Larry Summers, writing in the Financial Times last week, deplored the recent progression by the United States towards a “Downton Abbey economy” of extreme inequality. In fact, his criticism was in one respect ill founded: in terms of inequality, measured by a statistic such as the Gini coefficient, the United States is already close to […]

The Congressional Budget Office’s latest budget projections, released last week, estimated that 2.5 million people would leave the job market as a result of Obamacare. Immediately the two political sides engaged in verbal bickering, with Republicans saying the program would cause 2.5 million to lose their jobs, while Democrats claimed that 2.5 million people choosing […]

Last year made bears, emerging market investors, value investors and precious metals investors feel fools. The market went up continually, rising by over 30%, while stock values became ever more extended and precious metals prices headed steadily downhill in spite of an unparalleled orgy of money printing by the world’s central banks. This year, market […]

MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their new book “The Second Machine Age” (Norton, 2014) look at recent advances in machine capability and suggest that we are going through a second Industrial Revolution, with robots soon capable of taking over massive new areas of human activity. Their picture of a world with ubiquitous […]