Noah Smith
Americans feel down about a decent economy
In early 2017, a strange pattern began to appear. So-called soft economic numbers – surveys of business leaders and consumers – started to look...
Be careful with rent control
For years, thriving cities in coastal regions of the United States have become increasingly expensive to live in. As cities such as San Francisco,...
Not all economists are corporate shills
The economics profession gets a lot of the blame for the increasing inequality in American society. Yet the career of Harvard University economist Martin...
What if everyone applied to college?
The United States has a college-opportunity problem. University graduates earn higher lifetime wages and experience lower unemployment rates, but only about one-third of the...
Get workers in the boardroom
When legendary physicist Richard Feynman was called in to help solve the mystery of the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986, he didn’t use...
Four-year degrees not for everyone
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., wants to turn K-12 schooling into K-16 – in other words, to move toward making public four-year colleges free and...
Gold asteroid won’t make us richer
Rejoice, people of Earth! News outlets are reporting that NASA is planning to visit an asteroid made of gold and other precious metals! At...
Poverty worse than gentrification
First, the good news. More white Americans want to live in heavily black neighborhoods. A 2016 paper by the National University of Singapore’s Kwan...
Wall Street squeezing housing
President George W. Bush pledged to make the U.S. an “ownership society” and tried to promote homeownership via tax credits, assistance with down payments...
Cheaper college better than free
One of independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ tentpole ideas as a presidential candidate is the promise of a free college education for all Americans....
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