Mike Judge’s 2006 movie masterpiece “Idiocracy” painted a future in which differential fertility between the middle classes and the underclass in 500 years produced a U.S. population of knuckle-dragging intelligence, allied to a popular culture whose debasement had reached its ultimate destination. Meanwhile, with the first successful cloning of a human embryo by the Oregon […]

In an essay “Nietzsche’s marginal children” in The Nation this week, Corey Robin takes the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek to task, claiming that he replaced the ordinary consumer as driver of the economy by the ultra-rich, so that we are all subjected to the whims of financial Nietzschean supermen. I’ve always found Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy […]

The choice of Brazil’s Roberto Azevedo to lead the World Trade Organization, over the reported opposition of both the EU and the United States, is an indication that protectionism, which had appeared thankfully quiescent in the early years of the current recession, is now a major global danger.  Since a renewed downturn is inevitable when […]

The brouhaha about the spreadsheet error in Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s 2010 paper “Growth in a time of debt” brings home an important economic truth. Not that Reinhart and Rogoff were in error; their overall conclusion is clearly true, not to say obvious, and correction of the error in their spreadsheet merely softened the […]