Category: Economics

A number of years back I had the privilege of serving as a graduate intern in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. Two things I took away from that experience working directly for Andy Marshall were: 1) devote most of your energy to discovering the right questions to ask; and 2) once you zero in…

I first read this classic ten plus years ago during winter break as an undergraduate economics major. Not much sunk in back then, which says more about me than it does about the skilled author, Robert Heilbroner. The author turns a two hundred year history of rather recondite theories and inaccessible economic tomes into a…

The distinguishing feature of this book is the massive data set that undergirds the surprisingly few and rather conventional-wisdom-affirming findings. The authors have aggregated literally centuries of price, exchange rate, debt, export, current account and real GDP statistics for sixty-six countries representing over 90% of global GDP, which is presented in a dizzying array of…

This isn’t a book; it’s an education. And I can guarantee that if you’re a serious, committed, thoughtful reader the purchase price is but a tiny fraction of the value that Bernstein will deliver to you with “Against the Gods.” The following review may seem overly detailed and specific, wordy beyond measure, but that’s mainly…

Now in its sixth edition, “Mania, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises” was first published by Charles Kindleberger in 1978. How times have changed over those thirty plus years — at least that is the striking conclusion from this latest iteration of the enduring classic, which argues that the world of financial crises…

John Maynard Keynes once famously quipped: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” The underlying question in Nicholas Wapshott’s” Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics” is whether or not Keynes himself is now one of those defunct economists. And,…

Writing on New Year’s 2013, this whole “fiscal cliff” mess and the hullabaloo with the “Buffett rule” on taxing the wealthy got me curious about federal taxation in America. Not just where we are today, but where we’ve been and what the second and third order consequences have produced. It’s all well-and-good for Paul Krugman…