The many failures of economics before, during and after the recent financial crisis have left an intellectual vacuum. It seems that governments' past success in stabilizing the economy in the short run encouraged too much debt and instability in the long term.
With the U.S. government's latest monthly employment report, the American job market has entered a bewildering phase. The U.S. may be closer to "full employment" than is commonly supposed, but the weak recovery since 2009 is hardly typical of economic cycles since World War ...
More fitting than any commentary about Memorial Day, just celebrated in the U.S., is the description of Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox to Ulysses S. Grant, which ended the Civil War.
New World Bank figures suggesting that China's GDP will overtake that of the U.S. sometime this year raise profound issues for Americans who have presumed that postwar economic affluence depends on countries becoming more like the U.S.
A study by two University of Chicago economists disputes the conventional wisdom that publishers impose their views on newsrooms. What actually happens is both more innocent and more insidious.
To be among America's long-term unemployed — workers who have been jobless at least six months — is especially demoralizing for midcareer professionals and managers in their 40s and up because, from the perspective of potential employers, not hiring these workers can make sense.
The Obama administration's 2015 military budget cuts may embolden potential adversaries and abet miscalculation.
The theory that growing inequality in the 2000s caused many low- and middle-income Americans to over-borrow so that they could keep up with wealthier Americans doesn't hold up. The right debate is on why lenders relaxed credit standards.
The budget story that is largely missed by American political leaders and the public is that the welfare state is strangling government's ability to respond to other national problems, because the constituencies for welfare benefits are more powerful than their competitors for federal support.
True, the gap between the rich and the poor is enormous, wider than most Americans would wish, but this reality has made economic inequality a misleading intellectual fad, blamed for many of our problems.
