Bad Ideas Flourish Because They

Economists Don't Usually Make Good Speculators, Because They Think Too Much.

If We Discovered That, You Know, Space Aliens Were Planning To Attack And We Needed A Massive Buildup To Counter The Space Alien Threat And Really Inflation And Budget Deficits Took Secondary Place To That, This Slump Would Be Over In 18 Months. ... There Was A Twilight Zone Episode Like This In Which Scientists Fake An Alien Threat In Order To Achieve World Peace. Well, This Time, We Don't Need It, We Need It In Order To Get Some Fiscal Stimulus.

The Obama Campaign Seems Dangerously Close To Becoming A Cult Of Personality.

As An Economics Professor I Am By Nature Inclined To The View That The Truth Isn't Out There, It's In Here - That Usually You Learn A Lot More By Thinking Really Hard About The Data Than You Do By Sniffing Around For Supposedly Inside Information.

Europe Is Often Held Up As A Cautionary Tale, A Demonstration That If You Try To Make The Economy Less Brutal, To Take Better Care Of Your Fellow Citizens When They're Down On Their Luck, You End Up Killing Economic Progress. But What European Experience Actually Demonstrates Is The Opposite: Social Justice And Progress Can Go Hand In Hand.