The ongoing industrial revolutions in China and India are the most remarkable and wonderful things seen in recent economic history. The future looks relatively bright.

Income inequality in America has taken an enormous leap upwards since the mid-1980s, leaving us today with a society that is as unequal as America was in the pre-Great Depression Gilded Age.

Did the Federal Reserve fall down on the job and fail to do what it could to stem the Great Depression? Yes. Would things have been better if had there been no Federal Reserve at all? Definitely not.

JOHN Maynard Keynes's "Tract on Monetary Reform" may be his best book. It is certainly his best Monetarist book...

MANY praise Cuba for having such a high level of social development for a country whose economy is in such sad shape. But back in 1957 Cuba was a developed, not an underdeveloped country--it ought today to look like Italy, Spain, Portugal, or Puerto Rico, and it doesn't. Thanks to the dictatorship of the Castro brothers.

HERE at Berkeley, I'm often asked why I have such an allergic reaction to Noam Chomsky. Here's one of many reasons, but I think it alone is sufficient...

AND why no honest policy can keep all five of them on board and win elections in America today...

USUALLY I am a great fan of Barbara Ehrenreich. But I did not like her book "Nickel and Dimed." I did not like it because of its politics--or, rather, because of its anti-politics, because of its political passivity...

AT the end of Jane Austen's early-nineteenth century novel, "Pride and Prejudice," the hero Fitzwilliam Darcy proposes to the heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and Elizabeth's mother goes berserk...

ECONOMISTS should never forecast changes in long-term interest rates, the next move in the stock market, or whether there is about to be a recession. We have very good theories to explain why all three are more-or-less completely unforecastable.

IF they had any shame, they would have long since fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization and taken up lives of anonymous service to others...

JEFF Faux and I are talking past each other because we disagree on what the world we live in is like...

WAS NAFTA the right place for Mexico to put its development and reform energy in the 1990s? I have a hard time enthusiastically saying, "Yes, it worked out very well"--and I am a card-carrying neoliberal.

 

Beware--this is a huge file...