Don Boudreaux is an economist, yet although an expert in the "dismal science", he is an optimist, which makes a very nice change. He claims it's because he's a professional in the field.
Here he says that America's freedom and creativity will overcome present problems, as they have in the past; here he says the housing market can't be too bad if workers are unwilling to sell their houses in a falling market; and here he claims to love America's trade deficit.
Is he right? Or just seeing affairs from the point of view of a man who's had a good dinner and is assured that, in his case, good dinners will never stop coming? I've often thought that war movies should end prematurely and at different points for a random selection among, say, 20% of the audience, to remove the Olympian perspective.
But it is nice to read someone who thinks it's not all gloom and doom.
3 comments:
"here he says the housing market can't be too bad if workers are unwilling to sell their houses in a falling market": on that argument, the last British housing bust must have been an illusion.
Hi DM. I think both you and Don are right, but for different reasons - it's a question of empathy perhaps, or getting the balance right between individual and collective experience, or between concrete and abstract. As Douglas Adams said in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, "... and nobody was poor; at least, nobody that mattered."
Uh, maybe they are unwilling to sell their house b/c they don't have to. The banks have been dragging their feet w/NODs and foreclosures. I've seen people living in their places, some over a year and still no foreclosure. Little incentive to sell when you can live somewhere for free.
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