Ever since the Great Depression, economists have known that demand shortages tend to persist in the wake of severe financial crises like the ones that happened in 1929 and 2008.

The upshot is that to send its children to a school of even average quality, a family must outbid half of other similar families who are pursuing the same goal. And that's become dramatically more expensive because of the growth in median house size, which was in turn caused by higher spending at the top.

Once firms had to pay to pollute, they became incredibly inventive at figuring out cheaper ways to eliminate their SO2 emissions.

Every group spends more when its income grows.

As the great naturalist Charles Darwin saw clearly, individual and collective interests often coincide, as in the invisible hand narrative. But he also saw that in many other cases, interests at the two levels are squarely in conflict, and that in those cases, individual interests generally trump. That simple observation suggests that market failure is often the result not of insufficient competition (the traditional charge from social critics on the Left), but of the very logic of competition itself.

Prescriptive regulations, such as telling electric utilities what kinds of coal to burn or what kinds of scrubbers to install on their smokestacks, were not only intrusive, they were also grossly inefficient.

In the long run, greater investment would mean greater productivity and income growth.