• "Well written, well researched, and the thesis put forth is well argued.... Woods has opened up an area of historical analysis that should invite further study."
    -Journal of American History

  • "During these times that challenge our freedoms there is no one more qualified to make U.S. history relevant to the fight against big government than Thomas Woods."
    -Barry Goldwater Jr.
    Former Member of Congress

  • "I strongly recommend Woods's work."
    -The Honorable Ron Paul,
    U.S. House of Representatives

  • "Written with great clarity and fluency, making the complex philosophical and theological concepts approachable."
    -Journal of American Studies

  • "A must-read."
    -Barron's

  • "An excellent reading source for anyone interested in financial markets, and much more so for anyone interested in learning about capitalism without all the misinterpretations being thrown about in the financial media."
    -Asia Times

  • "Provocative, well-written, and deserves to be read."
    -Catholic Historical Review

  • "An engaging and important contribution to scholarship on the history of American Catholicism."
    -Journal of the Historical Society

  • "Woods and [co-author Kevin] Gutzman appeal to both left and right in this constitutionalist jeremiad…. The authors' exegeses of the Constitution and court decisions, heavy on original intent arguments, are lucid and telling."
    -Publishers Weekly

  • "A marvelous read. Every chapter taught me something new and unexpected."
    -Tom Bethell, senior editor,
    The American Spectator

  • "The hottest book today is Meltdown, by my friend Tom Woods."
    -Judge Andrew Napolitano, senior judicial analyst,
    FOX News Channel

  • "Should be required reading."
    -Economic Affairs (London)

  • "Woods, one of the best classical liberal [libertarian] scholars of his generation, has once more placed us in his debt with this lucid and tightly argued book."
    -David Gordon, The Mises Review

  • "Tom Woods is one of my dearest allies in the struggle against wrong-headed and dangerous economic policy."
    -Peter Schiff

Meltdown: My Experiences

I recently spoke to a group of college and graduate students about Meltdown (my recent New York Times bestseller on the financial crisis), the publishing world, my experiences with the book, etc.  The talk elicited quite a few laughs.  You can listen to it here (left-click to stream; right-click to download).

Among many other things, I also did this brief (print) interview.

  • http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoEconData.html jgo

    I just finished reading _MeltDown_ and it’s a great little book. I’ve tried to explain this view of the economic cycle to others repeatedly since the late 1960s, but this book will be a handy tool.

    But, there are a couple paragraphs which assert that there were shortages of STEM workers during the dot-com boom. I don’t see any signs of that in the data. In the last half of he 1990s, we had a large pool of idle or under-employed STEM talent, and a wide-open pipe-line for producing more capable of web-weaving and such (and it has only grown larger).

    Studies by researchers from Columbia U, Computing Research Association (CRA), Duke U, Georgetown U, Harvard U, National Research Council of the NAS, RAND Corporation, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers U, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Stanford U, SUNY Buffalo, UC Davis, UPenn Wharton School, Urban Institute, and US Dept. of Education Office of Education Research & Improvement have reported that the USA has continually been producing more US citizen STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we’ve been employing in these fields. If you’ve got data to the contrary I’d like to see it.

    In 2000, Cisco received 20K applications per month but hired only 5% of the applicants. Inktomi hired only 1%, MSFT 2%, Qualcomm 5%, Red Hat Linux 1%. Qualcomm reported in 2001 May that they were receiving over 1K per day, and in 2003 February they were receiving 200 job applications every day. And there was a jump in STEM lay-offs in 1998. Through this same period, MSFT had shaved pay and benefits by declaring many employees to be contractors (see “perma-temp”). With MSFT (and Oracle and Sun…), there’s also the issue of professional ethics and low-quality products which many self-respecting software and hardware engineers might reasonably wish to avoid; i.e. MSFT execs made their own bed but didn’t want to sleep in it.

    BLS figures on pay by industry show a slight increase in pay in software publishing, but also a big increase in hours worked (and there was an even bigger increase in off-the-books work by salaried STEM workers from 1985 to present).

    http://www.kermitrose.com/images/EarningsPerHour.jpg
    http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoOccupation.html

    Why would immigation lawyers be giving seminars on how to place job ads so as to avoid getting many able and willing US citizen STEM worker applicants, and then how to create pretexts to reject all who have applied? And yet, from 2000 forward, that’s what we see.

    http://www.kermitrose.com/econSummaryAnalysis.html

    P.S. I was glad to see friend Randall Holcombe’s book mention in the citations.

    P.P.S. Javascript is evil.