The kings and queens of graduate economics classrooms -- real business cycle sophists, have been surprisingly mute on causes and consequences of the Second Great Depression. The silence is probably best explained by the feelings of shame for the utter failure of their models and predictions. But, alas, no need to wait any longer! Edward Prescott, Nobel Laureate of 2004, has finally chosen to creep out of the woods and enlighten us here.
When researchers compared the Shanghai Ranking of World Universities to budgetary constraints they found a number of important, but not surprising results.
The Shanghai Ranking includes things like the number of patents and Nobel Prize winners a university generates along with citations to faculty publications.
Current Austrian economists are the true heirs to the neoclassical economics that thrived up through the 1930s. It was in the spirit of Carl Menger and stressed the discovery of true causal laws that explained real economic phenomena such as business cycles. By the 1950s this Mengerian-neoclassical mainstream had been hijacked by positivists, Keynesians and mathematical modelers who have held sway ever since.
George Bush expanded domestic spending at a faster clip than Lyndon Johnson, set up the monetary and institutional conditions for a massive economic collapse, and then explicitly told us that it was necessary for America to abandon the market system “in order to save it”.
You would think that would be enough damage for one man.
The story is here. Whether Harry Potter did or did not overtly borrow from “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard,” there can be no doubt that all good fiction is to some extent borrowed from other great fiction, else there would be no point in studying literature in order to contribute to it.
