links for 2009-09-18

• Samuel Brittan: Worse evils exist than corruption
• Gillian Tett: Watch Barclays in the cellar
• Jeffrey Williamson: Latin American inequality since 1491
• DeLong: The Roaring Twenties
• Matthew Yglesias: Katie Connolly of Newsweek Blames the Victim
• Kung Fu Monkey: I Miss Republicans.
• Kai Wright: Could taming the fury of poor whites lead to a happy ending for populist America?
• Andrew Leonard: Stock tips from the stupidest man alive
  One year ago today, Barry Ritholtz takes fully justifiable pleasure in informing us this morning, Donald Luskin, (dubbed by Brad DeLong "the stupidest man alive"), wrote "the single dumbest column ever published in The Washington Post": "Quit Doling Out That Bad Economy Line." The column was, as Ritholtz documents, embarrassingly wrong on every single point of economic analysis and forecasting. "If you had a time machine, knew the future, and purposefully tried to write something where every word was literally wrong, you could not have done a better job." Donald Luskin is an investment advisor who tends to pick fights with liberal economists, so there's been no shortage of schadenfreude in the liberal blogosphere over his stunning achievement one year ago. But I wondered: If he was so wrong back then, what's he being wrong about right now?
• links for 2009-09-17