Everybody is dunking on Paul Krugman’s latest column, “Beware Economists Who Won’t Admit They Were Wrong,” and rightfully so. He is frequently tricky and slippery (and terribly out of touch).  This column is no exception.

While the nation is rightly worried about the proliferation of antisemitism on its college campuses, another higher education abuse also needs prompt attention.

It’s Christmas on Wall Street as the long-awaited pivot is here, with Jerome Powell announcing the Fed’s giving up on inflation and turning to that long-promised recession.

The Federal Reserve dot-plot, which measures Fed members’ rate projections, went dovish — meaning inflationary — for the first time since the pandemic.

While traveling recently, I was stuck in a terrible bout of traffic. Unbeknownst to me, West Virginia University’s fall graduation just ended, and I was caught in the middle of the seemingly endless stream of parents, relatives, and friends who were leaving the ceremony. To deal with this problem, the City of Morgantown closed down lanes and reserved them for exclusive use by graduation attendees. Though the city may have done a fine job handling traffic, this raises an interesting question: How would road closures be handled in a free market?

Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics
by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
University of Chicago Press, 2022; 222 pp.

Deirdre McCloskey is a great economic historian, and in Beyond Positivism, she makes a number of valuable points that draw from her immense learning in this field. I’d like to concentrate on a few of these insights in this week’s column.

Last May, the chairman and publisher of the New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, wrote a twelve-thousand-word feature in the Columbia Journalism Review appealing to the importance of independent journalism and framing the Times as a news organization committed to this ideal.

Ever since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X, the censorship regime has been hell-bent on harassing the company and Musk himself—with bad publicity, accusations of antisemitism, and advertiser boycotts.