RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Bush broached the important subject of the nation’s dependence on imported energy. Unfortunately, his prescription for change embraced trivial or harmful approaches and overtly rejected the…
Category: Other
Does success spring from effort or luck?
People’s opinions differ on whether success in life is the result of individual effort or circumstances beyond anyone’s control. Tony Judt’s masterful “Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945” notes that surveys repeatedly indicate a majority of Americans believe how…
Look beyond Fed’s chairman
The structure of the United States Federal Reserve is complicated, and the nuances of how it makes policy are even more complex. Thus, most news stories focus on the Fed chairman’s personality or his utterances rather than substantive questions. The…
Let’s lose phone-tax hang-up
Changing policies that no longer achieve their original goals is hard. Failing to make such changes when needed, however, harms society as a whole but it seldom causes controversy. No better example of this is the fact that Americans are…
Tone down ecosystem debate
How people view resource scarcity often depends on how distant they are from the resource. Flying over Brazil from north to south a few days ago certainly drove that lesson home for me. The problem of tropical deforestation is real.…
Most charity tax breaks don’t aid poor
Unintended outcomes often reveal underlying principles. This is certainly true in the responses to Congress’s temporary increase in the proportion of income that can be excluded from taxation through charitable gifts. Intended as an incentive to help the hurricane-battered Gulf…
IT empowers regular folks
The information technology revolution of the last 25 years is not “scale neutral.” In other words, it does not affect big and small companies equally. In fact, this wave of technological innovation probably helps small organizations proportionately more than it…
Some myths about the boomer effect
The media are saturated with stories about the impending retirement of the baby boom generation. Given that the first boomers turn 60 this year, such stories are timely and describe an important phenomenon. More than 80 million people will reach…
Railroad loan challenges Republican identity
It is easier for a political party to maintain a coherent economic philosophy when it is a minority than when it is in power. Nothing illustrates this better than federal subsidies for the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad. The issue…
Inverted yield curve: Threat or just a blip?
The curve is inverted, the curve is inverted. The yield curve finally inverted last week, at least slightly. The New Year will show whether that occurrence was a trivial blip or a reliable warning. As economic indicators go, the yield…