On rationing, queues and the open-access quota that runs out every autumn On 2 October 2026 the university library at Leiden sent its researchers a short notice. The annual allowance of open-access articles under the Dutch national agreement with Springer Nature would, it said, probably be exhausted on 9 October, and any author who wanted…
Category: Political economy
Who Decides What a Good Is? Mazzucato’s Missing Question
Mariana Mazzucato has a new book. The Common Good Economy: A New Compass was published by Allen Lane earlier this month, and it is the culmination of a decade-long campaign against one of the quietest assumptions in economics: the idea that the properties of a good — whether it is rivalrous, whether it is excludable…
The Big GDP Debate: Wrong Units
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…
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…