A Partisan Nonpartisan Blog: Cutting Through Confusion Since 2012
The link above is to the Japanese version. “America’s Big Monetary Policy Mistake: How Negative Interest Rates Could Have Stopped the Great Recession in Its Tracks” in English can be found here.
The link above is to the Japanese version. “How Subordinating Paper Money to Electronic Money Can End Recessions and End Inflation in English can be found here.
Link to Wikipedia article on Henry George
Charles Lane compares Thomas Piketty to Henry George in hi May 15, 2014 Washington Post op-ed,
Thomas Piketty identifies an important ill of capitalism but not its cure.
Charles gives a succinct evaluation of both Thomas’s and Henry’s proposals:
Alas, Piketty’s global wealth tax and George’s single tax suffer from the same defect, and it’s not political impracticality — after all, George nearly got himself elected mayor of New York City in 1886.
It’s the inherent difficulty of separating the productive, untaxed component of the return on land or capital from the unproductive, taxed part. …
As a result, it’s hard to devise a tax on wealth that raises a significant amount of revenue but doesn’t discourage at least some socially beneficial saving or entrepreneurship. The potential for adverse unintended consequences — economic and political — is greater than Piketty seems to realize.
Quite distinct from this concern about incentives, Charles goes on to a positive note about having power in the hands of private individuals:
Great private fortunes can indeed entitle their owners to an undue share of society’s current income and political power. At times, however, private wealth can serve as a font of charity or, indeed, a bulwark against government overreach.
These are indeed the key issues to think about in relation to wealth taxation.
I have always liked Henry George’s proposal, and pointed out how a carbon tax can be seen as akin to Henry George’s single tax in my post “‘Henry George and the Carbon Tax’: A Quick Response to Noah Smith.” And I like Noah’s application of Henry George’s idea to San Francisco. But Thomas Piketty himself points to the difficulty of getting enough revenue from taxing the value of unimproved land alone:
In particular, it seems impossible to compare in any precise way the value of pure land long ago with its value today. The principal issue today is urban land: farmland is worth less than 10 percent of national income in both France and Britain. But it is no easier to measure the value of pure urban land today, independent not only of buildings and construction but also of infrastructure and other improvements needed to make the land attractive, than to measure the value of pure farmland in the eighteenth century. According to my estimates, the annual flow of investment over the past few decades can account for almost all the value of wealth, including wealth in real estate, in 2010. …
… the fact that total capital, especially in real estate, in the rich countries can be explained fairly well in terms of the accumulation of flows of saving and investment obviously does not preclude the existence of large local capital gains linked to the concentration of population in particular areas, such as major capitals. It would not make much sense to explain the increase in the value of buildings on the Champs-Elysées or, for that matter, anywhere in Paris exclusively in terms of investment flows. Our estimates suggest, however, that these large capital gains on real estate in certain areas were largely compensated by capital losses in other areas, which became less attractive, such as smaller cities or decaying neighborhoods. (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 197.)
Thomas Piketty’s example of the unearned rise in the value of one’s urban land may seem like an opening for non-distortionary taxation, but in fact from the standpoint of efficiency these positive externalities suggest subsidizing all activities that create these positive externalities for land values, of which just as many are private activities as are activities of the government. (And many activities of the government do not raise land values.) Also, I worry that urban governments often make land prices for certain favored plots go up while reducing the total value of land (and social welfare) by putting tight restrictions on building. This is a concern that Matthew Yglesias raises in his book The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think.
It is no secret that I am a partisan for Saltwater Macroeconomics as a better route to insight into business cycles than Freshwater Macroeconomics. (For a good sense of my own views, see “On the Great Recession,”“The Neomonetarist Perspective” and “Why I am a Macroeconomist: Increasing Returns and Unemployment.”) Yet, as Noah Smith and I wrote in “The Shakeup at the Minneapolis Fed and the Battle for the Soul of Macroeconomics,”
We are strong proponents of the idea that scientific progress—especially in economics—depends on a vigorous debate among widely divergent points of view.
The analogy that comes to my mind is biological evolution. Genetic variation is the crucial raw material on which natural selection operates in order to raise overall fitness, with all of the fascinating complexity of life that often accompanies higher fitness. Similarly, variation in viewpoints and approaches is the crucial raw material for the advances that result from scientific debate.
One of the key drivers of biological evolution is the need for disease resistance. (Indeed, the Red Queen Hypothesis holds that the key evolutionary driver for the origins of sexual reproduction was the need to outmaneuver parasites.) In agriculture, monocultures that gives a large share of a crop an almost identical genetic makeups run the risk of disastrous blights. In economics, having everyone look at things the same way would risk having no one prepared to understand new circumstances that the world might find itself in. As Noah and I wrote:
Scientifically, Freshwater macroeconomics plays an important role in laying out how the world should be if everyone thought like an economist.
In the future, more people may think much more like economists. And as I point out to my students, when talking about Real Business Cycle models, these models (done as well as possible, of course) establish, the benchmark of what the natural level of output is. And the dynamics of the natural level of output and the natural level of other macroeconomic variables in turn describe how the economy will behave in the future when (I optimistically predict) central banks will be much better at their task of keeping the economy at the natural level of economic activity. We need Freshwater Macroeconomics (again, done as well as possible) to be well-prepared for that possible future. (The blight in the analogy I am pursuing would be a blight on models that focus on the consequences of an output gap in a future when there aren’t much in the way of output gaps any more because monetary policy is so good.)
One of the counterintuitive logical consequences of the importance of diversity of approaches is that diffusing best practices too rapidly can actually be a bad thing. John Stuart Mill explains, in On Liberty, Chapter III: “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” paragraph 18 and 19:
The circumstances which surround different classes and individuals, and shape their characters, are daily becoming more assimilated. Formerly, different ranks, different neighbourhoods, different trades and professions, lived in what might be called different worlds; at present, to a great degree in the same. Comparatively speaking, they now read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them. Great as are the differences of position which remain, they are nothing to those which have ceased. And the assimilation is still proceeding. All the political changes of the age promote it, since they all tend to raise the low and to lower the high. Every extension of education promotes it, because education brings people under common influences, and gives them access to the general stock of facts and sentiments. Improvements in the means of communication promote it, by bringing the inhabitants of distant places into personal contact, and keeping up a rapid flow of changes of residence between one place and another. The increase of commerce and manufactures promotes it, by diffusing more widely the advantages of easy circumstances, and opening all objects of ambition, even the highest, to general competition, whereby the desire of rising becomes no longer the character of a particular class, but of all classes. A more powerful agency than even all these, in bringing about a general similarity among mankind, is the complete establishment, in this and other free countries, of the ascendancy of public opinion in the State. As the various social eminences which enabled persons entrenched on them to disregard the opinion of the multitude, gradually become levelled; as the very idea of resisting the will of the public, when it is positively known that they have a will, disappears more and more from the minds of practical politicians; there ceases to be any social support for nonconformity—any substantive power in society, which, itself opposed to the ascendancy of numbers, is interested in taking under its protection opinions and tendencies at variance with those of the public.
The combination of all these causes forms so great a mass of influences hostile to Individuality, that it is not easy to see how it can stand its ground. It will do so with increasing difficulty, unless the intelligent part of the public can be made to feel its value—to see that it is good there should be differences, even though not for the better, even though, as it may appear to them, some should be for the worse. If the claims of Individuality are ever to be asserted, the time is now, while much is still wanting to complete the enforced assimilation. It is only in the earlier stages that any stand can be successfully made against the encroachment. The demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves, grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature. Mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.
However wrongheaded they may seem, minority viewpoints, especially those articulately advanced, are to be treasured as a key to scientific advance and resiliency. Similar things can be said for minority political, cultural, and religious viewpoints. For example, whatever my differences of opinion with the Mormon Church, it is a prodigious generator of important social experiments, many of which may have turned up useful ways of doing things. See for example
(See also the discussion of non-monetary motivations in Scott Adams’s Finest Hour: How to Tax the Rich.) I am confident that those who know them better could point to similar contributions to the rich array of alternatives for ways to organize society that have been identified by other minority religions. (Hint for comments!)
As an example in the cultural vein, while some presume to make strong value judgments about different genre’s of music. I have found many German economists to be scathing in their view of Schlager music, for example, in an intensified version of the way many highly educated Americans look down on Country music as low class. My attitude is that substantial numbers of people enjoy a particular type of music, there is likely to be something to it. I listen trying to find the angle from which I too can get that kind of pleasure from each genre. I may not succeed, and then retain a preference for other music instead, but it is worth giving each genre a good try.
In politics, of course the disdain with which the Left looks upon the Right and the Right looks upon the left has been a target of mine since the beginnings of this blog. I insist that there are crucial insights on both sides of the political spectrum. Our nation and all other democratic nations would go disastrously wrong in their policies if either side of the political spectrum were eradicated from the range of opinions expressed in political action.
One of the most common temptations human beings face is the temptation to try to make people saying something disagreeable shut up. Another common temptation is to try to make people doing something that seems disgusting cease and desist. But stop and consider: a point of view (with its attendant insights) or a way of life (with its attendant practices) that does not currently agree with your own views may someday be your salvation.
I think Michael Gerson’s analysis is excellent.
There is no date counter, but the progress bar at the bottom of the video will give you a good sense of the date at any point.
Thanks to Robert Graboyes for pointing me to this.
Robert also recommends this (unfortunately not free) amazing video of the shifting battle lines during the Civil War. Here is the free trailer.
Jonathan Clements’s June 14, 2014 Wall Street Journal article “How to Calculate Your Net Worth” is an excellent discussion of integrating human capital into your portfolio. Here are some of his main points. The bolded labels are mine, the rest is his:
1. Human Capital is a Big Part of Your Portfolio. If you’re under age 50 and gainfully employed, your most valuable asset is probably your human capital—your ability to pull in a paycheck. The Census Bureau estimates, based on a 2011 survey, that a college graduate who works full time for 40 years might have lifetime earnings of $2.4 million, while someone with a professional degree, such as a doctor or lawyer, might earn $4.2 million.
2. Insure Your Human Capital with Life Insurance. Your human capital should heavily influence how you handle your larger financial life. For instance, to protect your human capital, you likely need health, disability and life insurance. Suppose you go under the proverbial bus or, alternatively, go under the bus but survive. In either situation, the right insurance can help your family cope.
3. Borrowing Against Your Human Capital Can Make Sense. Early in your adult life, you might take on a heap of debt, including student loans, car loans and mortgages. Reckless? Arguably, it’s rational. By borrowing, you can purchase items you can’t currently afford, thus smoothing out your consumption over your lifetime. With any luck, you will have years of paychecks ahead of you, so you can service these debts and eventually retire debt-free.
4. For Some, Human Capital is a Relatively Safe Asset That Can Be Balanced Out With Aggressive Investment in Risky Assets. Your human capital is also the rationale behind investing heavily in stocks when you’re younger. Think of your regular paycheck as akin to receiving interest from a bond. To diversify your big human capital “bond,” you might devote your portfolio mostly to stocks. But as you approach retirement and your last paycheck, you should shift maybe half your portfolio into bonds, so you have investment income to replace the lost income from your human capital.
In the rest of the article, he talks about how (a) you might have some human capital even after you have “retired” if you don’t retire completely, (b) integrating social security wealth (the value of the future social security payments you will get) into your portfolio and © liabilities like everything you will need to spend on a kid.
Let me also flag Jason Zweig’s nice article the day before “Can You Handle the Market’s Stress Test?” about how to fight “loss aversion”–being very risk averse toward relatively small risks. Here is what I tweeted about it:
How to fight loss aversion: avoid nonfinancial stress and make sure to net out gains and losses against each other.
“The unwillingness to take blame for bad decisions and tolerate criticism for tough ones is a telltale sign of a bad leader under any conditions.”
– Paul Sullivan, in Clutch, p. 127
I never got into a fistfight or suffered physical harm from another kid when I was young, other than a kid once randomly slugging me in the solar plexus. But I was afraid of bullies. I felt a little extra vulnerable because of being a bookworm. I tried to at least put some hard edge onto my intellectuality so that I wouldn’t look too much like a pushover and thereby attract unwanted attention from bullies.
During the years my own children were in elementary school, I was delightfully surprised to learn of serious anti-bullying campaigns, and to see how, as a result, my children felt less fear than I had in school. I see anti-bullying campaigns as part of the anti-violence march of civilization that Steven Pinker documents in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. (See also my post “Things are Getting Better: 3 Videos.”)
Going even further, the spirit of anti-bullying campaigns is being extended to other forms of cruelty that can only be called violence metaphorically. After reading Sumathi Reddy’s Wall Street Journal article “Little Children and Already Acting Mean Children, Especially Girls, Withhold Friendship as a Weapon; Teaching Empathy" I tweeted:
It is wonderful that anti-bullying campaigns are now being extended to fight social exclusion.
There are certainly many worse things in the world than bullying, but I suspect that many of those worse things are the actions of either those who got practice in bullying when they were young, or whose bad behavior later on was partly revenge on the world for bullying suffered when young.
To further make the case that bullying is not a trivial matter, in their article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, ”Childhood bullying involvement predicts low-grade systemic inflammation into adulthood,“ William E. Copeland, Dieter Wolkeb, Suzet Tanya Lereya, Lilly Shanahan, Carol Worthman, and E. Jane Costello write:
Bullying is a common childhood experience that affects children at all income levels and racial/ethnic groups. Being a bully victim has long-term adverse consequences on physical and mental health and financial functioning, but bullies themselves display few ill effects. Here, we show that victims suffer from greater increases in low-grade systemic inflammation from childhood to young adulthood than are seen in others. In contrast, bullies showed lower increases in inflammation into adulthood compared with those uninvolved in bullying. Elevated systemic low-grade inflammation is a mechanism by which this common childhood social adversity may get under the skin to affect adult health functioning, even many years later.
(You can see a discussion of this research in the Washington Post here.) One bit of context for this is that inflammation is being seen more and more as a risk factor for heart disease, strokes and other maladies in later life. So inflammation is not innocent.
A little over a year ago, an overlapping team of researchers reported long-lasting psychological problems resulting from being bullied as a child. Here is the description in an article in Reuters by Genevra Pittman, ”Psychological effects of bullying can last years“:
"It’s obviously very well established how problematic bullying is short-term,” said William Copeland, a clinical psychologist who led the new study at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.
“I was surprised that a decade down the road after they’ve been victimized, when they’ve kind of transitioned to adulthood, we would still see these emotional marks for the victims and also the bullies/victims.”
His team’s research included 1,420 youth from Western North Carolina who were asked about their experiences with bullying at various points between age nine and 16, then were followed and assessed for psychiatric disorders through age 26.
Just over one-quarter of kids and their parents reported they were bullied at least once, and close to one in ten said they had bullied other kids.
After adjusting for the participants’ history of family hardships, the researchers found that, compared to young adults with no history of bullying, former victims were at higher risk for a range of psychiatric conditions.
For example, 6 percent of uninvolved youth went on to have an anxiety disorder, versus 24 percent of former bullying victims and 32 percent of youth who had been both bullies and targets of bullying.
Kids who originally reported both bullying and being bullied were the most likely to be diagnosed with panic disorder or depression as young adults or to consider suicide.
Of course, this does not prove causality; those things that tend to make kids attractive target for bullying might still cause an elevated rate of psychological disorders even if an effective anti-bullying campaign meant that “easy targets” did not in fact suffer from bullying. Most likely there is some of that. But I wouldn’t want to bet on a total lack of causality from being bullied to having psychological problems later on in life. If there are regions of the country where anti-bullying campaigns have not yet begun in earnest, it should be possible to do randomized trials implementing anti-bullying campaigns in half of the schools in a sample.
If metaphorical violence is included, bullies are not absent among adults. The power of adults who are bullies in this broader sense can be reduced if they are clearly labeled as bullies by those around them.
The link above is to the Japanese version. “A Minimalist Implementation of Electronic Money” in English can be found here.
The link above is to the Japanese version. “Balance Sheet Monetary Policy: A Primer” in English can be found here.
The link above is to the Japanese version. “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?” in English can be found here.
Link to “Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal” in Japanese
I am delighted and honored that Makoto Shimizu has translated many of my posts in Japanese. Makoto will be in charge of the Tumblr blog for the Japanese version supplysideliberal.com: supplysideliberaljp.tumblr.com. I will post link posts here to each Japanese translation there.
Earth and the Sun, as viewed by the Space Shuttle Discovery.
In this moment, as in all the moments I have, may the image of the God or Gods Who May Be burn brightly in my heart.
Let faith give me a felt assurance that what must be done to bring the Day of Awakening and the Day of Fulfilment closer can be done in a spirit of joy and contentment.
Let the gathering powers of heaven be at my left hand and my right. Let there be many heroes and saints to blaze the trail in front of me. Let the younger generations who will follow discern the truth and wield it to strengthen good and weaken evil. Let the grandeur of the Universe above inspire noble thoughts that lead to noble plans and noble deeds. Let the Earth beneath be a remembrance of the wisdom of our ancestors and of others who have died before us. And may the light within be an ocean of conscious and unconscious being to sustain me and those who are with me through all the trials we must go through.
In this moment, I am. And I am grateful that I am. May others be, now and for all time.
Having a window of time on a plane ride when I didn’t need to do anything in particular gave me a chance to realize that I was feeling depleted. Sleep was one obvious remedy, but I felt a need for something to feed my soul as well. So I wrote this prayer as something that might help lift my spirits on a daily basis. I wrote it for myself, but thought some of you might like it as well, perhaps as something to riff off of. (Designing one’s own religious rituals is a well-accepted practice in Unitarian-Universalism, the organized religion I belong to, and it is part of the research program I argue for in my sermon “Godless Religion.”)
The basic theological ideas behind this devotional can be found in my sermon “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life.” There, I define teleotheism this way:
Teleotheism is the view that God comes at the end, not at the beginning, where I am defining “God” as “the greatest of all things that can come true.”
Thus, the “Not-Yet” is the greatest of all things that can come true, which I call God, or more specifically, “the God or Gods Who May Be.” I chose that phrase because it also has an agnostic interpretation, allowing for the possibility that there just might be a god or gods out there already. (If there is a god or gods out there already, I feel pretty confident that God or Gods will not match all the details described in any religion that I know of, since every detailed description of God or Gods I know of has internal contradictions.)
Note that identifying what is the “greatest of all things that can come true” is a job for all of us. As I wrote in “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life,”
In this view, the quest to discover what are the greatest things that are possible is of the utmost importance. The best of our religious heritage is just such an effort to discover the greatest things that are possible.
One key aspect of my theology is that it is non-supernaturalist. I tried my best to define “supernatural” in my Q&A post “What Do You Mean by “Supernatural”?” There are some phrases that were quite tempting to write into the devotional that I resisted because they were contrary to my non-supernaturalist beliefs.
Three previous prayers I have posted here provide elements for this prayer:
There are some new elements:
The Day of Awakening and the Day of Fulfilment. The final words of “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life” are
Can there be any greater purpose to life than working toward that day, that fine day, when God and Heaven do exist?“
The "Day of Awakening” and “The Day of Fulfilment” are handy names pointing to that time. It is unlikely that “the greatest of all things that can exist” will come into existence suddenly. “The Day of Awakening” is an early day when it seems that the greatest of all things that can exist is beginning to actually exist. “The Day of Fulfilment” is a later day when the greatest of all things that can exist does exist in full.
The Gathering Powers of Heaven. Because “heaven” can also answer the question “what is the greatest of all things that can exist,” in Teleotheism, the word “heaven” refers to the divine as well. “The gathering powers of heaven” is primarily those people (in the broad sense of intelligent agents) and ideas that are working to build heaven. To my mind, that is the same as those people and ideas that are working to make the world a better place, both in the immediate sense, and in the more roundabout sense of working to discover principles that will help us to make things better in the distant future.
Heroes and Saints. In “Adam Smith as Patron Saint of Supply-Side Liberalism?" I define a "hero” as someone who has done or is doing great good in the world, and a “saint” as a hero who in addition is free from scandal. That is, a “saint” is someone who has not only done or is doing great good in the world, but has done no serious, blameworthy harm, even locally.
On this blog, you will notice that there are many people that I admire. I give a set of links to posts about some of them in my recent post “Saint Clay.” I am sure I have forgotten posts I have written about other heroes. And there are many, many people I admire and think of as heroes whom I have not yet had occasion to write about, or have not yet had occasion to laud.
Younger Generations. The full significance of the phrase “younger generations” is only clear in the light of this passage from my column “That Baby Born in Bethlehem Should Inspire Society to Keep Redeeming Itself”:
… however hard it may seem to change misguided institutions and policies, all it takes to succeed in such an effort is to durably convince the young that there is a better way.
Died. The phrase “our ancestors and the others who have died before us” refers to the fact that in this age, we all still face death. Although I believe death will be conquered (see Cyborgian Immortality), unlike Ray Kurzweil, I don’t believe death will be conquered until it is too late for me to escape death. It is my fond hope that the words of this prayer and this post might survive to a time in the future when death is conquered. But I am very conscious of my own mortality. As I have often said, I am not a fan of death. My favorite poem about death is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music.” I hint at the poignancy of the fact that I and others I love face death near the beginning of the prayer above as well, in the phrase “all the moments I have.”
I Am. In “An Agnostic Grace” I make a hat tip to the Mormon religion I grew up in by ending with these words–which still respect my own non-supernaturalist beliefs:
And we remember Jesus Christ, symbol of all that is good in humankind, and thereby clue to the God or Gods Who May Be. Amen.
In the prayer above, the phrase “I am” is the hat tip to the religion I grew up in, since at least the King James Translation renders the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’s explanation of His own name as “I am that I am.” But “I am” also harks back to Renee Descartes rationalist dictum “I think, therefore I am.” (Cogito ergo sum.)
Grateful. I write about the importance of gratitude in “Human Grace: Gratitude is Not Simple Sentiment; It is the Motivation that Can Save the World,” which is also very much an expression of my theological views.
May Others Be, Now and for All Time. In my post about three possible “Armageddons” I wrote
I believe the continued existence of our species is of great value.
By current temperament, I am an optimist, but I don’t take the continuation of our species for granted. Andrew Snyder-Beattie wrote this in his Quartz essay “Finding a new Earth could be a sign we’re on our way to extinction”:
The Great Filter is an argument that attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox: why have we not found aliens, despite the existence of hundreds of billions of solar systems in our galactic neighborhood in which life might evolve? …
While emergence of intelligent life could be rare, the silence could also be the result of intelligent life emerging frequently but subsequently failing to survive for long. Might every sufficiently advanced civilisation stumble across a suicidal technology or unsustainable trajectory?
I am hopeful that we can make it through the Great Filter. We have already come a long way. Going forward, in addition to avoiding missteps in the short-run, a key to the long-run survival of humanity and our transhuman descendants is for humanity and its offshoots to branch out to the rest of our solar system and beyond. To the stars! (Ad astra.)
Tyler Cowen recommends the pdf linked above in this post.
Matt appears in two other posts on supplysideliberal.com:
The first is one of my most popular posts ever on this blog. The quality of Matt’s arguments there give me very high respect for his acumen.
In this column, Paul Krugman contemplates the economics blogosphere (including online magazines and newspapers).
Here is a link to my 49th column on Quartz, “Cheer Modi On: Why you really want India to join the US and China as a superpower.” I kept my working title as the title of this companion post, since it better reflects the content of the column.
Important Note: Thirumaran makes the case in these storified tweets that Narendra Modi has been given a bad rap for his performance during the Gujarat riots in 2002.What I say in my column about that incident is based entirely on the Wall Street Journal article “Why Narendra Modi Was Banned From the U.S.” I would be glad to hear reactions to Thirumaran’s additional perspective.
Populations of the Most Populous Nations. I found the population figures in Wikipedia’s “World population” for the most populous countries very interesting.
I hadn’t realized that the US was the third most populous nation. All of Europe, including 110,000,000 in the European part of Russia, is only listed at 742,000,000. The reason it makes sense to focus on population figures is that catch-up economic growth up to the cutting-edge level of income per capita is much easier than the economic goal of the US of pushing income per capita to levels the world has never seen before for any large nation.
I was clued into India being headed for beating out China in overall population by Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. It is a fat enough book that I am only partway through. And I am glad I am reading it on a Kindle.
“Nonetheless, selective outrage is not necessarily hypocrisy. There are a million good causes in the world, and one cannot be devoted to all of them. People naturally gravitate to those closest to their heart.”
– Charles Krauthammer, in his May 15, 2014 Washington Post op-ed “The sound and the fury–and the tweet” about the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign.
