Why is everyone still referring to the recent financial crisis as the "Great Recession"? The term, after all, is predicated on a dangerous misdiagnosis of the problems that confront the United States and other countries, leading to bad forecasts and bad policy.
Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann are real feminists – even if they do not share policy preferences with the already recognized “sisterhood,” and even if they themselves would reject the feminist label.
The debt dilemmas in Europe and the US prove yet again that elected officials will ignore long-run costs to achieve short-run benefits, and will act only when forced, in a doomed effort to circumvent the laws of economics and revoke the laws of arithmetic.
Could the financial crisis of 2007-2008 happen again? Since the crisis erupted, there has been no shortage of opportunities – in the form of inadequate conclusions and decisions by officials – to nurture one’s anxiety about that prospect.
America’s enormous budget deficit is now exceeded as a share of national income only by Greece and Egypt among all of the world’s major countries. And the economic downturn since 2008 is only part of the reason.
Perhaps for the first time in modern history, the future of the global economy lies in the hands of poor countries. The United States and Europe struggle on as wounded giants, casualties of their financial excesses and political paralysis.
Murdoch's media empire is a model of the modern global enterprise – a model that is now threatened by the fallout from the scandal that started with phone hacking in Murdoch's British press operations. But the Murdochs' problems reflect the underlying weaknesses of "family capitalism."
No one expects venture capitalists to divert their resources to village schools, but perhaps they could focus a little more on training new employees rather than poaching them from the competition at inflated salaries.
Vindication comes quickly in Hollywood movies, but not in Turkey, whose courts have so far seemed oblivious to the glaring problems with evidence presented by police and prosecutors.
Unfortunately, so far the world seems to have learned very little from the recent financial crisis: with the US worried by its anemic economic recovery, Europe paralyzed by fears for the euro's survival, and emerging markets wrestling with asset-price bubbles.
Europeans might usefully look back 60 years, to a time when their own countries, perched on the brink of a similar collapse, received the help that they needed to recover – help that has put them in a position to do something similar for Greece today.
Whenever opposite political forces attract, as activists and big business have in the case of global warming, there is a high risk that the public interest will be caught in the middle. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the rise of "renewable" energy.
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