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Cover page of the August 1957 issue of Nation's Business, featuring a clamp tightening in on dollar signs.

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said America faces an economic crisis fifty years in the making. But how can we name the long crisis, much less explain it?
by Tim Barker via Phenomenal World on June 24, 2021
Photo of economist Albert Hisrchman surrounded by abstract drawings

We Don't Know, But Let's Try It

For economist Albert Hirschman, social planning meant creative experimentation rather than theoretical certainty.
by Simon Torracinta via Boston Review on June 17, 2021
Packages of beef cuts
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What Scaremongering About Inflation Gets Wrong

Inflation isn't inexorably a bad thing. In fact, it used to be considered good.
by Rebecca L. Spang via Made By History on May 25, 2021
Black and white photo of a family sitting around the television together

A Brief History of Consumer Culture

Over the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.
by Kerryn Higgs via The MIT Press Reader on January 11, 2021
Thorstein Veblen in 1880, the year he graduated from Carleton College

The Prophet of Maximum Productivity

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.
by Kwame Anthony Appiah via New York Review of Books on January 3, 2021

Sadie Alexander Was a Trailblazing Economist and Activist

This op-ed celebrates the life and legacy of economist, attorney, and civil rights advocate Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander.
by Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman via Teen Vogue on January 1, 2021

From Keynes to the Keynesians

Socialised investment and the spectre of full employment.
by Tim Barker via Verso on December 4, 2020
Thorstein Veblen

The Gadfly of American Plutocracy

Far from a marginal outsider, a new biography contends, Thorstein Veblen was the most important economic thinker of the Gilded Age.
by Simon Torracinta via Boston Review on November 30, 2020
Drawing of people picking cotton at a plantation

A Few Random Thoughts on Capitalism and Slavery

Historian James Oakes offers a critique of the New History of Capitalism.
by James Oakes via The Economic Historian on September 28, 2020

Cousins Like Us: Black Lives and John Maynard Keynes

Reflections on the famous economist through the prism of the author's own mixed-race family.
by Taylor Beck via Los Angeles Review of Books on September 4, 2020
A photograph of enslaved laborers picking and carrying cotton in a field near Montgomery, Alabama.

Capitalism, Slavery, and Power over Price

The debate between historians and economists over the definition of capitalism, and the legacy of slavery in the structure of today's economy.
by Caitlin C. Rosenthal, Johnny Fulfer via The Economic Historian on August 3, 2020

The Nation’s First Unemployment Check — $15 — and the Love Story that Led to It

During the Great Depression, the daughter of the first Jewish Supreme Court justice and the son of a prominent Christian theologian changed America.
by Michael S. Rosenwald via Retropolis on April 18, 2020
Several stores in a 20th century shopping mall

Paul Samuelson Brought Mathematical Economics to the Masses

Paul Samuelson’s mathematical brilliance changed economics, but it was his popular touch that made him a household name.
by Roger Backhouse via Aeon on February 10, 2020
Cartoon of people at a crossroad, with one direction pointing to "prosperity" and the other to "depression"

Selling Keynesianism

Today, we can learn a lot from the popularizing efforts that led to that consensus that Keynesianism leads to and long-lasting economic success.
by Robert Manduca via Boston Review on December 6, 2019

The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever, Can They?

Inequality comes in waves. The question is when this one will break.
by Liaquat Ahamed via The New Yorker on August 26, 2019

The Mind Behind Early American Protectionism

Before free trade became a consensus, Friedrich List argued that U.S. industry should be put first.
by Tim Cavanaugh via The American Conservative on April 24, 2019

How the Chicago School Changed the Meaning of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’

Smith wasn’t warning about government intervention in the market; he was warning about government capture.
by Glory M. Liu via Washington Post on April 22, 2019

Atlas Weeps

Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s strange elegy for capitalism.
by Kim Phillips-Fein via The Nation on December 12, 2018

When Economists Took Socialism Seriously

If there’s one thing worth taking away from the new White House report on socialism, it’s that economics is a political argument.
by Tim Barker via Dissent on October 25, 2018

What These Early-20th-Century Scholars Got Right About 21st-Century Politics

Unlike many economists today, they questioned fundamental social structure.
by Branko Milanović via Vox on January 10, 2018

The Uses and Abuses of 'Neoliberalism'

Does the term clarify or confuse our understanding of capitalism today?
by Daniel T. Rodgers via Dissent on December 13, 2017

The Architect of the Radical Right

How the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s antigovernment politics.
by Sam Tanenhaus via The Atlantic on June 20, 2017

It’s Time for Historians of Slavery to Listen to Economists

Economic analyses of the antebellum era upend the notion that Southern whites were united in their support of slavery.
by Keri Leigh Merritt via Historians Against Slavery on March 17, 2017

Our Mis-Leading Indicators

How statistical data came to rule public policy.
by Stephen Macekura via Public Books on September 15, 2014
Sign saying "WHIP INFLATION NOW" with image of Uncle Sam whipping a personification of inflation

The Rise of Inflation

Understanding how inflation came to be a mainstay in modern economics.
by Rebecca L. Spang via Cabinet on June 14, 2013
A bread line on New York's Lower East Side in 1930.

Trump Tariffs Conjure Specter of Smoot-Hawley Act, a Depression-Era Blunder

The 1930 tariff bill hurt exporters and provoked other countries to enact their own tariffs as the U.S. economy grappled with the Great Depression.
by Andrew Jeong via Washington Post on April 8, 2025
Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein at Columbia University

C. Wright Mills, Karl Polanyi, and the Frankfurt School in postwar America.
by Sam Chian via Journal of the History of Ideas Blog on March 31, 2025
Henry Carey.

The Thinker Who Explains Trump’s Tariffs

Henry Charles Carey is arguably the most influential economist in American history.
by Adam Rowe via Compact on March 4, 2025
Photo of Wong Kim Ark and document about Chinese Exclusion.

History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism

Even Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship has a historical link to the Chinese American experience.
by Michael Luo via The New Yorker on January 5, 2025
Trump holding a table of tariff rates.
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Tariffs Don’t Have to Make Economic Sense to Appeal to Trump Voters

Economists and Democrats dismiss Trump’s tariffs talk at their peril.
by Bruce J. Schulman via Made By History on October 24, 2024
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