As the illness of the late Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane escalated, and with it Crane’s pessimism about how much time he had left, I would tell him he had to stick around lest the members of our weekly lunch crew retreat into fallacious thinking, including – gasp – conventional conservative wisdom.
There was reason for worry. At Cato, a pattern had revealed itself. Once people left Cato and Crane’s counsel, they tended to stray.
The frequently disappointing evolution of individuals outside Crane’s orbit came to mind while reading Cornell economics professor Eswar Prasad’s new book, The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling into Disorder. This is the third book by Prasad that I’ve reviewed, which is hopefully a signal to readers that I’m a fan of Prasad’s. While there’s broad disagreement with him about many things, there’s always been a lot of learning in between the disagreements.
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