In the News ( from The New York Times ): The publishing industry struggles with declining sales amid a generally difficult economy. My Comment: Baal HaSulam writes the following in his article, “ Time to Act ”: Prior to the development of the printing industry, there were no false books as there were no irresponsible writers, for the simple reason that an irresponsible person could not be famous. And even if one dared to write such a book, no scribe would copy it, since there w

I’ve spent the last few days trying with relatively little success to get a better understanding of the meaning of the disastrous economic data we’re seeing all around the world. The terrible Japanese export numbers , the awful US unemployment numbers and so on. I’m trying to get my head around this because no other political issue matters at the moment (except crime and war, which always matter) and I’m really shocked by the quality of British political debate about what we should be doing

Back in the 1980's, America's shrewd economic minds were very impressed with Japan. Typically, they seized on Japan as a model of what the U.S. should be like just when it became a model of what it should avoid. As usual, Robert Samuelson lays it out for us: From 1956 to 1973, Japan had grown 9 percent a year; in the 1980s, it was still growing at 4 percent. Japan was widely expected to overtake the United States as the richest, most advanced economy. It didn't. Worse, its semi-stagnation def