Mainstream historians attribute the postwar economic success of South Korea and Taiwan to the legacy of Japanese colonialism. The Japanese are credited with providing new technologies, critical infrastructure, and an efficient state that enabled industrial progress in South Korea and Taiwan. Both Taiwan and Korea benefitted from the successful adoption of Japanese technologies and recorded industrial growth under imperial rule.

A mom in the neighborhood recently made trouble. Macroeconomic trouble. Here is a way to spot such trouble, and how to help nurture the goodness in our economic way of life.

A few months back her boy went door to door, confidently introducing himself, explaining his purpose, and handing us a detailed flier: “Twelve-year-old boy willing to work.” He was trying to earn money to go to sailing school. I was impressed. My wife was impressed. We told our kids to be impressed.

The Austrian business cycle theory teaches us that low interest rates manipulated by the central bank lead to malinvestments, which are cleared when the central bank lets rates rise, reflecting a truer cost of capital. A real-time example is happening in the United States commercial office real estate market. Combine that with the government’s covid lockdowns, which forced employees to work from home. Now, employees never want to change out of their pajamas while on the clock.

Economists are becoming more appreciative of how historical episodes shape future events. The resurgence of history as an explanatory tool has led economists to publish a series of papers collectively known as the “Deep Roots” literature. These papers cover a wide range of topics, but Africa has been a strong focus due to its unique history of underdevelopment.

The taming of monetary policy necessary to slow price inflation has triggered a corrective trend in the valuation of financial instruments. Many big banks in the United States have substantially increased their use of an accounting technique that allows them to avoid marking certain assets at their current market value, instead using the face value in their balance sheet calculations.

The human tendency to kill what one fears asserted itself on April 4, 2023, as a Manhattan district attorney called Donald Trump into his office to issue a vague threat.

What crime Trump was being charged with is known only to Alvin Bragg, but the rest of the world is left playing a guessing game.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Western leaders have declared that Ukraine was defending not only its own freedom, but ours too. President Joe Biden, to whom apparently “freedom is priceless,” vowed to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”

The allure of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals has hypnotized corporate America into offering ESG funds that score investments for prioritizing social goals. Companies that account for environmental, social, and governance goals in their decisions collectively held $8.4 trillion in US investment assets at the beginning of 2022.

Most readers might not remember Daniel Ellsberg, but for those of us who came of age during the Vietnam War, the maelstrom that formed around him and his actions helped to define that era. Ellsberg, of course, is famous because he leaked a number of internal government documents called the Pentagon Papers in which the writers expressed skepticism about the chances for U.S. success in the Vietnam War.