Non-economists often think that "economists study money." The reality, though, is that most academic economists hardly think about money at all. Whether we're talking about tariffs, wages, Social Security taxes, or pollution, the analysis (though often couched in dollar terms for the benefit of the general public) really is grounded in microeconomics and would work just as well if we were talking about a barter economy. In fact, in a typical Ph.D. program, students study models with money in them only when explicitly trying to answer questions about central-bank policy.

Aristotle and Plato didn’t agree on much, but they were united in identifying wonder as the origin of their profession. As Aristotle said, “It is owing to their wonder that men . . . first began to philosophise.” This idea appeals to scientists, who frequently enlist wonder as a goad to inquiry. “I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky,” wrote Carl Sagan in 1985, locating in this response the stirrings of a Copernican desire to know who and where we are.

Yet that is not the only direction in which wonder may take us. To Thomas Carlyle, wonder sits at the beginning not of science, but of religion. That is the central tension in forging an alliance of wonder with science: will it make us curious, or induce us to prostrate ourselves in pitiful ignorance? We had better get to grips with this question before we too hastily appropriate wonder to sell science.  That is surely what is going on when pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope are (unconsciously?) cropped and coloured to recall the sublime iconography of Romantic landscape painting, or the Human Genome Project is wrapped in biblical rhetoric, or the Large Had­ron Collider’s proton-smashing is depicted as “replaying the moment of creation”. The point is not that such things are deceitful or improper, but that if we want to take that path, we should first consider the complex evolution of the relation between science and wonder.

[....]

Pretending that science is performed by people who have undergone a Baconian purification of the emotions only deepens the danger that it will seem alien and odd to outsiders, something carried out by people who do not think as they do. Daston believes that we have inherited a “view of intelligence as neatly detached from emotional, moral and aesthetic impulses, and a related and coeval view of scientific objectivity that brand[s] such impulses as contaminants”. It is easy to understand the historical origins of this attitude: the need to distinguish science from credulous “enthusiasm”, to develop an authoritative voice, to strip away the pretensions of the mystical Re­nais­sance magus who acquired knowledge through personal revelation. We no longer need these defences, however; worse, they become a defensive reflex that exposes scientists to the ­caricature of the emotionally constipated boffin, hiding within thickets of jargon.

The source of corporate privilege that raised Cleveland’s ire was the tariff, one of Tucker’s despised “four monopolies.” (Back in the day, it was said, “The tariff is the mother of trusts.”) As Cleveland puts it, “It can not be denied that the selfish and private interests which are so persistently heard when efforts are made to deal in a just and comprehensive manner with our tariff laws are related to, if they are not responsible for, the sentiment largely prevailing among the people that the General Government is the fountain of individual and private aid.”

Then, astoundingly, he adds:

Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule. [Emphasis added.]

Note what Cleveland is saying: The impetus for communism is not the masses’ or intellectuals’ envy of wealth earned through achievement in the market, but rather honest people’s frustration at being exploited through the collusion of capital and State, which Cleveland also labels a form of “communism.” In another place he refers to the “communism of pelf.”

The Balkanization of global finance along national lines will be accelerated in the decades to come as many governments choose to deploy moderate inflation to burn away much of the public and private debt built up during the Great Recession, as the alternative to politically unpopular spending cuts and tax increases.

How is it that The Huffington Post, at turns celebrated as the savior of its parent company and decried as a glitzy thief of journalism produced by others, has come to matter?

TRINIDAD, Texas – Gary Thomas will never forget the letter he received in early 2000. It was from John Joe Gray, a suspect in a felony assault case, offering a not-so-subtle warning to the area's chief criminal investigator: He had no intention of answering charges that he had attacked a state trooper.

"What he said was this: 'If y'all come to get me, bring body bags,' " said Thomas, now a local justice of the peace.

 ...six months after his Glenn Beck TV launched, it’s relatively clear that Beck’s efforts to build a stand-alone television channel have been successful: 300,000 people are paying either $9.95 per month or $99.95 per year for access to the network, which they can access on their computers, iPads and iPhones, and on their televisions through streaming players like Roku. Between subscriptions and advertising, GBTV is going to make $40 million in its first year.

THIS AWARD-WINNING VISUALIZATION ANALYZES 240 MILLION LIGHT YEARS OF SPACE TO PEEL BACK THE LAYERS OF INVISIBLE WEBBING HOLDING OUR UNIVERSE TOGETHER.

Georgia (STOGA1)’s lottery players are the biggest suckers in a nation buying more than $50 billion a year in tickets for state-run games, which have the worst odds of any form of legal gambling.

Players in Georgia, whose per capita income is about 10 percent below the U.S. average, are doing the most damage to their personal finances. They spent the second-highest chunk of their income on the lottery, which funds college scholarships and pre-kindergarten, according to the Sucker Index created by Bloomberg Rankings.

These weren't sanctity-of-marriage Republicans; these were second-and-third-marriage Republicans. These were Republicans whose favorite song isn't "Amazing Grace" but rather "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues." These were the Republicans who spearheaded Atlanta's suburban expansion in the seventies by moving out to the "swinging-singles" apartment complexes across the Chattahoochee River; the Republicans who voted for Jimmy Carter because of his association with Southern rock bands and then voted for Ronald Reagan because they thought that Carter turned out to be a weakling and a prig, and they didn't like waiting in line for gas; the Republicans who lost their houseboats on Lake Lanier in their divorces and lost pieces of themselves when Dale Earnhardt, redneck writer Lewis Grizzard, and the Johnny of Atlanta's fabled pickup joint Johnny's Hideaway died; the Republicans who might not wear gold chains and leisure suits anymore but have them in their DNA. Sure, they had bills to pay, but by God they also had stories to tell, and they liked Newt because he promised to help them with the former while not judging them for the latter. He was their guy because he was part of their history, and his last-gasp victory in Georgia was as much a victory for a localized subculture as Ron Paul's second-place finish in Maine.

Will Wilkinson | Iowa City | The Economist

...Mr Romney's mere survival, despite the "mega-church populist orthodoxy" of today's Republican Party, is remarkable in itself and deserves greater recognition. And there's a great deal of merit to Mr Kirn's insight that Mr Romney has to be careful not to appear motivated by anything other than the most hazily generic religious conviction. Mr Santorum obviously does not hesitate to argue for his favoured policies on narrowly sectarian grounds. In contrast, America's present wariness of Mormonism, which is indeed analogous to mid-century wariness of Catholicism, requires that Mr Romney argue his case on grounds acceptable to a relatively wide range of right-leaning types. Because Mr Romney cannot deploy straight-up Christian rhetoric without drawing unwanted attention to his faith, he compensates with a combination of twee sentimentality about family and a forced, almost hysterical American exceptionalism, both of which I think contribute to the widespread perception of Mr Romney's phoniness. Mr Kirn brings to our attention the possibility that it is a mistake to think that Mr Romney has struggled because of his perceived inauthenticity. Rather, Mr Romney has survived despite his Mormonism for many of the same reasons he seems a bit fake. A fully authentic Mitt Romney would be a frankly Mormon Mitt Romney, and that guy wouldn't stand a chance in a Republican primary.