LONDON – The doctrine of imposing present pain for future benefit has a long history – stretching all the way back to Adam Smith and his pra…

LONDON – Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s greatest twentieth-century peacetime prime minister. In the 1980’s, the near-simultaneous crisis of…

LONDON – I remember the exact date of my visit to Venezuela. I was sunbathing by the pool on the roof of the Caracas Hilton. A waiter came u…

LONDON – What impact will automation – the so-called “rise of the robots” – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, …

LONDON – The editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has written a book about how he decided to practice the piano 20 minutes a day. Eighte…

LONDON – “Why did no one see the crisis coming?” Queen Elizabeth II asked economists during a visit to the London School of Economics at the…

LONDON – It is generally agreed that the crisis of 2008-2009 was caused by excessive bank lending, and that the failure to recover adequatel…

LONDON – The king of Bhutan wants to make us all happier. Governments, he says, should aim to maximize their people’s Gross National Happine…

LONDON – US President Barack Obama has vowed to avenge the murder of J. Christopher Stevens, America’s former ambassador to Libya. How he pr…

LONDON – As Olympic mania swept the world in recent weeks, it transported the host country, Great Britain, to a rare display of public exult…

LONDON – How much inequality is acceptable? Judging by pre-recession standards, a great deal of it, especially in the United States and Brit…

LONDON – As people in the developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employment after the Great Recession, it might bene…

LONDON – Is China poised to become the world’s next superpower? This question is increasingly asked as China’s economic growth surges ahead …

LONDON – Nearly four years after the start of the global financial crisis, many are wondering why economic recovery is taking so long. Indee…

LONDON – Historically, the term “fair trade” has meant many things. The Fair Trade League was founded in Britain in 1881 to restric…

LONDON – “Deficits are always bad,” thunder fiscal hawks. Not so, replies strategic investment analyst H. Wood Brock in an interesting new b…

LONDON – Europe is now haunted by the specter of debt. All European leaders quail before it. To exorcise the demon, they are putting their e…

LONDON – The recent European Union summit was a disaster. Both Britain and Germany played the wrong game: British Prime Minister David Camer…

LONDON – Politicians are masters at “passing the buck.” Everything good that happens reflects their exceptional talents and efforts; everyth…

LONDON – The financial crisis that started in 2007 shrunk the world economy by 6% in two years, doubling unemployment. Its proximate cause w…

LONDON – Germany has been leading the opposition in the European Union to any write-down of troubled eurozone members’ sovereign debt. Inste…

LONDON – The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who died in 1992 at the age of 93, once remarked that to have the last word requires on…

LONDON – Everyone knows that Greece will default on its external debt. The only question concerns the best way to arrange it so that no one …

LONDON – Recently, at a literary festival in Britain, I found myself on a panel discussing free speech. For liberals, free speech is a key i…

LONDON – As the world recovers from the Great Recession, it has become increasingly difficult to discern the true trend of events. On the on…