How fundamentally wrong or right are the economic theories we use to design much of our social and governmental policy? According to Nick Hanauer, the Seattle-based entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and advocate for fighting inequality, and Eric Beinhocker, an economist at the Blavatnik School of Government and executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of…

The vibecession is back, or never really went away, or is now a “permacession.” Or so we’re told. But here’s a novel thought: What if it’s not just vibes?

For years, economists and commentators have been trying to explain why American consumer sentiment and confidence in the economy have hit record lows while many objective measures of the economy remain solid. This alleged dissonance persisted…

“Ye have the poor always with you,” says Jesus in Matthew 26:11, a statement that’s often said to express fatalism about the problem of poverty. Biblical scholars say that interpretation misses the point, but you can’t deny its predictive value: Two thousand years later, the poor are still with us, and so they will remain for the foreseeable future.

The same is true at the other end of the…

During his recent State of the Union address, President Donald Trump took a few minutes to talk about the affordability crisis that’s been gripping the nation—which is to say, he threw some balderdash in the direction of Democrats. Blaming the high prices he once referred to as a “hoax” on the “dirty, rotten lies” of the opposition party, he then neatly pirouetted into his next point: declaring…

One of the weirder journalistic spectacles of the Trump era has been watching mainstream news organizations parachute into the hinterlands to try to understand the voters who ushered in, and continue to support, this age of cruelty in America. A recent classic was _The New York Times_ ’ herculean effort to find one Minnesota diner whose patrons were willing to talk shit about the ICE resistance…