Robert Fogel died a few days ago. He was a prominent figure in the academic economic history profession for five decades, virtually from the time he burst onto the scene with the publication of a polished-up version of his Johns Hopkins Ph.D. dissertation, Railroads and American Economic Growth, in 1964.

Nobel Laurette Joseph Stiglitz claims here that Japan is the model for how economic policy can get the world economy out of its current malaise.

Bob Higgs provides a nice tribute to economic historian Robert Fogel, a leading economic historian and cliometrician.

Nicholas Wapshott is the British journalist who produced 2011’s Keynes-Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, an entertaining but ephemeral tale of Cambridge in the 1930s (here is John Cochran’s less-than-flattering review). Wapshott sees himself as an important critic of “free-market orthodoxy,” but his grasp of economic theory, history, and policy is more than a bit muddled.

You were considered a hoarder and a slacker if you still resisted turning over your gold to the government. From the New York Times, June 13, 1933:

(Click on the image for a sharper picture.)

Gary Gorton’s view of bank runs has already filtered down to students.

Sam Williams won first prize at the ASSC in February with the paper The Return of the Bank Run: How the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 was a Next Generation Bank Run

Congress had just passed the Underwood Tariff (reinstating the federal income tax following the passage of the 16th Amendment) and, miracle of miracles, the stock market began to slump. While the trade-off for passing the income tax was a reduction in tariff rates—this way, the tax’s proponents could claim pro-trade motivations—the powers-that-were wanted to inflate the currency to counter any adverse economic effects of the new tax.

Bloomberg View (the editorial page) has an article today entitled: “When Market Incentives Undermine Morality” by economists Daniel Friedman and Daniel McNeill, authors of Morals and Markets: The Dangerous Balance, of which the piece is an excerpt.