Increasingly, it looks like we’re going to find out. Europe continues to kick the can down the road, and kick us along with it. As for the U.S., there seems to be zero enthusiasm for an aggressive policy to stimulate economic growth. Republicans want the economy to get worse, the President says that, when times…
Search Results for: ECONOMIC GROWTH
The Grandfather of all Tick-Tocks
“Il Tick-Tock di Tutti Tick-Tocks”? “Tick-Tock Mania”? “Tick-Tocks R Us”? “Tick-Tock Around the Clock”? Anyway, over at the New York Times, Matt Bai has yet another Tick-Tock on that mother of all non-events, the Obama-Boehner non-budget deal, that died aborning back in July. This lemon has already been squeezed pretty dry, but Bai still gets…
James Q. Wilson good, James Q. Wilson not so good, Part II
Yesterday I had mostly good things to say about the late John Q. Wilson; today, mostly not so good, taking off from his May 22, 1995 review of Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War in the New Republic (subscription only). Confronting FDR, the liberal god himself, Wilson doesn’t…
Why work? Why marry?
Over at New York magazine, Jonathan Chait has a nice take on various discussions floating about the blogosphere about 1) why the white working class is so fucked up and 2) why they won’t vote Democratic. The notion that the white working class is fucked up has been pushed earnestly by AEI-style conservatives who seem…
Henry Kissinger: An unnecessary evil
Henry Kissinger has added yet another sin to his already grievous record, in the form of a fat tome, ponderously titled On China.* Because there is no way that I’m going to put another penny in Dr. K’s pocket, I’ll quote extensively from Michiko Kakutani’s review in the Times. Kakutani calls the book” fascinating, shrewd…
Thoughts on the current discontents
What’s happening in the Middle East? Damfino. Robert Darnton thinks it’s 1789. Ann Applebaum thinks it’s 1848. If Ann’s right, things ought to be pretty tight all around the Mediterranean around the year 2150 or so. Take that, Caesar Augustus!1 But what about the home front? Well, I had hoped to comment on Obama’s State…
Income inequality, muddle or myth? Or just plain irrelevant?
Brad DeLong, the grasping hands guy, with whom I have previously tussled on a number of occasions, recently ran a piece, Is America Today Really No More Unequal Economic Class-Wise than It Was in 1960?, attempting to sort out recent claims regarding prior claims regarding an alleged increase in economic inequality in the world today….
Democrats behaving badly. Again!
Oh yeah, it’s self-flagellation time around the Literature R Us corral, and my comrades in arms have supplied me with an awesome array of whips, knouts, and other assorted scourges, painful even to look upon, much less touch. But, well, duty calls. Yo, Joe Biden! Shut up! “They’re killing people,” bellowed/whined Uncle Joe back in…
What if they gave a Cold War, and nobody came?
I spend a lot of time grasping at straws these days, and Politico has kindly sent a couple wafting my way of late, viz., The U.S. Can’t Force the Rest of the World to Support Ukraine. Here’s Why. and A Forecasting Model Used by the CIA Predicts a Surprising Turn in U.S.-China Relations, said surprising…
Roy Jenkins was part of the solution, and part of the problem. Was that part of the problem?
Roy Jenkins had a fascinating life. Born in 1920 in Abersychan, a mining community in Wales, he came from a strongly “Labour” family—his father, Arthur Jenkins, was a leading official in the Union of Mineworkers, eventually becoming a member of Parliament. Jenkins himself was elected to Parliament at the age of 28, working his way…