Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel and colleagues estimated that the earth might be able to sustain only 2 billion people by the end of the fossil fuel era. There are about 7.5 billion humans on the planet right now. It seems counterintuitive that there is nearly 4 times the sustainable population now living on the […]
When I was teaching, I used to joke with students that my classes were particularly demanding because I wanted to be sure they would succeed in the real world so that they could pay for my Social Security checks. Economists are supposed to believe that self interest is the dominant human motivator. I was only […]
The trouble with taxes is that no one likes to pay them. We want the services of government (good roads, public schools, national defense, a functioning court system, etc.) but would rather that someone else pay for these things. Yet taxation is necessary in modern society. Taxes are needed to fund what economists call public […]
Economists become famous by winning the Nobel Prize (technically the Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) or becoming public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith or Paul Krugman. But economists do not have to be famous to be important. Significant contributions come in many guises. The most important economist you […]
Robert Gordon’s 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth is a comprehensive history of “the U.S. standard of living since the civil war.” Gordon, a Northwestern University economist, details changes in consumption of food, clothing, shelter, and transport during a period when Americans experienced unprecedented improvement in quality of life. From brutally difficult, […]
I recently suggested that one solution to the crisis of our age is a shift in economic paradigms to one called Sustainable De-growth. To understand fully the implications of de-growth, we need to see where the phenomenon of growth comes from. A new book by Swiss economic historian Matthias Schmelzer provides deep insights into the […]
By the middle of the 20th Century the world had endured two world wars and a global economic depression unprecedented since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. With the defeat of various forms of Fascism in World War II, Soviet and Chinese forms of Communism vied with Democratic Market Capitalism to dominate the social and […]
In Part I of this series I explored the idea that the British vote to leave the European Union may be understood as a rejection of the economic foundation of the post-World War II era. The prevailing view has been that economic growth, primary reliance on markets to allocate resources efficiently, free trade, and global […]
A key issue in the upcoming (and seemingly interminable) Presidential campaign is supposed to be inequality. Major candidates are already talking about their solutions to the problem of increasing inequality in the U.S. Not surprisingly, most of the proposals are for tired prescriptions from the past. Democrats call for increasing minimum wages while Republicans talk […]
