raphy demography, technology, and
             perhaps history) versus institutions, path dependency; externalities, and occasional
             breakouts of herd behavior ending in financial crisis; free banking versus regulation and
             central banks; public choice versus markets (governments make mistakes but markets
             seldom do, and such mistakes as they rarely make are quickly corrected);
             centralization versus pluralism; rules versus decisions by authorities . . . One could go
             on. In international trade, which I taught before I learned the delight of historical
             economics, I was wont to say that the answer to every question in economics is, "It
             depends," and that it usually depended on the magnitude of the elasticities. President
             Truman sought one-armed economic advisers because of his
             ...