Wealth of Nations, Wolf on Jacobs, Krugman on Warsh
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, calls Jane Jacobs, who died last week, “a self-educated intellectual of astonishing originality.” He devotes most of his article, “National wealth on city life’s...
View ArticleEconoman Captures the Knowledge Economy: David Warsh on Knowledge and the...
David Warsh’s engaging new book Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations tells two stories. One story, beginning with Adam Smith, covers the history of thought about the relationship of economic growth and...
View ArticleWhere Did The Wealth of Nations Come From?
Adam Smith (1723-1790) published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, also the year of the American Revolution. Both the Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence sprang from a context, the...
View ArticleIt Takes Government to Create Markets: Alex Marshall’s The Surprising Design...
When the US Army blasted into Baghdad in 2003, expelling Saddam’s Baathist regime, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expected “free markets” to pop up all over. Instead, he got looting, murder, and...
View ArticlePiketty’s Model of Inequality and Growth in Historical Context, Pt 1
In Thomas Piketty’s doomsday model, slowing of growth in the twenty-first century will cause an inexorable increase in inequality. Piketty is not the first to propose a grand model of inequality and...
View ArticleDead Empires: How China May Overtake the U.S.
“The earth is the tomb of dead empires, no less than of dead men.” Thus wrote the American economist and journalist Henry George in his 1879 worldwide bestseller, Progress and Poverty. Adam Smith had...
View ArticlePutting Land and Power Back into Economics
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote, “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent...
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