Richard J Grant

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, April 28, 2013 and at FORBES with archives . by  Richard J. Grant In scientific controversies, as in political contests, the people most ignored are those who would prefer to vote for “none of the above.” In political contests, we must often take sides between the two remaining “most electable” candidates in order to minimize the damage that will ensue. But in scientific controversies we are not so constrained. That is why this column never endorsed the 2010 study by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that purported to find a sudden increase in “debt intolerance” in countries whose national debt levels exceeded 90 percent of GDP. The problem was not with the concept of debt intolerance, but rather with the portrayal of the 90 percent level as some sort of natural threshold beyond which economic growth rates would be severely curtailed. Even before reading their article, it could be guessed (correctly, as it tu...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, April 14, 2013 and at FORBES with archives . by  Richard J. Grant Throughout history, inflation’s advocates always found some reason for governments to create new money. We receive most of our incomes as money and we calculate our wealth in terms of money. When any one of us receives more money, that person rightly feels wealthier. But it does not follow that the existence of more money in general would make us all wealthier. It is true that as we have grown wealthier, historically the quantity of money has tended to grow along with that wealth. The biggest deviations from this tendency have occurred during periods of fiat-money inflation or debasement of the coinage. In each case, the consequent monetary depreciation resulted from government officials trying to get something for nothing. The newly printed money, or the new coins minted from diluted alloy, was directed toward the special purposes of the government officials and their su...