Comparing our times with those gone by can be useful – but only if we remember what made those days different than our own. When we forget those differences then our analysis is fruitless. Attempts to understand economic inequality in 21st century America by comparing it with its ancient precedents inevitably runs befoul this truth.Over […]
I normally devote Notes From All Over posts to off-site material worth reading. This post shall be slightly different. As my computer access is is at the moment limited I shall use this post to relate a few short thoughts on the issues of the day that would have otherwise have been published in separate posts, and […]
Ashwin Parameswaran has an excellent piece up over at Macroeconomic Resilience on the intersection of economic innovation and technological progress, crony capitalism, complex system dynamics, and unemployment. To quote from the post’s conclusion: The Cause and Impact of Crony Capitalism: the Great Stagnation and the Great Recession Ashwin Parameswaran. Macroeconomic Resilience. 24 November 2010. Due […]
Over the last few weeks there has been quite a bit of hand-wringing over China’s rare earth elements monopoly. For those unfamiliar with the subject, rare earths are a group of 17 elements that can be found together in bastnasite and monazite deposits. Rare earths are necessary to create a wide range of products: cell […]
Philip Klein of the American Spectator explains why: Republican’s Fiscal Fantasyland Philip Klein. American Spectator. 10 October 2010. Republican candidates will discuss the need to cut waste from the budget vaguely while ruling out cuts to entitlements and defense spending. To demonstrate how absurd this is, I put together this pie chart breaking down the […]
This month Slate has published an unusually thoughtful series on America’s rising income inequality. The series comes in ten segments, all penned by Slate columnist Timothy North. The Great Divergence: Trying to Understanding America’s Income Inequality I recommend the series to my readers without reservation, and note that Mr. North’s sections on the United State’s […]
It does not matter who you are or where you come from. In America, if you study long enough and work hard enough you can become anything. Every American child has heard this story. It is a shame it is not true. Earlier this year the OECD published a report on the various economic policies […]
…but then I found my way to the Financial Times. Within a day of the story breaking they have published ten quality articles on the subject and collected them all into one “FT in Depth” special feature. Consider me impressed. I had planned on writing a post concerning the intervention’s relationship to Japan’s internal politics […]
This week’s “intriguing passage” comes by way of Ashwin Parameswaran’s blog on macroeconomics, Macroeconomic Resilience. In his post “Evolvability, Robustness, and Resilience in Complex Adaptive Systems” Parameswaran finds reason to quote economist Joseph Berliner’s book, The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry. Said Berliner: “Adam Smith taught us to think of competition as an “invisible hand” […]
Today’s “intriguing passage of the week” takes issue with the economic theorems of David Ricardo. One of the founding fathers of modern macroeconomics, Mr. Ricardo published his opus, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, more than two centuries ago. Despite its age On the Principles of Political Economy is a treatise with few […]
