What is happening to the ‘rules-based international order’ despairingly invoked by bewildered European leaders? The broad answer is that we are living through the retreat of American hegemony, masked by bluster and marked by contradictions. The retreat has two aspects, economic and geopolitical. Economists talk about Trump’s tariffs breaking up the free-trade order; geopoliticians about
The Keynesian economist Nicholas Kaldor called Milton Friedman one of the two most evil men of the 20th century. (Friedman was in distinguished company.) The ‘scourge’ he inflicted on the world was monetarism, a product of what Kaldor called Friedman’s Big Lie – of which more later. Moral judgments aside, how does Friedman rank in
Despite being awarded a Nobel in economics in 1974, Friedrich Hayek was a great thinker rather than a great economist. He called himself a ‘muddler’. His own attempt to build an economic theory floundered. His major contribution was to emphasise the limitations of economic knowledge, and thus the inevitable frustration of efforts to build economic
The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the Twenty- First Century. In it he documented a ‘fundamental force of divergence’ in the capitalist system, which he represented by the equation r>g — the tendency for returns to capital to grow faster than national
