it’s like the runup to the Iraq war, when all the serious people knew that Saddam was working on nukes and invasion was the only option, and anyone who pointed out that there was no evidence to that effect was a flake.

For many years economists have worked like the anecdotal drunk who searches for his dropped keys under a lamppost because the light is better there. In the future, and particularly in macroeconomics, economists need to start looking where the keys are, and try to build tools that will improve the chances of success.

...

Between these two levels, we need to consider the fact that the economy is not a simple machine for aggregating consumer preferences, and allocating resources accordingly. The economy is embedded in a complex social structure, and there is a continuous interaction between the economic system and society as a whole. Phenomena like ‘trust’ and ‘confidence’ are primarily social, but they affect, and are affected by the performance of the economic system.

Finally, now that Keynesian macroeconomic policy has re-emerged as a practical tool, we need to reconsider the real and perceived failures of the past, and in particular the emergence of stagflation in the 1960s. If the revival of Keynesian policy is to be sustained, it must provide not only an emergency response to the present crisis but a set of tools that can deliver sustained non-inflationary growth.

The United States should ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is supported by nearly every other nation in the world, Human Rights Watch said today. The United States and Somalia are the only countries that have failed to ratify the Convention, which was adopted 20 years ago, on November 20, 1989.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child became the most widely and rapidly ratified human rights treaty in history. The United States signed the Convention in 1995, but no US president then or since has sent it to the Senate for ratification.

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Most US laws are already in compliance with the Convention. In 2005, the US Supreme Court removed the most significant legal impediment when it ruled that the use of the death penalty for crimes committed before age 18 was unconstitutional. The practice is prohibited by the Convention.

HT abandoned Maajid as a "fallen soldier" and barely spoke of him or his case. But when his family were finally allowed to see him, they told him he had a new defender. Although they abhorred his political views, Amnesty International said he had a right to free speech and to peacefully express his views, and publicised his case.

"I was just amazed," Maajid says. "We'd always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt – maybe these democratic values aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously ... it was the beginning of my serious doubts."

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... Maajid says assertively: "You know, back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism – and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost. Who joins the Communist Party today?" I can hear the audience applaud him as he walks onto the stage, and with that, Maajid hangs up.

Another in my series about refuting the myth that Ronald Reagan, financial liberalization, or both ushered in an age of much faster economic growth.

Just to be clear: when I show that growth by every measure has been slower since 1980 than before, I’m not claiming that this shows that Reagan/finance caused the slowdown. The upper hand, in this case, is actually on the other foot: it’s the Reagan/finance enthusiasts who use the alleged fact of faster growth to make their case, so I’m just showing that it never happened.

It may seem absurd to suggest that American democracy today has anything in common with Russia or Poland in the early 1990s, or far-fetched to compare American businessmen and government officials with Russian clans and Polish nomads. But in the aftermath of the financial crisis in the United States, some things are starting to look familiar.

The post-communist players bear a striking resemblance to the interlocking handful of Wall Street–government policy deciders who "coincide" at the highest echelons of power and have come to be symbolized by "Government Sachs." From those who ruined Enron to those who wrought more recent Wall Street wreckage, a lack of loyalty to institutions, including the dearth of regard for shareholders and boards of directors, has characterized the modus operandi of the Wall Street players who brought on the financial crisis in America -- and the world.

In both the East European and U.S. cases, operators at the top challenge governments' rules of accountability and businesses' codes of competition, ultimately answering only to each other.