In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
There s a common script about about artists who live hard and die young. It says that the combination of a self-destructive lifestyle and art means that they were in some way fully alive, in a way that would be impossible, say, for some happily married husband and father, living in the suburbs and working as Continue reading Orwell: It is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully…
The great historian David McCullough (1933-2022) won the Pulitzer prize for biography twice, for his books on Truman and John Adams, but he also wrote best-selling books on the Panama Canal, the Johnstown Flood, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wright brothers, and others. Here are his comments in a 2002 interview with Bruce Cole on the Continue reading To Write Well is to Think Clearly : David McCullough…
Is new technology that replaces a worker a good thing? We have a tendency, it seems to me, to believe that most previous inventions turned out to have overall net social benefits, but to be worried that all future inventions will instead have overall net social costs. Philipp Ager and Davide Coluccia tackle the question of Continue reading Did the Sewing Machine Reduce the Workload for Women? The…
For teachers of economics, one familiar metaphor about tariffs is rocks in the harbor. Companies and countries go to considerable trouble and expense to build docks and interconnected transportation structure, and even dredge the harbor to assure smooth transit for vessels. Having done all that, it would seem peculiarly illogical to then dump rocks into Continue reading Rocks in the Harbor:…
My tradition on this blog is to take a break (mostly!) from current events sometime in mid- August. Instead, I pre-schedule daily posts based on things I read during the previous year about three of my preoccupations: economics, editing/writing, and academia. With the posts pre-scheduled, I can then relax more deeply when floating on my Continue reading When Happiness Was Invented The post When…
It is of course impossible to predict the effects of new AI technologies on total economic growth in a precise way, but there are strong reasons to believe that the effect will be modest for a decade or two, anyway. Charles Jones Jones explores some of the reasons in AI and Our Economic Future, in Continue reading Growth Effects of AI: Modest for a Decade or Two, At Least The post Growth Effects…
The US unemployment rate was 4.2% in June, which is low by historical levels. Nonetheless, lot of workers, and perhaps expecially young workers right out of college, are experiencing the US economy as a situation where it s hard to get a job. For example, in the The Job Market for Recent College Graduates, I reviewed Continue reading The Not-so-Fluid, Low-Hire, Low-Fire Economy The post The…
I have been the Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives since the first issue in Summer 1987. The JEP is published by the American Economic Association, which decided back in 2011–to my delight–that the journal would be freely available online, from the current issue all the way back to the first issue. You can download individual Continue reading Summer 2026 Journal of Economic…
Back in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, the European Union passed the European Green Deal, setting a goal of having the EU be climate-neutral in its emissions by 2050. Here in 2026, 20% of that 30-year time window has now passed. The government of the EU have a reputation for strong action toward these types Continue reading The EU Green Deal: How s It Going? The post The EU Green Deal: How’s It…
Lots of students come to college looking for what I sometimes call a golden ticket major that is, choosing a major that will assure future prosperity and status. Lots of first-year students show up declaring that their career path is to become a doctor, but a certain percentage of them make other plans after getting their Continue reading Major Stereotypes The post Major Stereotypes first appeared…