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Why do the vast majority of economists believe in free trade? Because they learned in school that it’s more efficient, in the first instance, to try to produce as much wealth as possible by relying on free and competitive markets to maximize everyone’s comparative advantage. Even if that means, in …

In the symbolic realm, moreover, Jobs and Gates embody the figure of the deserving rich, a soothing idea in times like these. We’ve come close to concluding that their fortunes ($8 billion for Jobs, $50 billion for Gates, according to the Forbes magazine rankings) are exactly what they ought to be …

Germany is right to want the banks and other financial institutions that lent to Greece, sometimes at very high interest rates, to pay part of the costs of the current disaster. But simply put, this needs to be done in an orderly, fair, and controlled way, through a specific European-level tax on t…

The second thing to note is that while the Japanese government certainly has a gross debt in excess of 200 percent of GDP, it owns nonfinancial assets on the order of 100 percent of GDP (real estate, land), as well as financial assets also on the order of 100 percent of GDP (ownership stakes in pub…

These accounts are certainly not perfect. For example, at the world level, the net financial position is negative overall, which is logically impossible unless we assume that on average we’re owned by the planet Mars. More likely, this contradiction suggests that a nonnegligible share of financial …