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From the Magazine

Too Smart to Fail
January 2014
Issue No. 19
The “sound” banker, alas! is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows so that no one can really blame him.            –John Maynard Keynes In the twelve ...

I Was a Teenage Gramlich
January 2014
Issue No. 19
I can’t say I ever intended from a young age to spend my eighteenth year mastering Washington Consensus–era monetary policy to recite in stuttering, rote cliché before a panel of mildly curious economic policymakers who filled out the payroll at Alan Greenspan’s Randian ...

Ronald Reagan’s Imaginary Bridges
When Ronald Reagan entered politics in the sixties, most observers judged him a joke. When Reagan announced he was running for the Republican nomination for California governor in 1966, the Washington Star described the “air of furtive jubilation down at Lassie for Governor ...

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those ...

Future Schlock
If there is one beacon in the landscape of American industrial decline, it’s the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or so it seems to the science and business reporters who regularly troop through its doors for their “Ten Breakthroughs That Will Change ...

Revolt of the Gadgets
It’s a sweltering midsummer afternoon in Ismailiya, a city of 700,000 people that lies on the west bank of the Suez Canal halfway between Port Said to the north and the city of Suez in the south. Two hundred striking workers, some dressed in company coveralls, rally at a ...

Water World
Here’s a little-noted quirk of our literary history, unlikely to turn up on the Trivial Pursuit board: the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Ernest Poole, devoted much of his writing career to cheering on the demise of capitalism. Poole won the prize for ...

The Animal Cure
Encounters with lions, mountain goats, grizzly bears, dolphins, and whales are not least among the exotic experiences offered by the tourism industry. The attractions are obvious: a chance to be outdoors in stunning scenery, to see creatures you may have known only as ...

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic
Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep. –Mary Baker Eddy Not long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund ...

We Told You So
Like many Americans, I was doing everything I could to help elect Barack Obama. It wasn’t all that much—but as an economist in Texas, I had some authority on the thinking of former Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain’s chief economic adviser. I’d made the front page of the ...

Zen and the Art of Self-Satisfaction
September 2013
Issue No. 12
Julia Cameron, the principal author of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (with Mark Bryan, Putnam, 223 pages, $13.95 paperback), claims “to tap into the higher power that connects human creativity with the creative energies of the ...

Putting Creativity to Work
Ah, creativity. We’ve always known it was desirable stuff, good for kids and poets and so on, but in the last few years creativity has entered that exalted realm of sacred social concepts. Today it ranks with “competitiveness” and “excellence” as one of the ineffable ...