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 […]
The following series is an attempt to make some sense of that most peculiar of subjects: human civilization. My interest lies in the dynamics of civilized societies: their material needs and limitations, the recurring patterns of geography, social organization, and cultural complexity upon which they are built, and the type of interactions that define their […]
Economic historian Angus Maddison provides us with our first “Intriguing Passage of the Week”: It is interesting to speculate on India’s fate if it had not had two centuries of British rule. There are three major alternatives which can seriously be considered. One would have been the maintenance of indigenous rule with a few foreign […]
Earlier this month Antoly Karlin (of Sublime Oblivion) wrote an interesting post outlining several possible trajectories India may take in the near future. A fair amount of the post is devoted to comparing India with Asia’s other billion-person behemoth, China. The two giants are likely to remain engaged in intense strategic competition for the next […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. THE REPUBLIC The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market: Implications for Employment and Earnings David Autor. Center for American Progress. April 2010. In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That Catherine Rampell. New York Times. 21 June 2010. Financial Revolving Doors: […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. As I have spent much of the last two weeks away from the blogosphere, this one is a bit smaller than usual. THE REPUBLIC Commentator’s DiseaseFred Reed. Fred on Everything. 11 June 2010. Mr. Reed identifies what is perhaps the greatest flaw of our pundit […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. A lot of good material has been published this week. I am a bit on the busy side, so the usual long winded responses will be replaced in favor of one-sentence summaries. THE REPUBLIC How Trillion Dollar Deficits Were Created New York Times. 9 June […]
Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a Haitian acquaintance of mine. The topic of our conversation had turned towards the corruption endemic to many underdeveloped countries, upon which point he said: “When I came to America, I did not know what the word ‘bribe’ meant. We don’t have these things in Haiti. In Haiti, […]
I often find myself frustrated with the lack of historical perspective present in contemporary political discourse. History is something pundits have little use for– why bother when one can blame society’s problems on the politicians one wishes driven out of office? This proclivity to see evil only in the machinations of one’s political opponents is […]
