One of the bon mots I remember from The Economist, from the days when I used to read it, is their definition of a radical: "someone we disagree with." Well, by that standard, I am less and less of a radical with almost every issue of the magazine. The magazine's latest Economics Focus column rep...

Ian McEwan is one of my favorite novelists, and when I picked up a copy of his Enduring Love in Heathrow on a recent transatlantic flight, I thought at first it was a new book. It turns out that it was published in 1997, with a film version in 2004. It is a beautiful book. I don't know if McEwan...

(Warning: This is a long and wonkish entry, aiming at self-comprehension, and the product of one too many long plane ride.) The Stolper-Samuelson theorem is a remarkable theorem: it says that in a world with two goods and two factors of production, where specialization remains incomplete (plus a...

by a daughter who wishes to remain anonymous, impersonating her dad OK, I am on the plane to Turkey with my two daughters and not even the incessant and loud snoring of the guy behind me can dent my excitement. I can't push the miracle that just occurred in Euro 2008 out of my densely-packed, e...

I was late to the opening session of the International Economic Association Congress, so I got to hear only the last bit of Guillermo Calvo's presidential address. But I was in time to hear his bottom line which is that financial crises can hit you regardless of whether you are a saint or a sinn...

A "loyal reader" writes Martin Wolf of the FT has written a whole article arguing that: '... higher food prices have powerful distributional effects: they hurt the poorest the most' without even a mention of the basic economics in your September post on food prices: 'The real answer of course i...

Avinash Persaud makes some excellent points and has some very useful suggestions. A key point that I have not seen made elsewhere: since the whole point of financial regulation is to counteract market failures in financial markets, it makes no sense to base regulation on the prices that those s...

I can't seem to get off this topic. This time my excuse is Maggie McMillan of Tufts, who rebukes me for having missed an opportunity to point out an important contradiction in the empirical literature surrounding the question of what a rise in food prices does to the world's poor. Maggie, who...

Bob Kuttner spends some time in Denmark and has wise things to say about the welfare state in Denmark and advanced countries in general: Reading Adam Smith in Copenhagen -- the center of the small, open, and highly successful Danish economy -- is a kind of out-of-body experience. On the one han...

Here is the video of a talk I gave last month at the annual meeting of the Turkish-American Scientists and Scholars Association (TASSA). The title of my talk: Why Do Some Countries Remain Poor While Others Grow Rich? The answer: I wish I knew.

The South African National Treasury has just put on its web site all the papers that were completed during a two-year project that I was involved in (along with a long list of other economists and social scientists). The papers run the whole gamut from straightforward research exercises to deta...

I am off to Milan this afternoon, first to talk to students at Bocconi university, and then to take part at a panel in a public conference on Governing Globalization. So I have been reading about recent economic performance in the EU, especially within the Eurozone, which will complete its first...

by Kevin P. Gallagher[1], guest blogger Negotiators continue to work desperately to achieve a breakthrough in the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round. Their goal is to get an agreement by the end of 2008. Developing countries should pull the plug on this moribund round until rich countries can...

My good friends Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian (along with Pratap Mehta) have written a piece in the FT which takes Larry Summers to task for having expressed views on reforming globalization with which I am broadly in agreement. They write: The liberal economic order of the last several ...

The rise in food prices and the costs it generates have been aggravated, some say, by policies of import liberalization and subsidy removal which the World Bank and economists advocated around the developing world in the 1980s and later. If developing country policies supporting food crops had ...

A former reader from China e-mails me saying that he can no longer access my blog. I wonder if that is a general problem. If you live in China and have been able to read this blog recently, can you kindly post a short comment or send me an e-mail? UPDATE: Don confirms that this blog is not acces...

'Cause let's face it, it didn't. It didn't boost investment and growth in emerging market economies; it led to increased volatility; and it played an important supporting role in the current subprime mortgage mess. I have a new paper with Arvind Subramanian which scrutinizes the reasons. From ...

Kevin Hassett, economics advisor to John McCain, is quoted today as saying: What really happens is that the economy grows more vigorously when you lower tax rates. It is beyond the reach of economic science to explain precisely why that happens, but it does. Now you can be excused for thinking ...

An e-mail from the assistant to an incredibly distinguished Harvard colleague (names deleted to protect the innocent): X [very distinguished Harvard professor] asked me to see if he can get on your calendar to have a lunch with him and Y [another distinguished professor] in the near future. I s...

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...

Look at the figure below, and then look at it again, and again, and again. It is the most telling picture about the U.S. political economy I have ever seen. It comes from Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels' new book, soon to be released. What it shows is the difference that the Pres...

In economics we think that happiness increases with lifetime wealth, albeit at a decreasing rate. But recent research on happiness fails to show a steep gradient between incomes and self-reported life satisfaction. But this work has typically focused on rich countries. In a recent paper, Angus ...

... is here. (Hat tip to Murat Iyigun.) The good news for economists is that their training allows them just as easily to minimize happiness as it does to maximize it. And no, I don't think that's what we have been doing all along.

I am teaching this stuff this week, and while I enjoy doing it and think it is important for students to know--no World Bank country economic memorandum is apparently complete without a sources-of-growth exercise--I wonder what purpose it really serves. These accounting exercises come in two fla...

Tom Palley wrote last week a review of my One Economics, Many Recipes, and some people have asked me to comment on it. On the whole, I have very little to complain about: Tom's review is gracious and probably gives me more credit than I deserve. But he does take me to task for pushing the "One...