Ours seems to be the age of the Partisan Hack. Looking over the list of best-selling books or the roster of columnists at top-drawer newspapers, success appears to correlate with mean-spirited attacks and heavy-handed rhetoric. Whatever happened to logical analysis of economic policy designed to illuminate as opposed to rabble-rouse?When I was young, economists Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson wrote regularly for a major news magazine. They ...
Now available with new commentary on political psychology and communication in the Trump era, Kling's book could not be any more timely, as Americans--whether as media pundits or conversing at a party--talk past one another with even greater volume, heat, and disinterest in contrary opinions. opinions.
When it was first released in 2013, Arnold Kling's The Three Languages of Politics was a prescient exploration of political communication, detailing the "three tribal coalitions" that make up America's political landscape. Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians, he argued, are "like tribes speaking different languages. As a result, political discussions do not lead to agreement. Instead, most political commentary serves to increase pola...
Conventional economists lean on the comfortable precision of mathematical abstraction and ignore the messy complexity of the real world. This work tells a big-picture story about the differences in the standard of living across time and across borders.
Since the end of the second World War, economics professors and classroom textbooks have been telling us that the economy is one big machine that can be effectively regulated by economic experts and tuned by government agencies like the Federal Reserve Board. It turns out they were wrong. Their equations do not hold up. Their policies have not produced the promised results. Their interpretations of economic events -- as reported by the media -...
In Unchecked and Unbalanced, Arnold Kling provides a blueprint for those who are skeptical of political and financial elitism. At the heart of Kling's argument is the growing discrepancy between two phenomena: knowledge is becoming more diffuse, while political power is becoming more concentrated. Kling sees this knowledge/power discrepancy at the heart of the financial crisis of 2008. Financial industry executives and regulatory officials lac...
An entrepreneur and Internet millionaire reveals successful strategies for launching an Internet-based business the old-fashioned way--through sound business plans and entrepreneurial drive
