If economists ruled the world, there would be no need for a World Trade Organization. The economist's case for free trade is essentially a unilateral… - Paul Krugman

As Branko says, there was a time when Serbs and Croats seemed to get along fairly well, indeed intermarrying at a high rate. But could anyone now put Yugoslavia back together? At this rate, we’ll soon be asking the same question about America.

In the court of conventional wisdom, Ronald Reagan stands accused of inflicting a huge burden of debt upon his country. He cut taxes on the rich, increased military spending, and failed to cut enough spending elsewhere to pay for his largesse. The result was a string of unprecedented peacetime deficits, and a debt that will be a drag on the national for decades to come.
Reagan is guilty as charged. The supply-side apologists' claim that some extraordinary economic success vindicates in spite of the deficits just doesn't hold up in the face of the evidence. The question, however, is whether the crime was a felony or a misdemeanor.
The answer proposed here will not satisfy those with a taste for drama. Reagan created a deficit, and it hurt American economic growth. But even if the effects of the visible deficit are supplemented with appeals to several alleged hidden deficits of the 1980s, the cost was not catastrophic. The deficit is not nearly the monster some people imagine.

In this part of the lecture I have argued that a number of works in development economics written during the 1950s contained, more or less explicitly and more or less self-consciously, a theory in which strategic complementarity played a key role in development: external economies arose from a circular relationship in which the decision to invest in large-scale production depended on the size of the market, and the size of the market depended on the decision to invest. Whatever the practical relevance of this theory, it made perfectly good logical sense. Yet this was subsequently abandoned, to such an extent that classic papers in the field began to seem, as the physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say, "not even wrong" — simply incomprehensible.