AUSTIN  —  With a single commentary in The Guardian, and an unintended assist from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, economist Isabella Weber of the University of Massachusetts injected clear thinking into a debate that had been suppressed for 40 years.

AUSTIN  —  With the anniversary of the January 6 riot now over, let’s focus on the big picture.The great anomaly of the 2020 US presidential election was that Joe Biden won the national popular vote by 7 million votes, yet came within 43,000 (in three close states) of l

AUSTIN — The headline chosen for Harvard economist Jason Furman’s November 15 commentary in the Wall Street Journal was both apt and sad.

AUSTIN — Pity the academic conservative. Having enjoyed tenure at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, and New York University, and now a steady gig at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, the historian Niall Ferguson now plays the victim.

AUSTIN — A supply chain is like a Rorschach Test: each economic analyst sees in it a pattern reflecting his or her own preconceptions. This may be inevitable, since everyone is a product of differing educations, backgrounds, and prejudices.

AUSTIN — Brood with me on the latest delay of the full release of the records pertaining to the murder of president John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. That was 58 years ago.

TOWNSHEND, VT — Now that so many sad truths about Afghanistan are being spoken aloud, even in the major media, let me add one more: The war, from start to finish, was about politics, not in Afghanistan but in the United States.Afghanistan was always a sideshow.

AUSTIN — In a recent essay on Samantha Power, President Joe Biden’s new administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times writes — correctly — that Power’s “first big test … lies in what America does to help vaccinate

AUSTIN — In a recent commentary for The Washington Post, former US secretary of the treasury Lawrence H. Summers stated that “the consumer price index rose at a 7.5 per cent annual rate” in the first quarter of 2021.