Brad DeLong writes of how our perception of history has changed in the wake of the Great Recession. We used to pity our grandfathers, who lacked both the knowledge and the compassion to fight the Great Depression effectively; now we see ourselves repeating all the old mistakes. I share his sentiments.

But watching the failure of policy over the past three years, I find myself believing, more and more, that this failure has deep roots – that we were in some sense doomed to go through this. Specifically, I now suspect that the kind of moderate economic policy regime Brad and I both support – a regime that by and large lets markets work, but in which the government is ready both to rein in excesses and fight slumps – is inherently unstable. It’s something that can last for a generation or so, but not much longer.

By “unstable” I don’t just mean Minsky-type financial instability, although that’s part of it. Equally crucial are the regime’s...

Paul? Krugman’s latest collection of essays, Arguing with Zombies, first appeared in January 2020. Not only was it quickly buried by Covid, but he missed out on a thing all too rare for a pundit: the opportunity to declare victory. A year later, in Joe Biden’s Washington, Krugmanism rules. The gigantic scale of the $1.9 trillion Biden rescue plan, and now the proposed $2 trillion infrastructure investment programme, are testament to a rearrangement of the relationship between economic expertise and politics in the Democratic Party, a rearrangement which Krugman anticipated and for which Arguing with Zombies makes a powerful case.

In the 1990s the lines were clearly drawn. The Democrats were a party of fiscal rectitude and trade globalisation. They had the weight of academic economic opinion behind them. Krugman was one of the cheerleaders and enforcers of that dispensation: the job of brilliant economists with a quick pen was to guard the true knowledge against...

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Yale University’s Stephen Skowronek has explained the Trump presidency better than other theories (including mine). His theory places Donald Trump in the “disjunctive presidency” bin, the same category as John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter: presidents who take office as the exhausted heir of a bankrupt political ideology. These presidencies, by performing so badly, are usually followed by “transformative presidencies” that lead the country in a decidedly different direction.

Joe Biden never captured the hearts of Democratic voters in the way Barack Obama once did. But now that he is in office, he is drawing nearly universal approval from his party.

You may have heard that Republicans are raging against “woke” corporations a whole lot these days. Republicans are furious over corporate America’s public defense of the voting rights of African Americans and over Big Tech’s supposed suppression of conservative voices.

Perhaps most threatening to Republicans, key corporate strategists attempting to woo liberal consumers have come to believe that their support for progressive initiatives will generate sufficient revenue to counter retaliation by hostile white voters and the Republican politicians who represent them.

The corporate embrace of these strategies has generally received favorable press, but there are some doubters.

Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued in “‘Woke Capital’ Doesn’t Exist” on April 6 that capital “pursues its financial interests in whatever political or social context it finds itself.”

As Serwer puts it,

Labor productivity—defined as output per labor hour—has grown at a below-average rate since 2005, representing a dramatic reversal of the above-average growth of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The productivity slowdown during these years has left many economic observers wondering why this situation has occurred and what factors may have contributed. To clarify potential sources of the productivity slowdown, this article presents an analysis of labor productivity and its component series—multifactor productivity, contribution of capital intensity, and contribution of labor composition—at both the economy-wide and industry levels, complemented with a survey of the contemporary productivity literature.

This book came immediately after The Virtues of War. There’s a chapter in Virtues titled Badlands. It’s about Alexander’s campaign in the Afghan kingdoms, 330-327 BCE.

As I was writing it, I thought, This is a book all by itself. I have to come back to this and write another volume just on this subject.

Why did I think that? Because Alexander’s war in the region that would become Afghanistan (it was called Bactria, Areia, Arachosia, Drangiana, Gedrosia and Sogdiana in his day) was a dead-ringer for our American war in the same places 2300 years later.

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