Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Economic history
As Covid-19 threatens to push millions of Americans into poverty, we can look to the past for lessons on how to deal with a pandemic.
The numbers are already grim. Worldwide, over 27 million have contracted Covid-19; nearly 875,000 have died from it.
The fate of the codfish suggests that collectivism on the ownership level is as destructive as anywhere else
If the twentieth century has taught us anything about economics, it is that free markets work better than any other kind.
Will the current bull market die spectacularly, à la 1929, or—as in 1974—strangle in weird silence?
J.P. Morgan did not have much use for either the stock market or reporters. So when one reporter importunately asked him what the market was going to do one day, he replied, with about equal parts contempt and truth, “It will fluctuate.”
With his usual furious vigor, Andrew Jackson posed a question that continues to trouble us to this day
The alarm bells are ringing for Social Security again. That’s not exactly news— predictions of the exhaustion of its trust fund have been made before.
Foreign trade—import and export alike—has been indispensable in building America from the very start, and many of our worst economic troubles have arisen when that trade wasn’t free enough. A historic overview.
It is not a coincidence that Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and what would one day be the world’s wealthiest nation should both have burst upon the global scene in 1776.
Those who believe America’s power is on the wane look to the example of Britain’s shockingly quick collapse. But the similarities may be less alarming than they seem.
In 1987 Paul Kennedy published his eighth book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
In 1937 the American economy, which had been slowly rising from the depths it had reached in 1933, suddenly reversed course and sank once more.
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