Twenty years ago--with the end of the Cold War--American policy got dammed up:
It was clear we needed to do something to balance the long-term social-insurance spending promises both parties were making with the long-term tax base, and we haven't.
It was clear--first for national-security and domestic-congestion reasons, and then for global-warming reasons as well--that we needed to start imposing Pigovian taxes on coal and oil-driven energy use, and we haven't.
It was clear that we needed to reform America's health care financing system, and we haven't.
It was clear that America, as the globe's sole hyperpower, had a unique opportunity to build a world in which we could live very comfortably and peacefully once we were no longer a hyperpower or even a superpower but instead only one (if we are lucky) of several great powers--and we haven't.
To this in the past three years we have added:
A recognition that the "Greenspanist" bet--deregulate finance, rely on financial company shareholders via corporate control to limit moral hazard, and bet that the Federal Reserve can lean up after any elephants that stampede through--was wrong. We need to restructure financial regulation--and we haven't.
A recognition that the "central problem of macroeconomics" has not in fact been solved. We need to solve it--both in the short run of recovery from this recession, and in the long run of creating a world that is net, whether through global imbalances or other factors, as vulnerable to episodes like this as our world turns out to be.
About these six issues, two questions:
Which of these six policy issues will--as many of them have been doing--continue to drift, and what damage will drifting do?
Which of these six policy issues will the Obama administration actually be able to address--and what will be the consequences for the world of how it addresses them?
-
This announcement speaks for itself: Dear Colleagues, After two decades teaching medieval art history and doing photography for my own use,...
-
From the Guardian: Leading foreign academics from the LSE acting as expert advisers to the UK government were told they would not be asked ...
-
A new translation of this fascinating treatise on horsemanship by a fifteenth-century king. This interview with Jeffrey Forgeng comes from...
Rabu, 28 Oktober 2009
Langganan:
Posting Komentar (Atom)
Weekly
-
This announcement speaks for itself: Dear Colleagues, After two decades teaching medieval art history and doing photography for my own use,...
-
From the Guardian: Leading foreign academics from the LSE acting as expert advisers to the UK government were told they would not be asked ...
-
A new translation of this fascinating treatise on horsemanship by a fifteenth-century king. This interview with Jeffrey Forgeng comes from...
-
...if you are very, very rich. (Most mss. of this age and quality are in national or university libraries and are not for sale at any price... -
Byron York talks to dedicated, long-time Romney supporters right after the concession speech: A few hours earlier, across the street at the...
-
Two experts in the Middle East have been more useful to me than most of the more prominent ones. They are Juan Cole and Joshua Landis. If yo...
-
I have always loved maps and history. Growing up in the USA in the early 60s, the Southeast Asian war gave me the opportunity to learn geog...
-
I just discovered this book, which came out a couple of years ago, thanks to Brad DeLong, who provided a link to a pre-print to chapter 9, ...
-
...full of archaeological goodies. Thanks, David Meadows! One of the nice things about this e-mail news compilation is that it supplies me ...
-
I have been reading the magazine Foreign Policy recently, and despite the fact that is understandably American-centric, it does tend to take...
0 Comment to "Brad DeLong provides an approach to the last 20 years of world history"
Posting Komentar