Op-Eds
When Marx Met Engels, the Renegade Industrialist: Mary Gabriel
Friedrich Engels had been traveling from England back home to Germany when he decided to make a slight detour in Paris.
How Marx Came to Discover the Alienation of Labor: Mary Gabriel
Joblessness was liberating for Karl Marx in 1844 -- it meant he could go back to school. His classrooms were Paris’ gaslit cafes and wine cellars, and small offices filled with cigar smoke.
The Parisian Roots of Marx’s Economic Theories: Mary Gabriel
Throughout history there have been moments when Paris was the center of the creative universe --and 1843 was one of them.
Short-Term Stimulus Won’t Help U.S. in Long Run: Glenn Hubbard
Joblessness and sluggish growth are hampering the economic recovery and Barack Obama’s political standing. Raising taxes on the rich, as the president called for yesterday, isn’t going to turn things around.
Buy American and Fairer Trade Can Solve Job Woes: Alan Tonelson
President Barack Obama’s new jobs plan, if passed by Congress, might spark some activity and even some employment in the moribund U.S. economy. But it’s unlikely to foster the growth and job creation we urgently need, without adding new debt, because the plan ignores a key obstacle to genuine prosperity: the nation’s immense trade deficit.
German Taxpayers Want Equity in Bank Bailouts: Karl Heinz Daeke
When will politicians finally accept that their ideology of cheap money has failed?
Europe’s Credit Crisis Is Also an Identity Crisis: John Bruton
Credit was crucial to the success of Western economies in the past 150 years. Without credit, there would have been no Industrial Revolution, no postwar recovery, and no information-technology era. Houses wouldn’t have been built, and shops wouldn’t have been stocked. All of them used borrowed money.
Euro Bonds Are Wrong Fix in Half-Way Union: Riccardo Barbieri
A number of European politicians and economists are hailing the euro-bond proposal as the only viable solution to the region’s sovereign-debt dilemma.
Hayek, Keynes and How to Prevent Economic Crises: Sylvia Nasar
Unlike the movies, life rarely permits second takes. But the Second World War gave John Maynard Keynes, the patron saint of government activism, and Friedrich Hayek, the Cassandra who warned of the state’s destructive potential, just such opportunities.
Nasar: Fisher, the Crash and an ‘Economics of the Whole’
For Yale’s Irving Fisher, inventor of the Rolodex and America’s economic oracle, the madness of World War I was epitomized by his daughter Margaret’s descent into insanity after her fiancé was drafted. When a bizarre surgery touted as a miracle cure killed her, Fisher saw Margaret as another of the war’s senseless casualties, and rededicated himself to finding remedies for the nation’s economic and other ills.
Keynes, Schumpeter and the Great Post-War Mistake: Sylvia Nasar
In January 1919, as the Allied leaders met in Paris to hammer out a treaty ending World War I, famine and pestilence raged from St. Petersburg to Istanbul. To the Britons and Americans who came to survey the damage, the whole continent seemed to be in extremis.
Two Questions at the Heart of Bin Laden’s Jihad: Lawrence Wright
When Osama bin Laden began his war on America in 1996, he was posing two questions. The first was: What is Islam?