EconoSpeak

In a radio lecture he gave two and a half months before he died in 1969, Theodor Adorno explored the paradox that people do not know what to do with their free time and thus no longer even like it because "[t]hat state of freedom has been refused them and disparaged for so long." People are generally more familiar with the Kris Kristofferson / Fred Foster version of the same idea from their song "Me and Bobby MeGee":Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loseNothin' ain't worth...

 Incoming GOP Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has just announced his choice for Secretary of Natural Resourxes, Andrew Wheeler, a longtime coal lobbyist, who seved as Trump's EPA director in the latter part of his term. He has an utterly abysmal environmental record, so bad I cannot think of a single thing he did that I can applaud or even ust vaguely approve ot. It was just simply all bad.He combined blocking new rules such as limiting mercury emissions into water and many others, with...

 For those of you of a branch of Orthodox Christianity still using the Julian calendar, such as the Russian branch, Merry Christmas! I am tempted to comment on the situation in Kazakhstan, but I think we do not know what is going on there yet, so not now.Instead somehow I have been thinking about something that has something to do with economics, but I am going to look at it in other fields, namely the relationship between classicalism and revolution.  That this is complicated in that in...

The blurbs on first few pages of Martin Hägglund's This Life are so surprisingly accurate that it would be hard to describe the book with an original superlative. "Monumental!" "Powerful!" "Important!" "Electrifying!" "Profound, thoughtful, compelling, and insightful!" Those blurbs were not idle puffery. All that is left for me to add is that I liked it very much. Oh, just one more thing...Hägglund's premise is that spirituality, and consequently freedom, is grounded in our mortality....

 Somewhere on the web recently, I saw this anecdote:Asked whether Ringo was the best drummer in the world, John Lennon replied: he's not even the best drummer in The Beatles.Happy New Year, everyone!

The subtitle of T. R. Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population advertised its inclusion of "remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers." In volume I of Capital, Marx did not mention William Godwin's name.  One might say, rather, that Marx studiously avoided mentioning Godwin. He did, however, engage in a sustained disparagement of Malthus -- particularly his essay on population. This alone would make Marx's silence on Godwin remarkable.Consider the...

 In today's Washington Post, intel columnist David Ignatius had a ten question multiple choice quiz about what will happen in 2022. He provided his own answers at the end, effectively forecasts.  Many I agree with and some, speculative about tech developments and such like, I have no opinion on.  However on two very important ones I think I disagree with him, if not overwhelmingly so.One of these was about prospects for Iran and the US and others to put back together the JCPOA nuclear deal...

 On Tuesday, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the International Memorial Foundation, the oldest human rights group in Russia, founded in the final years of the Soviet regime by Andrei Sakharov, to investigate crimes carried out by the Stalin regime. They were officially labeled a "foreign agent" in 2016. They are being dissolved for sllegedly failing to follow through on the many requirements that an organization labeled that is supposed to do.On Wednesday a lower court...

I may have scoffed in the past at the notion of "the marketplace of ideas" but I am coming around to think that maybe it's not such a bad metaphor. Back in the days of primitive economy, families, clans, tribes produced and consumed their own subsistence. If a surplus was produced beyond what was to be set aside for contingencies, it might be given as a gift to a neighboring group, setting up the obligation of a reciprocal gift.Eventually, gift exchange was supplemented and/or supplanted by...

 Something I have been dong for several years now is serving as Senior Coeditor of the Fourth Edition of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, with the original one published back in 1894 in London (my coeditors are Matias Vernengo and Esteban Perez). As part of this effort, a multi-year project, I have been reading cover-to-cover, the entire Third Edition, coedited by Steve Durlauf and Larry Blume, which came out several years ago.  It is 15 volumes, just shy of 15,000 pages, with about...