In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.

I'm writing from New Zealand - a country that decided from the beginning that the War was wrong, and chose not to participate in Iraq War.

As a rich country, we can, in some sense, "afford" the war. But spending money on the war means that we are not spending money on other things that we could have spent the money on.

I understand why political leaders in the beginning want to be cheerleaders to generate optimism. But to admit that they didn't understand the depths of the problem afterwards, I found a little bit surprising.

The national debt will have increased by approximately 50% in just eight years! We will have created a new unfunded entitlement - disability and health care benefits for the huge number of disabled veterans returning from the Iraq war.

It's actually a tribute to the quality of economics teaching that they have persuaded so many generations of students to believe in so much that seems so counter to what the world is like. Many of the things that I'm going to describe make so much more common sense than these notions that seem counter to what one's eyes see every day.

The basic thing that made Trump popular is that he blamed others for the problems that we have in the United States. We have a problem. Let's face it. The typical income, median income, of a full-time male worker - and the workers who have a full-time job are the lucky ones - is at the same level it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages in the United States are at the same level they were 60 years ago.