The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush

A political storm, as I have written many times, is a dramatic event, the telling of a moral fable as it were, on the political stage. It is an almost inevitable consequence of policy, which is so catastrophically bad and unwise as to have highly visible catastrophic consequences. The political storm is the accountability moment.

Not all bad policy has such immediate consequences. And, plenty of bad policy, due to the ideological blindness of its progenitors or the self-interest of its beneficiaries, resists any accountability moment.

Joseph Stiglitz writes in Vanity Fair, on The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush