If the price of everything is going down, that's going to include wages as well. People will have an incentive to sit on their cash and not spend it.

I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.

On the political as on the economic front it's important not to fall into the "not as bad as" trap. High unemployment isn't O.K. just because it hasn't hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst.

...instead it seems that business - like weight loss - is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.

Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: it's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

By rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.