Judge Posner

What has gotten into Judge Posner? Look at A FAILURE OF CAPITALISM: /The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/POSFAI.html

He's so prolific; he turns out books faster than I turn out blog posts.

I celebrate him for identifying our situation as a "depression." Expressing distressing thoughts is not that common.

What should we make of these conservatives like Posner and Greenspan who now say that the market lacks some of the self-correcting mechanisms that they used to say it had?

Part of what they missed was the corruption that infected the last administration. It's my theory (I didn't really think of it) that the last administration failed to be honest and screwed up the market. I think they kept interest rates too low too long, presumably because of the need to finance the war in Iraq. By leaving rates too low too long, the Bush Administration allowed home prices to become inflated. People like Posner and Greenspan aren't likely to say that the failure of the Bush Administration to allow the market to work or to be truthful with the public about the real costs of the war allowed the circumstances that led to the current state of the economy. They are more likely to fall back on the idea that the ideology was flawed in some way.

I cannot really prove this idea, but it certainly seem plausible to me. Anyway, I salute Posner for grappling with this. He's a lot more intellectually honest than many. Here's Posner's blog: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/05/; here's where he deals with his book: http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/richard_posner/. It's called a "Failure of Capitalism." His Atlantic blog comments are quite thoughtful (not surprisingly) and reasonable.

Posner's book is #250 on the Amazon list today.