Today I would like to once again return to the subject of the intellectual hipster–someone who adopts an idea without giving it much thought for the purpose of conveying or demonstrating an intellectual impulse that is, in reality, foreign to them. In the past, we have looked at libertarians, sceptics, and lovers of Nietzsche. Today I wish to turn to the self-proclaimed centrists, those who purport not to agree with either side in political disputes, with the implication that their moderation indicates higher wisdom than their partisan counterparts.
Hurricane Sandy and the Least Productive Congress
Yesterday, some republicans from states affected by Hurricane Sandy grew extraordinarily angry with House Speaker John Boehner for delaying a vote on a senate-approved $60 billion disaster relief bill. Are they right to be angry? I shall endeavour to examine the situation and reach what conclusions I can.
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The Fiscal Cliff: Stepping Back From the Abyss
A couple days later than perhaps would have made a decent show, Congress managed to slap together a stop-gap and avert the economic catastrophe that the CBO projected would have resulted from the fiscal cliff. So let’s get to business–what does the cliff deal do, and where does this leave us going forward?
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Stagflation: What Really Happened in the 70’s
If you argue long enough about economics, you are bound to run into the stagflation argument. The stagflation argument claims that the big state and stimulus caused high inflation, high unemployment, and poor growth during the seventies. Usually this argument is not fully argued by those who believe in it–it is merely asserted, and the rest of us are expected to accept that it is simply the case that the seventies happened that way. Today I’d like to endeavour to illustrate what actually happened in the seventies, what the real causes of stagflation were, and what sort of lessons might be pulled from it.
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Rise of the Machines: The Robot Economy of the Future
My attention has been drawn to a rather interesting phenomenon by Paul Krugman–that of a gradual shift in the distribution of wealth from labour to capital. As a percentage of the economic total, workers are earning less and less over time, and more and more of our output is landing in the hands of people who own capital–the land, the buildings, the tools, the machines that make things tick. This has interesting implications, and, if I might be permitted to speculate today, those implications may demand changes in how we view what we produce.
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Benjamin Studebaker 