Uncommon Arguments on Common Topics: Essays on Political Economy and Diplomacy

I wrote decades ago on the causes of the Great Depression, emphasizing the roles of both the post-WW1 undervaluation of gold and the deflationary policies of the Federal Reserve and, even more, of the Bank of France. Since publication of Gold, France, and the Great Depression (1997), we have seen the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, the Great Recession of 2007-2009, a subsequent decade of slow growth, and the pandemic and subsequent inflation of 2020-2022. Contents here include comments on each of these. I also became interested in theoretical issues involving monetary and fiscal policy, especially as they appear in J.M. Keynes and in Robert Mundell. Elsewhere, it has loomed for me as an unfinished task to understand better why Cold War events, including Berlin and Vietnam, unfolded as they did. I include two papers here that are clarifying, including of the roles of US and international leaders. Finally, I spent years working on economic development and political reconstruction in the Middle East and central Asia, and include observations on what happened there and what should have been done differently.