Macro Flame War

There are lots of Great Internet Debates- over operating systems, video game consoles, or politics.  This last week, a similar sort of name-calling verbal brawl broke out among prominent macro-economists.  But that exchange featured long posts and highly technical arguments.  To simplify it for you, I will summarize the debate as the flame war it [...]

I time-traveled here from 1987 to say: You future people like weird things

(Continuing from my previous post, Does the  idea of sustainability survive sustained inquiry?)
Sustainability means preserving good things for future generations.  But as Bob Solow notes, we have no idea what the preferences of future generations are; we are likely to think they are weird.  After all, if someone in 1800 were trying to make people [...]

Does the idea of sustainability survive sustained inquiry?

In Bob Solow’s 1993 “Economist’s Perspective on Sustainability“, it survives as a “necessarily vague, but useful” idea.  He notes that sustainability has been conflated with other moral ideas about environmental protection, but that sustainability itself does not necessarily mean preserving species or wilderness.  Instead it is about “distributional equity” between the present and the future.  [...]

Democracy is Cool once more

After the American Revolution, democracy was the new thing that all the cool Americans were doing.
In the 1960’s and 70’s, a large youth cohort and a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age brought down the age of the median political participant.  Political policies and styles became more in tune with the youngest generation which is [...]

Epistemological Modesty and the Stimulus

David Brooks’ NYT column introduces a useful framework for evaluating the stimulus and economic policy.  In the short term this a welcome exhortation for less grandiose plans.  In the medium term, the stimulus and bailout packages will provide an excellent test for the potential of government planning.  I hope people will look back two and [...]

Self-Defeating Political Regimes: The Case of Inequality

We can all think of specific times when a political party has shot themselves and their base in the foot.  In fact, the last eight years may have been one of these times.
If we believe what most say, that power corrupts, then any party long in power will get old and corrupt.  There is no [...]

A Comedic Eulogy of Conservatism, From Inside the Coffin

You’ve got to read P.J. O’Rourke’s essay in the Weekly Standard, “We Blew It”.  The whole conservative and Republican establishments are trying to figure out what went wrong and what to do next; this is one of the best attempts at the former.
Excerpts:
“It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years–from 1954 [...]

Arthur Conan Doyle- Historian

The man remembered for Sherlock Holmes was not only a novelist, but a contemporary historian as well.
Searching for a good history of WWI in the Widener Library, I stumbled across his 5-volume his of the war. I decided to see whether his writing ability carried over to this new field.
One might expect that a [...]

An End to War: Don’t get even, get MAD

My last post was a lengthy attempt to explain how the two World Wars changed Europeans’ philosophy, making another major European war unlikely.
In this post I will propose a shorter, simpler explanation.
It’s all about technology.
Before World War One, the logistics of transportation and supply did not allow for large armies to take the field. [...]

The War to End All Wars

The memory of the Great European War, of millions of young men fighting and dying to win a few yards of shell-pocked mud, was enough to convince many that war was an ugly, irrational, pointless endeavor which civilized nations should have the good sense to avoid in perpetuity.  They hoped that something good could emerge [...]