A dystopia is a utopia in reverse. The post-1980 era is likely to be remembered as a free market dystopia–a headlong compulsion to throw away the mixed economy that was built on the ruins of depression and world war in favor of a marketized society. This compulsion has been ground into the lenses of the […]
Economic Policy
Posted inWorking in America
Employee Voice in Competitive Markets
The new global economy demands new models of worker regulation.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Up Against the Wall Street Journal
O n March 11, 1993, the Wall Street Journal published a long editorial-page article called “The Industrial Policy Hoax.” It was by Karl Zinsmeister, a scholar associated with the American Enterprise Institute who in the past had written mainly about U.S. social policy. The article, which was a summary version of a much longer essay […]
Posted inAmerica and the World
Privatization in Eastern Europe: The Tunnel at the End of the Light
I n the former Soviet empire, the collapse of Communism created an opportunity for the victims of one failed utopian ideology to find another. The evaporating Soviet system left an ideological vacuum that was quickly filled as legions of Western advisers arrived to help translate the goals of political democracy and a market economy into […]
Posted inAmerica and the World
Beyond Shock Therapy: Why Eastern Europe’s Recovery Starts in Washington
Laissez faire was planned. —Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation,1944 T he collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe demonstrated the failure of a command economy. The subsequent crash in output and employment induced by “shock therapy” has suggested the limits of laissez faire. Rather than replace the excesses of communism with excesses of capitalism, it is […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Liberals and Public Investment: Recovering a Lost Legacy
T he emerging debate over the efficacy of public investment– a debate the Clinton administration seems certain to accelerate– has a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Among the staples of economic discourse then were warnings that the United States was suffering from what many called “economic maturity” […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Who’s Bashing Tyson?
L aura D’Andrea Tyson’s appointment to chair the Council of Economic Advisers received savage treatment from some of her professional colleagues. According to Peter Passell of the New York Times, “jaws dropped” in academe at the announcement. Passell went on to describe Tyson as “trendy” and a “polemicist.” And the addition of Princeton’s Alan Blinder […]
Posted inBooks
Can Economists Save Economics?
Economics is what economists do. –Jacob Viner T he trouble with Professor Viner’s delicate evasion is that economists no longer agree about what they do, or even whether it is all worth doing. Critics outside the profession long faulted economists for a host of sins: their deductive method, their formalism, their over-reliance on arcane algebra, […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Saving Disgrace? More on Savings
F red Block and Robert Heilbroner, in “The Myth of a Savings Shortage” (TAP, Spring 1992), want to persuade us that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no scarcity of savings in the U.S. economy today. They say that the present national savings rate is as high as ever; that it plays no depressing […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Saving Disgrace? More on Savings
F red Block and Robert Heilbroner, in “The Myth of a Savings Shortage” (TAP, Spring 1992), want to persuade us that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no scarcity of savings in the U.S. economy today. They say that the present national savings rate is as high as ever; that it plays no depressing […]
