Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
Economics
In novels, movies, and television melodramas, money and power often are treated as if they were two sides of a single coin. In life, they are different currencies, and the effort to convert one into the other has produced some amazing tangles.
Just imagine that you have a chance to buy for $25 a stock whose potential earnings seem to you to justify a price of $30. Should you buy? It appears irrational not to. But wait.
It depends on whose interpretation of both history and the current crisis you believe. For one of America’s most prominent supply-side economists, the answer is yes.
Jude Wanniski was among the early leaders in the revival of supply-side economic theory.
How much did we lose?” my wife asked me on the day the stock market sank like a stone last October. I did some quick arithmetic and answered, with remarkably good cheer under the circumstances, that we had lost only a little more than two times our annual income.
He invented modern mass-production. He gave the world the first people’s car, and Americans loved him for it. But, at the moment of his greatest triumph, he turned on the empire he had built, and on the son who would inherit it.
The Creator
The unveiling of the Statue of Liberty was not the only event that stirred the passions of New Yorkers in 1886.
The crisis swept over France and Germany and Britain alike, and they all nearly foundered. Now more than ever, it is important to remember that it didn’t just happen here.
Back in 1955, John Kenneth Galbraith called the Great Depression of the 1930s “the most momentous economic occurrence in the history of the United States,” and 30-odd years later that judgment, recorded in Galbraith’s bestseller, The Great Crash
Connoisseurs have long regarded him as the master of cold-turkey peddling. He’s been at it for 80 years.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, a doorbell would ring almost anywhere in America, a housewife would run to answer it, and there would stand a well-groomed, smiling gentleman. “I’m your Fuller Brush Man,” he would say, stepping back deferentially.
The urge to create literature was as strong in the mid-1800s as it is today, but rejections were brutal and the pay was even worse.
How does the writing life in pre-Civil War America compare with that of the 1980s?
Herman Melville’s great novel Moby-Dick has inspired dozens of books and thousands of articles and essays, but not one of them, so far as I know, has examined the novel as a case study in managerial failure—a portrait of an unsatisfactor
"My office is a zoo,” a friend of mine complained a few weeks ago.
I can remember Mickey Mantle before he hurt his knees and the exact spiral of a pass from John Unitas to Raymond Berry, but I’m too young to remember the golden age of the American department store.
It didn’t just change the way we buy our groceries. It changed the way we live our lives.
Late last year, on its obituary page, The New York Times acknowledged the passing of a multi-millionaire Oklahoma businessman named Sylvan Goldman. SYLVAN N.
Imagine yourself as a senior executive with General Motors in the years just after World War I.
The curious story of Milford Haven
Milford Haven is the name of both a town and a natural harbor set in the rolling hills of southern Wales some 250 miles west of London.
The 20s and 30s saw a host of new ways to separate customers from their money. Those methods have not been forgotten.
No era provides such revealing insights into the cultural values of both producers and consumers of American advertising as the 1920s and 1930s, when admen not only claimed the status of professionals but also saw themselves as missionaries of modernity.
What does Dale Carnegie, the author of an enormously successful book that few people read any more, have to do with In Search of Excellence, the management book that everyone is reading these days?
As the twenties roared on, a market crash became inevitable. Why? And who should have stopped it?