THE popularity of Google’s search engine in the United States just grows and grows. In the past three years, its market share gains have even been accelerating, making some people wonder whether the company will eventually obliterate what remains of its competition in search.

Edward L. Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard.

The Great Depression provided an opportunity to rethink old policies in a major way. In the current morass, everything should, once again, be open for debate. One sacred cow that has long been in need of a good stockyard is the home mortgage interest deduction. So, in the spirit of libertarian progressivism, I suggest gradually reducing the upper limit on the... More

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Banning Sunday liquor sales pleases Baptists"”and also pleases bootleggers by increasing demand for their services.

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In the name of "stimulus," Washington is radically broadening its... More

SOMETHING to ponder during Black History Month: In the long night that followed Reconstruction, what was the engine that drove Jim Crow? Did segregationist laws codify existing social practice, or was it the laws themselves that segregated the South?

Many people might intuitively assume that Southern racism had led to entrenched public segregation long before Southern legislatures made it mandatory. Not so. Separate... More

By Steven Horwitz, OpEd Contributor - 2/13/09

Like many of the forgotten people in America, I have strongly recommended that the government do nothing to bring us out of this deep recession. But I know we're going to lose the argument. The debate now is really all about what politicians should do, not what the American public should do.

To my way of thinking, economic... More

It began as a sub-prime surprise, then became a credit crunch and is now a global financial crisis. At last week's World Economic Forum at Davos there was much retrospective finger-pointing--Russia and China blamed America, everyone blamed the bankers, the bankers blamed everyone--but little in the way of forward-looking ideas. From where I was sitting, the majority of attendees were still stuck in the Great Repression: deeply... More

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I used to be optimistic about the capacity of our political leaders and central bankers to avoid the policy mistakes that could turn the current global recession into a deep and lasting global depression.  Now I’m not so sure.

I used to believe that the unavoidable protectionist and mercantilist rhetoric would not be matched by protectionist and mercantilist deeds.  Protectionism was one of the factors that turned a US... More

THE HOUSE has passed an $819 billion spending package. Soon the Senate will vote. Will government spending get the economy going or slow it down? How long will it take to have an impact? How many jobs will it create? Can we afford it?

You would think economists could answer these questions. Since at least the Great Depression, economists have theorized about what causes the economy to slow down or speed up. We've theorized... More

AS job losses mount and bailout costs run into the trillions, the social costs of the economic downturn become clearer. The primary question, to be sure, is what can be done to shorten or alleviate these bad times. But there is also a broader set of questions about how this downturn is changing our lives, in ways beyond strict economics.

All recessions have cultural and social effects, but in major... More

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John Ibbitson's America

JOHN IBBITSON

From Friday's Globe and Mail

January 30, 2009 at 4:23 AM... More

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By Amar Bhidé

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Glass-Steagall, enacted in 1933, limited banks to deposits and loans Classicstock/Alamy

"Where enterprise leads," wrote British economist Joan Robinson in 1952, "finance follows." But now finance has led industry—into a ravine. It didn't start with the recent missteps of bankers,... More