Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy
Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong
Harvard Business Press Review, 2016
xi + 223 pages
Cohen and DeLong are well-known economists, but they indict their fellow economists for an overemphasis on theory. Away with models that have little relation to reality, our authors say. Instead, we need to graph a simple lesson about the source of America’s prosperous economy.
Donald Trump has announced his economic advisory team and unveiled a preliminary broad brush economic program that his prospective administration would implement. He has promised to fill in the details of his America First Economic Plan as the election approaches. So how should we grade his choice of advisers and his economic plan at this point?
No matter who wins the presidential election next month, the media and the political class will whoop up the result as another triumph of American democracy. Regardless that the winning candidate’s path to power was paved with lies and shenanigans, we will be assured that “the system works.” But the only certainty at this point is that America will have another bad president for the next four years.
In the introduction to a talk I gave at the Mises Institute this year, I noted how, in the early part of the twentieth century, a convergence of interests between social progressivists and ideological empiricists led to the publication of the Flexner Report and the subsequent enactment of licensing laws.
The War on Cash continues to gain momentum within the circles of the politically influential.
Bloomberg yesterday posted an article on a new book titled The Curse of Cash, written by Kenneth Rogoff former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and current Harvard University economist.
Critics of capitalism from Marx to Bernie Sanders claim that the free market exploits the working class for the benefit of the rich; and even some “classical liberals” of recent vintage argue that capitalism needs to be supplemented by a guaranteed basic income or the like.
James Fenimore Cooper, America’s first national novelist, lived during our first great groundswell of political populism during the Jacksonian era. Egalitarian language and imagery fanned enthusiasm for democracy. Cooper saw serious dangers from this impulse toward majority rule as a panacea for every complaint, and that without strict limits on what majorities were allowed to decide, it was inconsistent with the equality of unalienable rights our founders proclaimed.
Today in Philadelphia, in a speech focused on military policy, Donald Trump criticized Hillary Clinton as “trigger-happy” and as a politician focused on “destruction” over diplomacy.
It has been almost eight years since former U.S. President George W. Bush warned the world that “without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic and a distressing scenario would unfold.” The government’s response to the crisis was a $700 billion rescue package that would prevent U.S. banks from collapsing and encourage them to resume lending, which was soon to be followed by a series of Quantitative Easing (QE) packages injecting money into the economy.
