The Secret of the Weak Recovery: We Had a F***ing Housing Bubble

The problem with economics is not that it's too complicated; the problem is that it's too damn simple. This problem is amply demonstrated by all the heroic efforts made by economists to explain the weakness of the current recovery.

We've had economists tell us that the problem is that we are now a service sector economy rather than a manufacturing economy. The story is that inventory fluctuations explain much of the cycle. Since we don't inventory services, we will have a slower bounceback in...