Taking Hope in the Long View
If all goes well in China and India in the next generation – and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong in the North Atlantic core of the global economy – the next generation will reach a milestone. For the first time, more than half of the world's people will have enough food, shelter, clothing, and medical care that their chief concern will be avoiding boredom.
BERKELEY – In the United States, we sit in the midst of 10% unemployment. In some countries, fiscal policy is crippled by legitimate fears that more deficit spending will trigger government-debt crises. In many other countries, fiscal policy is crippled by confusion between short-term cyclical and long-term structural deficits.