A sustained and increasingly technical argument about European economic performance has been running across economics blogs and Substacks since early 2026. The starting gun was fired by Seth Ackerman in a series of posts in February — “Eurpoors vs. Florida Man,” “Europe’s productivity keeps outpacing the US,” and “Productivity statistics, Paul Krugman, and Hicks’s shadows…
Author: Robert Gilles
The Radical Irishman Who Got There First: Labour, Specialisation, and the Price of Things
William Thompson published his Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth in London in 1824. He was an Irish co-operative socialist, a follower of Jeremy Bentham, and a passionate critic of the political economy of his day. He was also, I now believe, one of the most penetrating economic theorists of the nineteenth…
The Praetorian Electorate
A wonky parallel of Rome’s Third-Century Crisis and the Perma-Crisis of Western Democracy There is a question that haunts every serious observer of contemporary Western politics, though it is rarely asked with the directness it deserves: why does it not matter who wins? Leader after leader is elected on a platform of change, governs for…
Superpower Suicide: The Threat to Dollar Dominance
There’s a story economics textbooks have been telling for over two centuries. It goes like this: once upon a time, people bartered. A farmer traded wheat for shoes. A cobbler swapped boots for bread. But bartering was awkward — what if the shoemaker didn’t want wheat that day? So clever humans invented money. Gold coins….
Economic Mythology: What Money Is Not
A response to Paul Krugman’s column “The Dollar’s Special Status: Sources and Threats” April 2026 Paul Krugman’s recent column on the international role of the US dollar is an accomplished piece of applied economics. He marshals a great deal of evidence efficiently, his empirical command is not in question, and his conclusion — that dollar…
When Everyone Follows the Same Compass
The second chapter of Potential Game Theory: Theories and Applications is now complete, and I am rather pleased with how it came together. Let me share what lies at its heart. The central question of Chapter 2 is deceptively simple: what does it mean for a group of self-interested decision-makers to all be, in some…