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From high inflation to a ground war in Europe to widespread technological disruptions, the biggest challenges facing the world today are hardly unprecedented. Yet they seem to have caught policymakers largely by surprise.
STANFORD – Watch any sport nowadays, and you will be treated to instant replays that give you a detailed – often slow-motion – view of important moments. Watch the news, and you may find yourself feeling like you are similarly watching the past on playback. But these replays – of high inflation, soaring public debt, a brutal ground war in Europe, a new cold war, and the rise of potentially destructive technologies – are far from instant, and the stakes are much higher.
Readers might recall that I predicted rising inflation and slower growth as early as spring 2021. Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers did so even earlier. Yet today’s inflation – the worst since the early 1980s – caught most people by surprise.
Supply-chain snarls, including energy-market and food-system disruptions linked to Russia’s war on Ukraine, contributed to the initial surge in prices. But the main driver of today’s inflation has been profligate monetary and fiscal policies, which were upheld despite quicker-than-expected recoveries from pandemic lockdowns.
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Writing for PS since 2009
89 Commentaries
Michael J. Boskin is Professor of Economics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was Chairman of George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 to 1993, and headed the so-called Boskin Commission, a congressional advisory body that highlighted errors in official US inflation estimates.
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It is clear that what American Political Elites and their Overlord American Capitalists want is continued Money and Power and World Control.
But the recent rise of the Sino-Russian Alliance, especially its "Fully Supported" war by many “Neutral Nations” for the domination of Ukraine, its agricultural resources across Ukraine and its production in the Donbass Region proves that if the West (especially its Financial Elites) want more Money and World Power that We (NATO) are going to have to send Western European and American Soldiers to War to defend Ukraine from the imminent Russian takeover.
The real problem, heavily bet on by the Sino-Russian Alliance (casting lots on what is ‘practical’) is that the West is "War Leery", likely even "War Weary" from its failures in the Middle East, and that if the Western Elites demand the sacrifice of their military men and women in War as the only means of heading off the "War Against the West" for the power dominance of the Sino-Russian Alliance, that these 'Western Elites' are not politically capable of motivating the sacrifice of their military enlistees to fight and die for maintaining American/Western World Dominance.
What do you think? Are our Western Political/Financial/Multinational Industrial Elites capable of motivating their subordinate military combat soldiers to sacrifice and die for their continued New World Order Power? Neither the FSB/KGB nor the CCP in the PRC think so.
If not, what can American/Western Elites offer to their Middle Classes and Lower Classes to encourage the necessity of their life’s sacrifices, to join the US/European Militaries and fight and die for the continued rule of the current Capitalist American/European Regimes in Power in the West?
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Some doubt the wisdom of granting Ukraine NATO membership, warning that it will give the alliance nothing but headaches. In fact, Ukraine brings much to the table, from a battle-tested military to the ability to act as the model of a functioning democracy that post-war Russia will need.
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