There's a sort of parlor game that the economically-minded sometimes play around the Christmas holiday, related to A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens.
The other day I found myself, as one does, reading speeches given 50 years ago by Edward Levi, who was then the president of the University of Chicago. Here are some thoughts from "The University and the Modern Condition," which was delivered to the University of Chicago Citizen's Board on November 16, 1967, and reprinted in his 1969 collection Point of View: Talks on Education (magically available via Google Books). It is both comforting and disheartening that many of his comments could be delivered essentially unchanged by a speaker a half-century later.
Making predictions is hard, especially about the future. It's a comment that seems to have been attributed to everyone from Nostradamus to Niels Bohr to Yogi Berra. But it's deeply true. Most of us have a tendency to make statements about the future with a high level of self-belief, avoid later reconsidering how wrong we were, and then make more statements.
One can make a reasonable argument that the concept of an economy and the study of economics begins with the idea of specialization, in the sense that those who function within an economy specialize in one kind of production, but then trade with others to consume a broader array of good.
The US dollar has become the safest asset in the face of mounting evidence that the “beggar thy neighbor” policy and drowning structural liquidity problems are coming to a close.
There's an old rueful line from firms that advertise: "We know that half of all we spend on advertising is wasted, but we don't know which half." It's not clear who originally coined the phrase. But we do know that the effects of advertising have changed dramatically in a digital age. Half of all advertising spending may still be wasted, but now it's for a very different reason.
Randomization is one of the most persuasive techniques for determining cause and effect. Half of a certain group get a treatment; half don't. Compare. If the groups were truly chosen at random, and the treatment was truly the only difference between them, and the differences in outcomes are meaningful and the size of the samples are also large enough for drawing statistically meaningful conclusions, then the differences can tell you something about causes.