The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.

If you're doing your job right, some substantial group of people [is] going to be mad at you.

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

Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.

[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.

Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader.