I have always loved the opening lines of William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming – his words seem at once mystical, haunting, and as meaningful in our time as in his:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote those words in 1919, in the aftermath of The Great War, when it must have seemed that the whole world had lost its way. Americans have been spoiled because in our lifetime war has taken place “over there” instead of “over here.”  We know little of what it is like to watch the structures and institutions that provide order and meaning disintegrate overnight. Continue reading →

The Long Slump is economist Joseph Stiglitz’s name for the stubbornly weak state of the US economy. Writing in Vanity Fair magazine, Stiglitz argues that the conditions that led up to the present recession eerily mirror the conditions that caused the Great Depression of the 1930s.

If he is correct, it means that the current war against spending and economic investment  in Washington, DC will have two drastic effects. First, it will prolong our economic stagnation and suffering. Second, it will delay the profound changes that are necessary to put our economy back on a growth path. Continue reading →

Tomorrow is the anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination near Dealey Plaza in Dallas, as he rode through the streets in an open car greeting the crowds who had come just for a glimpse of JFK and Jackie as the motorcade passed by.

It doesn’t seem possible that it was so long ago. The memories of that day and the days that followed are burnt deeply into the cells of my brain, as they are for so many of my contemporaries.

I don’t know if it is possible for young people today to quite understand how much we loved him. He was born in 1917, but he came to power in 1960, just as we were starting to claim our own power.  For us, Kennedy epitomized the freshness and the optimism of the early 1960’s, and the break with the past that we all prided ourselves on. Continue reading →

Is the US economy running out of jobs? If it is, we may be saved by, of all things, a shift to a four-day week.

Here’s the background. It’s possible that we are headed for a future with a permanent shortage of work. There appears to be a growing gap between how many jobs we need and how many jobs our economy can produce. Continue reading →