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Jan 11, 2025 | 
forbes.com | Brian Domitrovic
A mannerism is stymying economic discussion about the President Trump tariffs, as it has since the first presidential term. This is the accusation among economic purists that it is craven and outrageous that supply-siders—the very carriers of the Reaganite tax-cut economic tradition—would accommodate their views to tariffs now that powerful and charismatic President Trump is for them.
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Dec 20, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Brian Domitrovic
When the economy goes south, when “capitalism” fails, government at its best comes in and spends money, restoring the system to the order and prosperity that the free market could never achieve on its own. This is a perfectly passable one-sentence summary of Keynesianism, the theory elaborated by JM Keynes in his big book of 1936, the General Theory.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Brian Domitrovic
At 4pm on Friday, December 6, 1974, the Dow Jones industrial average hit bottom. It closed at 577, the lowest it had been in twelve years, since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and lower than any other close since. In 1973, the index was over 1000. The bear market of late 1974 was nasty. The recovery began the following Monday. Louis Rukeyser’s Wall $treet Week was grim viewing (as here) that dim stagflation-era evening.
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Apr 28, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Brian Domitrovic
Last year’s economics Nobelist, Claudia Goldin, wrote an influential article in 1998 on the rise of high school in the United States. In 1900, about 10 percent of Americans of proper age attended high school. In 1940, the figure was 70 percent. Most of the growth came over 1920-35. Goldin’s conclusion was the huge increase in secondary education in this period was a chief reason the economy performed so well after 1945.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Brian Domitrovic
Economics is a proud discipline. It has long seen itself as the premier social science and with the major natural sciences part of the core of the intellectual apparatus of modern society. It understands its methods as sound, serious, and extensive and its contribution to progress notable. Economics has been particularly proud of its record in explaining the central negative event of economic history since the industrial revolution, the Great Depression of the 1930s.
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Apr 20, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Brian Domitrovic
Deindustrialization, “the hollowing out of manufacturing in America,” you always hear, began in earnest with President Reagan in the 1980s. In the 1950s and all that decade represented, the United States churned out manufactured products galore. Then everything offshored and we were left with the Rust Belt. Economist Robert Solow once said that the information technology revolution showed up everywhere except the productivity statistics. Solow was wrong about that.
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Apr 19, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Spencer Klavan |James Patterson |Brian Domitrovic |David Krugler
April 19, 2024 From whence cometh our help? They call him Da Liu: Big Liu. A looser translation might be “the big kahuna,” the one who needs no introduction. Many American viewers of Netflix’s new interstellar drama, 3 Body Problem, are unfamiliar with the trilogy of books it’s based on (collectively titled Remembrance of Earth’s Past) and their author, Liu Cixin. But in his native country, he is a literary sensation, the kingpin of Chinese science fiction.
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Apr 19, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Titus Techera |James Patterson |Brian Domitrovic |David Krugler
Last month I was at a book launch in Washington, DC. This was an event for Republicans—sparsely attended. Older gentlemen and ladies who may have been notable once were obviously struggling with anonymity, looking for people they themselves might know without looking too eager to everyone else. Of course, there were almost no young people except the waiting staff. I knew maybe five people there and wondered what they were doing there; and vice versa.
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | John O. McGinnis |Spencer Klavan |James Patterson |Brian Domitrovic
Every new regime not born from revolutionary violence must win the support of an elite to survive. Mere theories of sound social arrangements do not suffice. A powerful cohort must be invested in the regime’s success, ready to uphold its ideals. Lacking allies to enforce its vision, a regime’s framework may ironically undermine the principles it is designed to uphold.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | James Patterson |Daniel Miller |Spencer Klavan |Brian Domitrovic
Daniel Miller has offered us a critique of American political culture by way of European reactionary thought, with an emphasis on analogies from the French Revolution to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His argument is primarily conceptual, meaning that he identifies key concepts as primary drivers for the events. The central and eponymous concept, American counterrevolution, is never directly defined.
