Generals, the old saying goes, always fight the last war. A similar (though less pithy) principle is that politicians always propose solutions to the last decade’s problems. In the US, there are two main areas where we see this principle at work. The first is immigration—net illegal immigration stopped a decade ago, but President Donald Trump and his supporters are ...

Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident-turned-president, wrote a famous essay about the life of the mind under a system of totalitarian control. He invoked the example of a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window saying, “Workers of the world, unite!”— not believing in it and perhaps not even knowing what it meant, but ritually accepting it as the officially ...

Facts are facts, but their interpretation is often subject to preconceived notions that can be easily misunderstood. Households have been net sellers of stocks for some time, which is a fact. The interpretation of this fact, however, can go badly awry. The dangerous implicit assumption is that households are selling because they want to reduce their exposure to equities. That ...