“...we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex”

“I had surmised, that benevolence is meant to improve society, not the State; and to do so through personal, not political, acts in the community.”

According to the University of Michigan’s latest Index of Consumer Sentiment, a record number of Americans have negative views of the economy. This is yet more evidence that the American people are dissatisfied with their economic condition. Some commentators have claimed to be perplexed by the people’s negative views of the economy since government statistics show that most Americans have good jobs that pay them good salaries.

[This article was originally published at Judgment Calls on May 19.]

Edmund Phelps died last Friday. Obituaries focus on the expectations-augmented Phillips curve, the natural rate of unemployment, and his 2006 Nobel prize. That work, which reshaped how central banks think, deserves all the attention it will get. But there was another strand of Phelps’s thinking—less celebrated in mainstream circles but more interesting to me—that I want to highlight. 

Cathie Wood is the co-founder of ARK Invest—an investment management firm known primarily for Ms. Wood’s appearances on financial news networks and her penchant for chasing high-flying tech stocks and other speculative assets.

Even a small sampling of Ms. Wood’s television appearances and reporting reveals little aptitude for investing or critical reasoning. Rather, she is a trend-chaser, buying stocks and other assets that have already gone up sharply and made splashy headlines in the process. 

[Chicken in a Strange Way by Melanie Thomas Armstrong (Ballast Books, 2026), 461 pp.]