May state legislative applications limit an Article V convention? Subject, yes; specific language, probably not
- September 12, 2013
Book reviews
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The Density Fallacy0
- October 5, 2011
A decade or so ago, an Economist senior editor named Frances Cairncross wrote a book called The Death of Distance which argued that, thanks to declining transportation and telecommunications costs, distance really doesn’t matter anymore. So it is ironic that another Economist writer, Ryan Avent, has written a new book arguing that “Distance is not […]
READ MOREThe History of Home Ownership0
- June 15, 2011
An earlier series of Antiplanner posts looked at the recent financial crisis and the role the housing market played in that crisis. This has led the Antiplanner to look deeper into the history of housing and home ownership. The Census Bureau began tallying homeownership rates in the 1890 census; before that, American homeownership rates can […]
READ MOREMarket Asymmetry0
- May 18, 2011
Along with Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, Gregory Zuckerman’s The Greatest Trade Ever shows that at least some investors were aware that the housing bubble of the mid-2000s was likely to collapse, with severe repercussions on the economy. The book (whose alternate subtitle is “How One Man Bet Against the Markets and Made $20 Billion”) […]
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Contributing Factors, Part One0
- April 21, 2011
Today and tomorrow, as a part of the Antiplanner’s continuing series about the 2008 economic meltdown, I am going to look at many of the supposed causes of the crisis and show that, while some of them may have made the crisis worse, none of them were the ultimate cause of the crisis. In some […]
READ MOREA Crisis of Reserves0
- April 18, 2011
The Antiplanner continues to read recent books about the 2008 financial crisis, but there are definite diminishing returns. I just finished Roger Lowenstein‘s The End of Wall Street and found it disappointing. It covered almost exactly the same ground as Too Big to Fail, but unlike the latter book, which was based mainly on interviews, […]
READ MOREAntiplanner’s Library: Freefall0
- March 30, 2011
Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz‘s take on the 2008 financial crisis is simple: Free markets are bad; government is good; we need more government. This is, essentially, a reiteration of what is known as the Greenwald-Stiglitz theorem, which states that markets are imperfect, so “government could potentially almost always improve upon the market’s resource allocation.” A […]
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