What is the welfare state? Highway robbery? A necessary evil? A good idea? All three perspectives are out there and deserve addressing …
What is “the economy” and how did Charlie Chaplin misunderstand it?
Oh no, not again, more theory about what economists do! Don’t worry; today it’s about Charlie Chaplin and broken glass too. The other day I read a letter to the editor in the FT titled, “Economics in just one sentence” (in the February 25, 2014 paper version). It dealt with the question at hand – […]
Squaring the Circle: Growth, Employment and Inequality
I need to confess to the reader that I have problems, but not solutions. Specifically, there are three problems. First, the rate of growth is decreasing in several countries: certainly in Europe, but also in Japan (my generation can still recall the years of the Japanese “miracle”), in the U.S. (what today is considered growth […]
No One Really Believes that Honesty Is the Best Policy
Ernst & Young’s 2013 Fraud Survey has yielded some ugly results. 60% of the 3,000 board members and managers surveyed around the world said that the pressure to report positive financial outcomes had increased in the last 12 months. This is a delicate way of saying that owners and senior managers are prepared to do […]
Economic Policies Move in Cycles
To say that the economy moves in cycles doesn’t seem like a great discovery at this point. But here I am referring to the cycles that occur in economic policies. They are not new. In the 70s it seemed that inflation was inevitable and necessary to reduce unemployment, but then we had the worst of […]
