture and Politics […] February 13, 2005--On Gingrichism […] February 6, 2005--The Caretaker’s Hand One of the proudest names in American industry quietly entered the history books last week when, just shy of its 130th […] January 30, 2005--Why the Hurry? To understand the itch […] January 23, 2005--Writing History […] January 16, 2005--Who Is Minding the Store? […] January 9, 2005--“What Can You Tell Me That I Don’t Already Know?” […] January 2, 2005--Covering the Social Security Debate […] December 26, 2004--Same As It Ever Was: A Report to Readers […] December 19, 2004--Second Time Farce? […] December 5, 2004--The “Assigned To” Trial […] November 28, 2004--Gingering the Merchants of Life […] November 21, 2004--Two Houses, Alike in Dignity… The spectacle of four American presidents and one presumptive candidate for the office gathering last week in Little Rock, […] November 14, 2004--Rabbits Out of Hats? […] November 12, 2004--“A Narrow and Technical Issue” […] November 7, 2004--Eighteen Months Be careful what you want, goes the old saw. You just might get it. Had he been one-term president, George W. Bush might have […] October 31, 2004--The Situation in Iraq […] October 24, 2004--Confessions of a Swing Voter […] October 17, 2004--A Day in the Life of Ed Prescott […] October 10, 2004--And the Winner Is… The Nobel Prize in economics will be announced tomorrow, Monday, October 11, just before lunch in Stockholm. North […] October 3, 2004--The Sea Otter, and Other Cautionary Tales […] September 26, 2004--Who Cares About the Working Poor? I have been trying to imagine a world in which David Shipler’s new book, […] September 19, 2004--When the Wolf Is Real […] September 12, 2004--Meet the Siloviki Half a […] September 5, 2004--A Walk on the Beach […] August 29, 2004--The Really Interesting Question In thinking about political history, it helps to periodize. To the extent that you listen to any of the hoopla emanating from New York City this week about jobs, pay, retirement security, health care, education, energy and the environment, spare a moment to think back on a memo that Dick Cheney wrote nearly thirty […] August 22, 2004--Unraveling the Greenhouse Riddle […] August 15, 2004--Push Me, Pull You? […] August 8, 2004--Infectious Good […] August 1, 2004--Summer Housekeeping […] July 25, 2004--Strategic Thinking for Democrats […] July 18, 2004--A World Without Shims? […] July 11, 2004--Remembering Michael Kelly […] July 4, 2004--Judge Finds Against Shleifer, Hay and Harvard […] June 27, 2004--1932, 1968 and 1980 […] June 20, 2004--A Short History of America’s Foreign Wars […] June 13, 2004--The Birds of Berlin […] June 6, 2004--After Europe’s Civil Wars […] May 30, 2004--A Subtle National Obsession […] May 23, 2004--To Be or Not to Be? […] May 16, 2004--The Shifting Ideology of Adventure […] May 9, 2004--A Forest Grows in Toulouse […] May 5, 2004--Abundance and Fragility […] April 18, 2004--Two Cities, Two Tales […] April 11, 2004--Open and Closed […] April 4, 2004--Guilty Pleasures: The News From Home BERLIN — The day last week that that a mistrial was declared in the epic […] April 1, 2004--The Bigger Dig […] March 28, 2004--In the Shadow of the Old Bundestag At least on the surface, Germany is the last place you’d go to think about the economics of global integration. The nation seems hung-over from its miraculous reunification a decade ago, diminished by the growth in the membership of the European Union (ten new members on May 1), and, according to both the national and […] March 21, 2004--The Spanish Mechanism […] March 14, 2004--Cold War? Yes, But… BERLIN — Economic Principals had contended for a long time that another sort of Cold War began with events of 9/11. The 3/11 bombing in Madrid reinforces this view. Whoever is to blame, it is further evidence that a new ideological struggle has replaced the old one. March 7, 2004--Money Talks BERLIN — The eight-month election campaign has begun in the United States. What are […] March 6, 2004--Don’t Just Do Something Situations don’t come much trickier than the one facing the U.S. Congress. The president’s plan to “personalize” the safety net that is the Social Security system is in deep trouble. But that doesn’t mean Democratic legislators are off the hook. As the Washington Post editorial page observed […] February 29, 2004--The Short Run and the Long Run […] February 22, 2004--Two Failed Walls […] February 15, 2004--Architect of the Public Household […] February 8, 2004--Mountain of Difficulties […] February 1, 2004--A Doktor in the Haus […] January 25, 2004--A Short History of the Other MIT The dramatic growth of specialization in the 20th century has produced some spectacular examples of professions taking advantage of the intrinsic complexity of things to cut sweet deals for themselves. These don’t last forever, but the forces of competition can take a long time to bring them back into line. January 18, 2004--The Color of the Flower […] January 11, 2004--Leading Indicator Eight years ago, when economists gathered in San Francisco for the […] December 28, 2003--Our Marshall This is not an age for statuary. As a rule, we honor not the doer […] December 21, 2003--Texas Against the World It’s been quite a year. The biggest change was the transformation […] December 14, 2003--Understanding Bob Bartley Robert L. Bartley […] December 7, 2003--Reality Check Like nearly everybody else I know, I read New York Times columnist Paul Krugman twice a week. He is overbearing. He […] November 23, 2003--Detective Stories […] |