History Archive for Ezra Klein - Economic and Domestic Policy, and Lots of It

(Medieval Europe) Graph of the Day

That's a real graph from a serious book: Jennifer Davis’s and Michael McCormick’s "The Long Morning of Medieval Europe." If you want it explained, head this-a-way. (Via Brad DeLong.)...

Gonna Party Like It's 1979

There's not a particularly good reason that I spent my lunch hour reading James Fallows's 1979 article assessing the failures the Carter administration, but I did it anyway. And this bit caught my eye: I was led on myself by...

Misremembering the Past

I'm going to quote pretty much this whole post from Nick Beaudrot because it's really, really, really good: It's simply not meaningful to compare the present circumstances to those faced by Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt when it comes to...

Gonna Party Like It's 1965

My colleague Greg Sargent notes that Michael Steele isn't sounding so much like a Republican from 1994 as a Republican from 1964: Steele, for instance, warned that “we need to prohibit government from getting between seniors and their doctors,” adding...

WWVS (What Would Veblen Say?)

Daniel Gross had the smart idea of turning to the writings of Thorsten Veblen, one of America's greatest, and first, political economists, for some insight on the current meltdown. Veblen, he decides, is still right about the eccentricities of the...

It Was Lyndon Johnson in the Roosevelt Room with the Tax Cut!

I'm pretty confused by Robert Samuelson's column today. He's arguing that the press should be more skeptical of Barack Obama's policy initiatives, but the historical evidence he brings to the question seems peculiar: All "reforms" do not succeed; some cause...

Ezra Klein Archive: History