I swear, Milton Friedman is spinning in his grave... The debate over at the website of The Economist is even more horrifying than I thought it would be, as Luigi Zingales simply does not appear to have thought any of the issues through at all. I think that his views are what Steve Sheffrin calls the...

He misses two important threads. Had John McCain won last November, very few of the New Deal denialists would be out in public--instead, the Republican legislators and their tame intellectuals would be enthusiastially rallying behind McCain's tax cut-based Keynesian fiscal stimulus package right now...

Now that the stock market has fallen below 7,000, there's lots of talk about "another Great Depression." But to fall as far as stocks did in the 1930s, it would have to plunge to 4,000 or even to 2,000. I'm still unpersuaded that this recession is worse than what the U.S. endured f...

A very smart middle-aged Washington economic policy bureaucratic hand emails me his reaction to the New York Times's "When Will the Recession Be Over?": Whoa. Just realized. Kevin A. Hassett is now sounding more coherent and sensible than William Poole. Dear god. Not only does the Emperor have no cl...

From an article about the Edsel: total new car sales in the United States declined 31% from the 1957 to 1958 model years Gosh, and we managed to get out of that without spending a trillion dollars.  Wow. Postscript: Sometimes it is hard for fiction to top reality.  In vacation, the movie-makers tr...

What relevance and use does a work like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848), "Manifesto of the Communist Party" have to twenty-first century economists today? ---- Remember: Two hard copies, and one soft copy emailed to me at delong@econ.berkeley.edu...

Townhall: Economic Miracle Walter Williams ... Imagine you are trying to understand a system consisting of six elements. That means there would be 30, or n(n-1), possible relationships between these elements. Now suppose each element can be characterized by being either on or off. That means the num...

Some guy once said that Hegel said somewhere that the World-Spirit leads all things to happen, as it were, twice--but that Hegel forgot to add that the first time it happens is tragedy, the second time farce. When Rudolf Hilferding endorsed the "Treasury View" and vetoed Wladimir Woytinsky's plans f...

Part of my continuing attempt to think through the Decline of the Chicago School--here I try to argue that Milton Friedman tried too hard to sell a stable nominal money growth rule as a laissez-faire policy, and thus undermined the ability of his students' students to actually say anything coherent ...

Public pension funds are in the tank: Something will have to change. Without a restored boom in stock prices, public pension funds will have a very hard time meeting their obligations. Either governments will have to increase taxes – perhaps dramatically – or force public employees to endure the...