At three o’clock in the morning a great horned owl hooted outside my bedroom window. Moonlight laughed in the forest. The rain had stopped and the weather had cleared up and I had to get up to pee but I didn’t want to leave my warm bed. I felt like that owl who had...

 With the news from Venezuela this morning (January 3rd, 2026) we refer you to our good friend over at Global Macro Monitor. The crib notes for those who won't or can't read this important post in all its detail are pasted below. For the entire article click on this...

 There is a strange similarity of thinking between Trump’s tariff-driven bid to “restore” U.S. manufacturing and Mao Zedong’s ill-fated Great Leap Forward (1958-62). They do not share an ideology but a method: both are top-down attempts to force economic reality to...

  For only 16 cents a day, less than the cost of one cup of coffee per month, yada, yada, yada … you can support ? They’re out there, the Christmas hucksters, appealing to your guilty heart, yes guilty, you know you’ve sinned and you want to atone painlessly so you...

“Love you all, but there's a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. If you are a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” Billie Eilish, after receiving the Music Innovator Award. At the ceremony, Stephen Colbert announced that Eilish donated $11.5...

  Bertrand Russell wrote his essay on the benefits of doing nothing in 1932 during the Great Depression which destroyed the jobs and lives of millions. You can read the essay at this LINK or scroll down to the bottom of this post and listen to it.Russell argues that...

 If capitalism undermines democracy (Lindblom, see Politics and Markets 1) and democracy undermines capitalism (Schumpeter, see Politics and Markets 2) then how can we make them compatible?That is the question we face today: authoritarian capitalism, democratic...

 In Politics and Markets 1, using Charles Lindblom’s model, I discussed how capitalism can undermine democracy. Let’s turn this around and look at how democracy can undermine capitalism.The influential economist Joseph Schumpeter finished his career at Harvard...

     In 1977 Charles Lindblom published Politics and Markets. In the book he explored what he called “the privileged position of business” in capitalist democracies. Governments depend on private business to invest, create jobs, and maintain economic stability....

     The only appropriate answer to “fiction or nonfiction? art or science?” is both.Fiction is a simulator. It provides emotional knowledge. How does a character’s suffering, courage, cowardice, love, loss and redemption feel? It provides moral imagination. “What...

      “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Thucydides It’s been fifty years since I studied the history of western civilization at Stanford. My professor, E. Berkeley Tompkins, wrote Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate,...