Underbelly

From her corner office in New York’s Rockefeller Center, [Rebecca Patterson] the chief investment officer of Bessemer Trust Co. is putting $...

I feel inhibited about joining the affray over Megan McCardle's non-review of the Piketty sensation .  Unlike Megan (and unlike her mo...

Two can't miss weekend reads:  One. the  " Economist Essay" on the history of financial crises; and two, DeLong on Piketty ...

Twice this week, I've heard versions of the same story.  Paraphrasing: --I look at my investment accounts and I can't believe wh...

One recurrent point of reference in Thomas Piketty's fascinating Capital in the 21st Century   is the "trente glorieuses," th...

Yesterday's number, $10 billion, being the aggregate compensation last year for the 10 best-paid hedge fund operators. For compariso...

That Denmark, with the world's lowest Gini index measured by income , also has the  third highest measured by wealth ?   Different ye...

Here's a job for which I am too old and sick and stupid and tired and lazy to do myself.  But it  society shouldn't be too hard. ...

I didn't pick up on it right away, but while we were watching The Apartment the other night, I could swear I heard something that must...

It's becoming more and more the meme to remember the period 1947-1973 as a kind of good ol' days: dynamic growth, sponsored (and un...

Here's a man who needs no introduction so I won't give him any, except to say here's Robert Frost with "Provide, Provide!...

Link.

My buddy John is chewing the chair legs: The NYT article on Chisago County continues to nag at me – not sure why. I guess the major mys...

I'm a big Kevin Drum fan--and Charles Murray gets up my nose--but for once I think  Murray has the better of it ( link ). Kevin, I was ...

My friend Ignoto weighs in on the 99 percent: The ideologue sees the pepper-spraying and gets indignant. The intelligent ideologue sees t...

He gets it down to a page: [H] uman technology ... is a seriously two-edged sword, in some eras liberating, and others enslaving, the hu...

Some of the usual suspects are enjoying an interval of (perhaps premature?) grave-dancing this weekend over the (alleged) corpse of green en...

Meditating further on the phenomenon of persistent wealth, I just thought of another great example: Venice.  Seems to me that most of what w...

Fiscal Times is  back with another one of those accounts of how life on $250k a year is not all ortolans and whipped cream.  It's tem...

This one is getting buzz all over the place, but I just last month repeated the conventional wisdom about Africa being a basket case so I ...