Day in and day out, politicians and the press harp on the trade deficit and the federal deficit. Hoover fellow Charles Wolf Jr. and former Citicorp chairman Walter Wriston explain why they should save their breath.

Hoover fellow Melvyn Krauss explains why there is nothing inherently good about running a trade surplus or inherently bad about running a trade deficit. A lovely exercise in clear thinking.

Plenty of economists doubted that it could be done, but the Federal Reserve Board managed to cut inflation from the double-digit rates of the 1970s to the modest single-digit rates of today. Hoover fellow Michael J. Boskin explains how Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan slew the dragon--and taught consensus opinion a lesson.

The Boskin commission frees us from slavery to a flawed statistic-and permits us to see the "observable betterment of economic conditions in the United States." An accolade from the editors of the Wall Street Journal.