A mong fellow economists, Veblen’s reputation over the years has ranged from low to ambiguous. A few years before his death in 1929, he rejected nomination for president of the American Economic Association on the ground that the recognition came …
Particularly at a time of slow growth and global economic disarray, a new president’s first budget assumes even greater importance than usual as a statement of priorities and a forecast of policy for the remainder of his term. As commentators …
By comparison to the Kennedy-Johnson 1964 tax cut or even the Ford administration’s 1975 acceptance of congressional demands for antirecessionary action, the Carter program, as originally presented to Congress at the start of the new Administration, was disappointingly small. The …
The strangest aspect of the current minidepression, by far the deepest since the 1937-38 episode, is the almost passive reaction of the unemployed, the principal victims, and the bewilderment of economic experts who a few years ago were certain that …
Is the great and final crash of capitalism at last at hand? Well, as Lyndon Johnson’s legendary job aspirant answered the school board member who inquired about his views on cosmology, I can teach it round or flat. Let’s try …
Last December at the meetings of the American Economic Association, there was a major address by MIT’s generally admired theorist of economic growth, Robert M. Solow. He chose for his title, “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics,” …
American intellectual conservatism, as Joseph Epstein observed in this journal’s last issue, has become a tendency to be interpreted as well as resisted by radicals. Our contemporary conservatives, like their English predecessors, are skeptical about human behavior and disposed to …
Ideologically, this is a time of startling events and strange alliances. Increasingly prominent on the polemical scene are the new social-science conservatives, often former liberals or radicals. They are featured in the Public Interest, Commentary, and the New York Times …
In the 1970s two ways of examining society, neither of them very satisfactory, will probably continue to vie for intellectual favor. One is the New Left rebellion against the organizational rationalism of a complex technological polity. The second is the …
What is a good tax law? Radicals are likely to apply three criteria to legislative handiwork. If, as economists in the days of the Old Welfare economics used to believe and socialists continue to believe, human beings are approximately equal …
These volumes, the product of extensive meetings by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Seminar on Race and Poverty, are just about the best items in the copious literature on poverty, which has been a minor growth industry ever …
IN ENGLAND 1795 was a gloomy year. Respectable opinion divided its concern between the wild French revolutionaries, their possible impact upon discontented Englishmen, and the soaring domestic price level. As usual it was worse to be poor and unrespectable. Bread, …
Harvard is no more like other American universities than rich people are like the rest of us. This is partly because the place is truly richer than other universities. At Harvard the consequences of opulence are to be seen in …
One of the more tantalizing statistics of the decade is this: for a mere $11 billion we could raise every poor American above the poverty line as poverty is currently and officially defined—an income below $3,130 for a family of …
