Author: Ed Lotterman

Neither Clinton nor Trump will ruin our nation

Wildly exaggerated rhetoric is one of the most visible manifestations of how dysfunctional U.S. politics have become. Donald Trump clearly leads the pack of political candidates in this, but nonsensical and inflammatory claims bubble out of all sides of the…

Some get profiled, others get privilege

Some people pooh-pooh the existence of bigotry, but I myself, an elderly white guy, have been profiled against repeatedly recently — and it ain’t pretty folks! Yet often snap judgments based on cursory information, including appearance, are economically efficient. Social…

‘Terrorism’ isn’t going away, so how are we going to respond?

Every day in America, indeed around the globe, we collectively substantiate the thoughts of the great 19th-century Swiss military thinker Antoine-Henri Jomini. Indeed, if he and Osama bin Laden and Muhammed Atta were somehow looking across the great divide to…

Lessons of value of public investment have been forgotten

Fundamental trade-offs often are the same regardless of the scale of the organization in question. That thought hit me as I read an article about a county board meeting in a weekly newspaper back home while getting new tires on…

Modern CEOs should be glad they are not generals

John Stumpf, chairman and CEO of Wells Fargo, should be glad the legal principles the U.S. Supreme Court imposed on now largely exonerated Japanese World War II Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita are not applied to banking violations. If they were, Stumpf’s…

Gun noise debate speaks loudly to economists

Basic, and sophisticated, economic ideas can show up in the most real-world of situations, such as the ongoing bickering over a police gun range in Maplewood. Indeed, the case involves insights that win Nobel prizes. And while this situation affects…

Drug, medical device patents always pose knotty problems

The recent outcry about the pricing of EpiPens reinforces what we already know: Monopolies, particularly those that produce highly needed items, can do harm, even evil. But people have long recognized that there can be such a thing as a…