Two very different articles, but converging on the same phenomenon from different angles: http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/phillip-longman/demography-and-economic-destiny and http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1282575644-AJmsry10blzaALPgqo51cQ In the first, the author links the current economic downturn, induced by over-consumption financed by easy credit, to the more systemic social condition pervading Western societies, namely falling birthrates and longer life expectancies. The political upshot of a demographic bulge of older people is [...]

Tags: Adulthood, Culture, Economics

Do the math: “There is simply a growing recognition that Greece has got to default,” banking analyst Dick Bove told CNBC.com. “The riots in the streets showed the decision to repay the debt was not going to be made by the people in Germany, France and Switzerland—it’s going to be made by people in Greece [...]

Tags: America, China, Debt, Economics, War

If we take by the “End of History” Prof. Fukuyama’s sometimes misunderstood thesis that liberal capitalist order has no theoretical and ideological opponents left, and that the only future adjustments are within the bounds of democratic capitalism, what happens when the goose that lays the golden eggs lays smaller and smaller eggs? I think the financial crisis is re-ordering the [...]

Tags: Culture, Economics

Good article from the Atlantic. Some choice excerpts: Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the [...]

Tags: Culture, Economics

After trying, very briefly, to keep up with it regularly for a (very) short period of time, I fell back on only reading TakiMag when links were sent to me by friends. Today I was directed to a bit by Dylan Hales by a short retort from Caleb Stegall on FPR. The issue seems to [...]

Tags: Economics, Front Porch Republic, Nation State, Political Philosophy

Friedrich List believed deeply in German nationalism and saw the dominance of British liberalism and Smithian economics as the arch-nemesis of future German greatness. He visited America in the early nineteenth century and stayed in Pennsylvania for some time, becoming an avid reader of Hamilton whose economic thought on national development heavily influenced him List’s critique [...]

Tags: Adam Smith, Economics, Liberalism

Here’s a shocker: Public finance is a matter of morality. The most fundamental currency when we engage in international finance and inter-temporal trade is our word. With our money we make and trade in promises. The systems constituting America’s debt market are not trading in money per se, but legal contracts. Options are legal contracts [...]

Tags: Economics, Philosophy

David Brooks’ sensitivity to how our culture and economics integrate is a vital point for any renewed American conservatism.  The conservatives of the post World War 2 era were dedicated to the proposition that the republican (small ‘r’) commercial society of the United States needed conservation against the collectivizing tendencies of the administrative/redistributivist state of [...]

Tags: Conservatism, Culture, David Brooks, Economics

From the UofC news office: Roger B. Myerson, the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics Monday “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.” Myerson earned one-third of the prize along with colleagues Leonid Hurwicz of the University of Minnesota and Eric S. Maskin of [...]

Tags: Economics, Nobel Prize, The University of Chicago

You would think the neighborhood that was home to the birthplace of free market economics would have a little more common sense when it came to matters of the local economy and businesses. You would be mistaken. The Maroon has a piece detailing the latest ‘controversy’, in which Hyde Park residents are apparently “decrying” the [...]

Tags: Economics, Hyde Park