But extreme need not mean marginal or irrelevant.

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Because it involves something that the Bank of England and orthodox central banks almost never do - which is to lend money with the express purpose of getting it out into the real economy, rather than just providing the marginal credit that commercial banks need to operate efficiently.

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This idea has been championed by conservative policy entrepreneurs such as Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review and Robert Stein, a veteran of George W. Bush's Treasury Department, yet it has met with fierce resistance from The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which sees it as an unjustifiable tax giveaway that is an unhelpful distraction from the need to cut marginal tax rates.

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If workers can price discriminate by offering marginal employees lower wages, then market power need not create unemployment.

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Given the large movements in the time allocated to these two categories, our results suggest that economists need to think hard about how individuals value the marginal time spent watching television or sleeping when computing the welfare costs of business cycles.

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However, should customers embrace the playback capabilities that marginal component costs will soon make a standard feature of their handsets, Apple will need to take a more active role if it wants to preserve the portable digital music experience it has executed so well.

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In any case, progress in averting the fiscal cliff will depend on one side acknowledging the need for more tax revenue and the other side acknowledging the negative incentive effects of higher marginal tax rates.

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