Mayor Mamdani has created a new program—70,000 free tickets, every year, for students, citizens, residents, workers, immigrants, toddlers, grandparents, homeless people, anyone and everyone who lives in the city, to go to the Metropolitan Opera. To see La Boheme, Macbeth, Cosa Fan Tutte, Tosca, The Magic Flute, Samson and Delilah, Aida, Parsifal, and more. Sign up here. While you’re waiting to sign into the lottery, savor these words of John Maynard Keynes, writing at the height of World War II, reminding us what the idea of a “commonwealth” really means: I should like to see that war memorials of this tragic struggle take the shape of an enrichment of the civic life of every great centre of population. Why should […]
The screenshot below is of a passage in a chapter written by Susanne Lohmann, a top UCLA political scientist, in the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, which is edited by Barry Weingast, an even more senior political scientist at Stanford. Two things of note. First, Lohmann claims that the Yale economist William Nordhaus coined the phrase “political business cycle” in 1975. That’s untrue. As Nordhaus himself acknowledges in his 1975 article, it was in fact the Polish Marxist economist Michał Kalecki who formulated the phrase, in 1943, in his article “Political Aspects of Full Employment.” But, second, by mistaking the authorship of the “political business cycle” idea, Lohmann erases its original meaning, or even the fact that it ever had […]
Throughout his life, John Maynard Keynes was plagued by the thought that he was ugly. In his diary, Keynes’s father notes that his six-year-old son “thinks no one ever was quite so ugly.” When he was 23, Keynes complained to Lytton Strachey that “I have always suffered and I suppose always will from a most unalterable obsession that I am so physically repulsive….The idea is so fixed and constant that I don’t think anything—certainly no argument—could ever shake it.” Keynes didn’t lack for sexual partners. He kept a detailed list of his sexual experiences, and it’s long. Nor was he an unhappy person, prone to self-doubt. He was just convinced that he was ugly. Interestingly, his lack of confidence in […]
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: Society…is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primæval contract of eternal society… Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: Money in its significant attributes is, above all, a subtle device for linking the present to the future.