Grieving about the Emanuel A.M.E. Church murders My chest literally aches for the people of Charleston, S.C. and every African-American whose fear of racially motivated violence has been affirmed, once again. I live in an integrated neighborhood–an increasingly rare place … Continue reading
Honoring the irreverent dead The satirists who were murdered at the comic-journal Charlie Hebdo prided themselves in being iconoclastic. The purpose of this essay is to critique the Western group-think of both political leaders and journalists, in their unified reaction … Continue reading
A common conservative disparagement of liberals and leftists is that we are anti-business. I often use Adam Smith’s arguments to show precisely the opposite. Leftists dislike monopolies and oligopolies. Oil companies and phone companies are two examples of oligopolies: their … Continue reading
Americans have been deeply divided along political lines in the past: the film Lincoln is all about the brutal factionalism preceding the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Why is the current Congress so divided and ineffective? I … Continue reading
In my courses I try to tell the story of urban modernity through a series of sub-stories. One of these is about how the Industrial Revolution happened. In 2012 I explained the Industrial Revolution thus: the key technology of the … Continue reading
My favorite scene in the Harry Potter series of films happens towards the end of the third film, Prisoner of Azkaban, when the very-unlikable Professor Snape finds the three protagonists at the base of the Whomping Willow tree. He is … Continue reading
[This is another political-economy posting, but it does not follow the previous postings as a series. After all, this is a blog; just thinking out loud here] This morning I had an epiphany about the changing structure of global production, … Continue reading
In this post I continue to use historical research to challenge present political rhetoric. Matt Groening paints a vivid picture of a businessman from the 1980s in Futurama. It is satirical, but satire is only so funny because of that … Continue reading
This is the second post in a series about political economy. I begin with an intriguing historical observation that pertains to present electoral politics: the guy who convinced Franklin D. Roosevelt to engage in public spending was a wealthy Mormon … Continue reading
This is the first in a series of postings about political economy. Over the past year I have been teaching about globalization. So I have had to clarify my own understanding of where we got ideas about macroeconomics and the … Continue reading