These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.
[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite.
Programmers have a saying: "garbage in, garbage out.
[W]hat possible purpose does this lashing-out serve? Will activists be shamed into recovering their previous enthusiasm? Will Republicans stop their vicious attacks because Obama is lashing out to his...
And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pai...
The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.
Businesspeople are not used to thinking about closed systems;economists are.
The next time you hear businesspeople propounding their views about the economy, ask yourself. Have they taken the time to study this subject? Have they read what the experts write?If not, never mind...
In 1953 Time magazine, declaring that the real news of the nation’s political future and its economic direction lies in people who seldom see a reporter, sent one of its contributing editors, Alvin Jo...
I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.
Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, no...
One is reminded of the old joke about the centipede who was asked how he managed to coordinate his 100 legs : He started thinking about it and could never walk properly again.
I joked back in the summer of 2011 that what we really need right now is a fake threat of alien invasion that leads to massive spending on anti-alien defense
As long as there are no routes back to full employment except that of somehow restoring business confidence, he pointed out, business lobbies in effect have veto power over government actions: propose...
There's another element in the euro crisis, another weakness of a shared currency, that took many people, myself included, by surprise. It turns out that countries that lack their own currency are hig...
In the scientific world, the syndrome known as 'great man's disease' happens when a famous researcher in one field develops strong opinions about another field that he or she does not understand, such...
Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don't remember it.
The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.
The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in...
These senior claims were supposed to be very low-risk; after all, how likely was it that a large number of people would default on their mortgages at the same time? The answer, of course, is that it w...
