When we think about the causes of the Great Recession, the first one that comes to mind is usually the burst housing bubble. But the origins of the recession—and our sluggish recovery from it—go deeper than that. According to Robert D. Atkinson and Stephen J. Ezell, co-authors of Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage, […]
Yale Professor of Political Science, Steven B. Smith has a personal relationship with rapper Ludacris. He is an obsessive Yankees fan, and can often be spotted smoking cigarillos in a bright pink blazer. The portrait of him hanging in Branford College shows him wearing a tie, on the tie: an upside-down portrait of his wife. […]
Phoebe Clapham— As I discovered on becoming the politics and economics editor at Yale University Press’s London office, ‘political economy’ is a phrase that means very different things to different people. Before the twentieth century it was generally used where now we say ‘economic policy’, to describe how a state ordered its trading, industrial and […]
James “Gus” Speth‘s powerful account of America’s current political economy is at once an unsparing indictment of the country and a constructive blueprint for its recovery. In America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy, Speth first identifies a dozen aspects where transformative change is crucial and then envisions an America in which income inequality, unemployment, lackluster […]
What if the constant panic about the rising costs of health care and higher education in America were somewhat unfounded? What would this entail for this country? A giant, collective sigh of relief? This is the premise of famous economist, Willian J. Baumol’s new book, The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care […]
After Senator John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate for the 2008 Republican Party presidential ticket, there was quite a bit of media speculation and excitement surrounding Mitt Romney’s announcement of Paul Ryan as his running mate in August. But the last two presidential elections are hardly the only recent examples […]
Last Tuesday, September 11, United States ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three of his staff members were killed when violent riots broke out in Benghazi, fueled by a 14-minute YouTube trailer of an American-made film called “Innocence of Muslims.” Now, U.S. officials believe that the Benghazi riots were not entirely spontaneous and that […]
In his preface to The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, Richard L. Hasen explains how Americans’ belief in electoral integrity has changed over the years—in particular, since 2000, the year of the presidential election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. Prior to the election, people tended to […]
Amidst the bombings, shootings, political turmoil, and mass exodus in Syria, it’s difficult to follow the trajectory of its recent troubled history. One can start in 2000, when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad came to power. David W. Lesch, author of Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad, can trace this path because he knew […]
What is the future of capitalism in the wake of the Great Recession? Traditional macroeconomic tools have not worked to correct listless economic growth and high unemployment like economists believed they would—and some have blamed this on a fundamental failure in ‘capitalism’ itself. But are there different brands of capitalism from which we can choose? […]
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