LAS VEGAS -- Gone is the polite Georges St-Pierre. He's been replaced by a guy who has demons in his head. If anything shows St-Pierre means business about wanting to rip Nick Diaz's head off down the road it was the fact that he sat down with the media for close to an hour on Wednesday. That's...

Non-economists are often baffled by the disagreements among professional economists on the issues of the day--from international trade to the minimum wage, from economic development to health policy. I think the best way to understand the source of these disagreements is to recognize that there...

Simon Johnson tells a simple and compelling story: the U.S. has been afflicted by a version of the crony capitalism that has been the scourge of so many emerging markets, except that Wall Street has bought its influence and power not by bribery but by shaping the ideology of our times: In a pr...

The New York Times has discovered to its horror that Manhattan's manhole covers are made in India under working conditions that would be considered appalling by most of its readers. Seemingly impervious to the heat from the metal, the workers at one of West Bengal’s many foundries relied on s...

The NYT describes how Chinese auto parts makers are beginning to conquer the world. You wonder once more how it is that China has become so successful in export-oriented manufacturing. The "fundamentals"--human and physical resources, macreoconomic stability and the exchange rate--are part of t...

Paul Krugman frets that we are about to witness the mother of all currency crises in emerging markets, and I am afraid that he is right. As I wrote in my previous post, the financial crisis in the developing world has just started and there are indications that it will get a lot, a lot worse. W...

What should a World Bank economist know about governance and growth? That was the intriguing question with which Brian Levy entrapped me into writing a short note on governance. (To my credit, I was not the only one so gullible: he managed to rope in Daron Acemoglu, Francis Fukuyama, Doug North...

Sort of, says Christopher Hayes in a very well-written and very interesting piece in The Nation. He says orthodox economists are a close-knit group and are quick to penalize those among them or from outside who overstep the boundaries. Here is an excerpt: So extreme is the marginalization of het...

You read the title, and you say "here he goes again." OK, I admit it. I have been a bit obsessed with industrial policy lately. But there is a reason. I have been writing another paper on the subject, as an input to the work of the World Bank's Commission on Growth and Development. The Commissio...