Woody Allen's new movie Midnight in Paris is really good. It was easy for me to identify with Owen Wilson's character. Back in 1999 when I was 29 I went on a fund-raising cruise for The Nation magazine and had the chance to hang out with some of my favorite writers and editors at that time like Hitchens, Cockburn, Pollit, Navasky and Vanden Heuvel. It wasn't exactly like Midnight in Paris, but they were charming and friendly like Hemingway and Fitzgerald are to Wilson in the movie and I was blown away.

Krugman on Fatal Fatalism

Our current economic discourse is pervaded by fatalism. Leave aside the people who insist that somehow Obama has destroyed capitalist incentives by passing Mitt Romney’s health care plan and threatening to raise tax rates to Clinton-era levels. Even among people who should be sensible, you hear many assertions that run something like this: historically, recovery from financial crisis is usually slow, so we have to accept a slow recovery this time around too. Actually, that’s more or less what Obama has been saying.

Gavyn Davies* writes in the Financial Times about Robert Lucas and the classical view of the global recession.

--------------------
*Gavyn Davies is a macroeconomist who is now chairman of Fulcrum Asset Management and co-founder of Prisma Capital Partners. He was the head of the global economics department at Goldman Sachs from 1987-2001, and was chairman of the BBC from 2001-2004.
     He has also served as an economic policy adviser in No 10 Downing Street, an external adviser to the British Treasury, and as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.