EconoSpeak

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...

 Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union.  I previously posted here about this looming anniversary, arguing that the large troop buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border along with the many strong demands being made by V.V. Putin of various parties reflected his high awareness of this looking anniversary, which has been only barely mentioned or noticed in the western media.  As it is, the anniversary passed without an invasion. Not only that there are...

 Somewhere I never saw a full version of this classic, Its a Wonderful Life, but here it is on Christmas Eve, an official Christmas classic. I was always suspicious of it, from all I had heard, but it looks less worth than I had heard. I mean, really, local bank owner gets into real estate problems? And the well-intentioned owner is somehow some great hero? He is offered total control of local monopolies. Heck, today's WaPo noted that the real hero is the wife, played by Donna Reed, Indeed...

 I know, I know, my part of this blog is increasingly resembling an obituary column. But, heck, people I know who are conneted to econ keep dying, although this one was not as well known as others. Sharon Lyn O'Hare was a former student of mine 40 years ago at James Madison University, and while she never finished her PhD at Boston College, she was a decade later a colleague of mine in our department for five years. After then she left academia and ended up holding a high position in the...