Most of the time I take my neighborhood for granted.  Walking home from the subway last Saturday, though, the neighborhood was looking positively Biblical.Specifically, it reminded me of the eleventh chapter in Genesis (Old Testament again, for those of you keeping track), in which the citizens of Babel decide to build a tower that will […]

John Steele Gordon is one of the most interesting economic historians around.  This piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal looks at some of the most important changes going forward in the United States today.  You may not agree with his answers, but I think you’ll find that his questions make you think.

Remember, remember, The Fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot!I only got to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day once when I was a kid, but it was definitely the Best Holiday Ever.Three hundred and five years ago today, a deranged Roman Catholic named Guy (aka Guido) Fawkes and a group of accomplices were caught in the […]

Well, it’s not your real birthday, and I’m not Marilyn Monroe, but it is the first anniversary of your election – and the first time the voters have spoken since then.Welcome to the rest of your term.This isn’t the happiest day you’ve had in the White House.  Last night’s election returns weren’t what you’d hoped […]

Japan’s August 30 election, which swept the ruling Liberal Democratic Party out of power, changes everything—perhaps.

Why IKEA is just as bad as Wal-Mart.

Before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, economic theory trumped economic history; no longer. But what does that history tell us?

Germany has undergone five different political systems in the space of a few generations: monarchy, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, the separation into democracy in the West and real socialism in the East, and finally reunification. It seems reasonable at first, given such tumult, to ask whether Germany is now a normal country twenty years […]

“Normal” tends not to be an adjective that individuals or nations cherish for themselves. Who wants to be merely normal, average or typical when one can be exceptional or superior? Germans do, and it is not hard to understand why. As a united polity only since 1870, Germany’s bloody odyssey from the Franco-Prussian War to […]

The improbable journey of a theory that helped wreck the economy.