Entries by Ed Walker

The Theory of Business Enterprise Part 1: Introduction

Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of Business Enterprise in 1904. He is best know for The Theory of the Leisure Class, with its famous phrase, conspicuous consumption. Here’s his Wikipedia entry. There are two things that recommend him to me. First, he studied with Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the central figures of American Pragmatism, […]

Wonks and Activists

Marcy took on the excellent Jonathan Cohn’s piece on wonks vs. activists here, but I want to pile on. Wonks only get heard if politicians want to hear them, and even then, they aren’t always right. Paul Krugman has written many laudatory pieces about Obamacare in both his blog and his column, but it is […]

Who Are The Non-Celebrities In The Panama Papers?

In the first stories about the Panama Papers, we got the names of a bunch of politicians, a few criminals, sports and other celebrities and one or two names of rich people. But in focusing solely on this kind of person, we miss the major point about tax havens. They are used by hundreds of […]

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 7: Superfluous People

The last chapter of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is devoted to discussion of the totalitarian regime, which comes when the totalitarian movement has taken power. Arendt says that totalitarian movements don’t offer a specific program for government. Instead, they propose to operate under a “scientific” program. For the Nazis, this was the law […]

The Problem of the Liberal Elites Part 4 Conclusion

Most economists supported NAFTA, and then spent years justifying their support with models and econometric studies they claimed showed that it had little effect. They continued to support trade treaties when China entered the World Trade Organization. They supported the KORUS deal and most supported TPP. Meanwhile, manufacturing job losses increased from the allegedly minor […]

The Problem of the Liberal Elites Part 3 on Trade

Paul Krugman has been walking back his nearly unbridled support of trade treaties lately. In this blog post, he says “I think I’ve never assumed away the income distribution effects.” Those distributional effects are, he says, predicted by the standard models. In the Foreign Affairs article I’ve discussed in the last two posts in this […]

The Problem of Liberal Elites Part 2 On Trade

Paul Krugman begins his 1993 defense of NAFTA by insulting its opponents gratuitously and wrongly. Then he offers the readers of Foreign Policy the defense of trade treaties they love. The truth about NAFTA may be summarized in five propositions: • NAFTA will have no effect on the number of jobs in the United States; […]

The Problem of the Liberal Elites Part 1

As I pointed out in this post, conservative elites have completely lost their minds. But liberal elites have problems as well. The problem is more complex with liberals, and it will take several posts of reasonable length to get into it. To make things concrete, I’m going to begin with the liberal approach to trade, […]