This is the text of the talks I gave at the University of California–Riverside and UC–Irvine, January 25 and 26, 2012. Graphs were added for the bloggy version. It’s funny. I spend most of my life writing about economics, politics, and finance, yet about the only academics who ever invite me to speak are in the humanities. Maybe that’s because I dropped out of a graduate English program and can’t do a proper vector autoregression. But you guys are more fun than a bunch of dismal scientists anyway. I took my title,… Read More