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The crisis was 2008, in 2015 - almost eight years later and the gap between where we would have been and where we are is huge and not closing. The implied unemployment rate is very high, labour force participation is very low, and the increase in wages in the second quarter was the lowest in 25 years. Before this turmoil, the U.S. economy was in better shape than Europe or Canada, but not strong.
The trouble is that the risks that are being hedged very well by new financial securities are financial risks. And it appears to me that the real things you want to hedge are real risks, for example, risks in innovation. The fact is that you'd like companies to be able to take bigger chances. Presumably one obstacle to successful R&D, particularly when the costs are large, are the risks involved.
Human artifacts not only include material structures and objects, such as buildings, machines, and automobiles, but they also include organizations, organizational structures like extended families . . . tribes, nations, corporations, churches, political parties, governments, and so on. Some of these may grow unconsciously, but they all originate and are sustained by the images in the human mind.
Human capital analysis starts with the assumption that individuals decide on their education, training, medical care, and other additions to knowledge and health by weighing the benefits and costs. Benefits include cultural and other non-monetary gains along with improvement in earnings and occupations, while costs usually depend mainly on the foregone value of the time spent on these investments.
One must be wary of the view that these loose and diverse coalitions represent a new form of globalized participatory democracy. The dissent industry is largely a product of the Internet revolution. Inexpensive, borderless, real-time networking provides advocacy non-governmental organizations [NGOs] with economies of scale and also of scope by linking widely disparate groups with one common theme.
Building on the public's unwillingness to act on principle in support of market solutions to apparent problems, whether real or imagined, these interest groups secure arbitrary restrictions on voluntary exchanges and, in the process, secure rents for their members while reducing both the liberties and economic well being of other members of the economic nexus, both domestically and internationally.
In the old days, land was important as the giver of all things. That period is gone now. Technology and brainpower are all that matters and yet conflicts over land, specially one like on the India-China border, that yields nothing, continue. This is a burden of ancient history that we continue to carry. If tomorrow there is settlement on planet Mars, we will begin to worry if others are interested.
Rip Van Winkle would be the ideal stock market investor: Rip could invest in the market before his nap and when he woke up 20 years later, he'd be happy. He would have been asleep through all the ups and downs in between. But few investors resemble Mr. Van Winkle. The more often an investor counts his money - or looks at the value of his mutual funds in the newspaper - the lower his risk tolerance.
Which countries contain the most peaceful, the most moral, and the happiest people? Those people are found in the countries where the law least interferes with private affairs; where the government is least felt; where the individual has the greatest scope, and free opinion the greatest influence; where the administrative powers are fewest and simplest; where taxes are lightest and most nearly equal
What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.
Once we admit that there is room for newness - that there are vastly more conceivable possibilities than realized outcomes - we must confront the fact that there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no particular justification for why things are the way they are. Any number of arbitrarily small perturbations along the way could have made the world as we know it turn out very differently.
As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them.
Not since the days of the Hitler Youth have young people been subjected to more propaganda on more politically correct issues. At one time, educators boasted that their role was not to teach students what to think but how to think. Today, their role is far too often to teach students what to think on everything from immigration to global warming to the new sacred trinity of 'race, class and gender.'
Like other magicians, Obama has chosen his distractions well. The insurance industry is currently his favorite distraction as scapegoats, after he has tried to demonize doctors without much success . . . . Obama even gets away with saying things like having a system to 'keep insurance companies honest' - and many people may not see the painful irony in politicians trying to keep other people honest.
As the bus slowed down at the crowded bus stop, the Pakistani bus conductor leaned from the platform and called out, "Six only!" The bus stopped. He counted on six passengers, rang the bell, and then, as the bus moved off, called to those left behind: "So sorry, plenty of room in my heart - but the bus is full." He left behind a row of smiling faces. It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it.
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.
She is a reflection of comfortable middle-class values that do not take seriously the continuing unemployment. What I particularly regret is that she does not take seriously the intellectual decline. Having given up the Empire and the mass production of industrial goods, Britain's future lay in its scientific and artistic pre-eminence. Mrs Thatcher will be long remembered for the damage she has done.
As long as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a space ship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed.
Thus we seem to be on the verge of an expansion of welfare economics into something like a social science of ethics and politics: what was intended to be a mere porch to ethics is either the whole house or nothing at all. In so laying down its life welfare economics may be able to contribute some of its insights and analytical methods to a much broader evaluative analysis of the whole social process.
We must not forget either that some of the system's resilience is due to its ability to coopt people with money and prestige. It is easy to get sucked right in. Those who grasp the system are also likely to be talented and capable of doing well within the system. Who will turn down a lot of money? Who doesn't have an ego? A compromise here, another one there, and pretty soon, you are sucked right in.
Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power. The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other
The individual man, in introspecting the fact of his own consciousness, also discovers the primordial natural fact of his freedom: his freedom to choose, his freedom to use or not use his reason about any given subject. In short, the natural fact of his "free will." He also discovers the natural fact of his mind's command over his body and its actions: that is, of his natural ownership over his self.
Mobile phone technology can help to bring financial services to the 80 percent of African women who do not have a bank account and bolster the growth of the world's poorest continent. It's not just about empowering women, it's about economic growth. Unless we can make access to finance easier for women in their businesses, we will be missing out on a significant portion of growth within our economies
In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.
If liberals can seize our guns because they are dangerous, we have no chance of holding on to our cars and our homes. The total number of accidental fatalities (the majority of which are hunting accidents) of all types of firearms is infinitesimal compared to the number of fatalities from car and home accidents. More children die from playing with cigarette lighters than from playing with loaded guns.
Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities - modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn't whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It's whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.
Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that 'Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.' And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, 'Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' So which is it - stupidity, ignorance or insanity - that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?
South Korea from a country that had relatively little primary education became close to universal literacy in the course of 25, 30 years, in a way trying to replicate what Japan had done earlier. They were learning to some extent from the Japanese experience too. So I think, in a sense, the East Asians were following a path, which all other countries including South Asia could follow but chose not too.
We noted the psychological problems facing many of the returning from Iraq veterans - of the 700,000 returning veterans, more than a 100,000 have been diagnosed with problems, but the numbers are likely to get worse, as those with multiple deployments return. We should have valued the loss of life as a result of these suicides, using the same procedures we used for the loss of those who died in combat.
The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of an entire nation are [being] undone and erased.... No Agent Orange or steel pellet bombs, no napalm, no toxic chemicals: a new phase of economic and social (rather than' physical) destruction has unfolded. The seemingly neutral and scientific tools of macro-economic policy constitute a non-violent instrument of recolonization and impoverishment.
Take Washington, D.C., which spends over $10,000 per student for education whose student achievement would be dead last if Mississippi chose to secede from the Union. Suppose Washington gave each parent even a $5,000 voucher - that wouldn't mean less money available per student. To the contrary, holding total education expenditures constant, it'd mean more money per student remaining in public schools.
The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies - not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor rewriting of the social contract.
Capitalism is a powerful producer of output, crisis-mongering on the left notwithstanding, and this too makes the system seem to have a lot of promise. This is why it is so important to agitate against the system in good times and bad. We can't depend on some super crisis to get folks thinking but instead have to focus on all of the contradictions of the system which cannot be ultimately resolved by it.
A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people.
The great paradox of the civil rights revolution is that instead of enforcing and expanding equality before the law, the revolution created differential rights based on race, gender and, any day now, sexual orientation. The great liberal revolution, centuries in the making, that brought forth equality in law has been overthrown. In its place we see rising a new feudal legal order of status-based rights.
I am convinced that it is impossible to expound the methods of induction in a sound manner, without resting them upon the theory of probability. Perfect knowledge alone can give certainty, and in nature perfect knowledge would be infinite knowledge, which is clearly beyond our capacities. We have, therefore, to content ourselves with partial knowledge - knowledge mingled with ignorance, producing doubt.
As far as many statistical series that are related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory. The world of today is as different from the world I was born in as that world was from Julius Caesar s. I was born in the middle of human history, to date, roughly. Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.
To get a person's real opinion, ask what she thinks everyone else believes... If people truly hold a particular belief, they are more likely to think that others agree or have had similar experiences. [People] tend to assume that other people have had life histories at least somewhat similar to their own. When we talk about other people, we are often talking about ourselves, whether we know it ourselves.
Experience, however, shows that neither a state nor a bank ever have [sic] had the unrestricted power of issuing paper money without abusing that power; in all states, therefore, the issue of paper money ought to be under some check and control; and none seems so proper for that purpose as that of subjecting the issuers of paper money to the obligation of paying their notes either in gold coin or bullion.
Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions
The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialist promise us, and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice: it must be the freedom of economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right
In the midst of the East Asian crisis, there were choices. One choice would have been to encourage countries to implement a bankruptcy law that could have threatened the interests of the lenders. Workers' rights should be a central focus of development. But nowhere did issues of workers' rights, including the right to participate in the decisions which would affect their lives in so many ways, get raised.
Italy may well be the main problem. It has benefited most from the euro by having been able to get the euro interest rate instead of what otherwise would have been its own. That would be much higher because Italy has been accumulating so much debt. In the past, Italy has inflated away its debt. The virtue of the euro is that Italy can't do it alone. A tight ECB policy wouldn't permit that to happen again.
we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.
The greatest danger to an adequate old-age security plan is rising prices. A rise of 2% a year in prices would cut the purchasing power of pensions about 45% in 30 years. The greatest danger of rising prices is from wages rising faster than output per man-hour.... Whether the nation succeeds in providing adequate security for retired workers depends in large measure upon the wage policies of trade unions.
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.
So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against (Einstein). He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing?
One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties.
Three-fifths to two-thirds of the federal budget consists of taking property from one American and giving it to another. Were a private person to do the same thing, we'd call it theft. When government does it, we euphemistically call it income redistribution, but that's exactly what thieves do - redistribute income. Income redistribution not only betrays the founders' vision, it's a sin in the eyes of God.
I believe in helping our fellow man in need. I believe that reaching into your own pockets to help someone in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into somebody else's pockets to help your fellow man in need is despicable. And, or those of us who are Christians, I'm very sure that when God gave Moses the commandment Thou Shalt Not Steal, he did not mean ...unless you get a majority vote in Congress.