President Donald Trump would like to offer migrants who want to work in the US a “gold card,” akin to a green card, with one significant difference: the price tag.
Might this be the year that stagflation returns to the US? It has been half a century: The last time the US economy had both excessively high inflation and unduly high unemployment was in the mid-1970s, with inflation rates reaching 12.2% in 1974 and unemployment at 8.5% in 1975.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed restrictions on large financial firms buying homes, and state legislators in Virginia and Nebraska have similar ideas.
Free trade is in trouble. That’s hardly startling news when the US has an avowed protectionist in the White House, but the problem runs deeper than it may at first appear.
One of the longest, most technical and, as it turns out, most inconsequential public-policy debates of the 21st century was about net neutrality.
President-elect Donald Trump is said to be interested in the privatization of the US Postal Service, a prospect that also appeals to his DOGE project and its allies in Congress.
Advances in AI, including artificial general intelligence, are very likely to continue — but it’s unclear how much of a difference they’ll make.
I am (mostly) bullish on crypto and (usually) skeptical of higher taxes, especially on capital gains.
President-elect Donald Trump pledged last month to eliminate “the Double Taxation of overseas Americans.” Never mind the clumsy wording — taxes on US citizens working abroad aren’t excessive so much as excessively complicated — this is one campaign promise that may actually be fulfilled, given the Republican control of both houses of Congress. That would be a good thing not only for those Americans but also for America.
One of the only things growing faster than progress in AI applications is speculation about AI’s effect on the economy. I don’t have all the answers, not by a long shot, but I do think we should expect great unevenness in adaptation, and that itself will alter our world.
In an age of accelerating progress in artificial intelligence, everyone is debating AI’s implications for the labor market or national security. There is far less discussion of what AI could or should mean for philanthropy.
The various bestselling books on income inequality cite a variety of driving factors. Robert Kuttner blames global capitalism. Paul Krugman pins it on bad domestic economic policies. Thomas Piketty writes of capitalists as if they are rentiers, extracting royalties from the system.
In the long-running popular series about what’s wrong with economics, there is a new entry: Our profession is too insular. “Economists generally agree that competition is good, and that markets with only a few dominant players are inefficient,” writes the economist David Deming in the Atlantic. “We may need to take a hard look in the mirror.”
There are two radically different visions of our AI future, and they depend on the cost of energy.
“What happened in 1971?” It is one of the most important and debated questions in US economic history, and new research suggests that the answer may be lurking a few decades earlier — in 1948, to be precise.
Which financial assets a central bank should buy and sell is hardly a novel question. Historically, the US Federal Reserve has focused on shorter-term Treasury securities, but quantitative easing had the Fed buying mortgage securities and quality commercial paper in significant quantities. More generally, central banks often hold gold and foreign currencies.
Like it or not, the world is going to fall far short of meeting its current goals for reducing carbon emissions.
Sometimes industries want to be regulated. It’s not that they favor all of the associated restrictions, but that regulation means legitimation. The mere act of passing laws circumscribes some activities as deserving of legal protection.
The good news is that President Javier Milei seems to be backing away from plans to dollarize the Argentine economy. That is also the bad news.
As improvements in artificial intelligence continue apace, so do questions about how AI will influence economies, asset prices and — the question of the moment — interest rates: Is AI more likely to make them go up or down?
Going against type, some Canadians are being very negative. A chorus of doomsayers is pointing out that by some measures, Canadian per-capita GDP is in decline.
With the US economy booming, the job market growing and inflation retreating, the consensus is near-unanimous: Bidenomics has been vindicated.
Open-source software may well be the greatest “public good” the market economy has ever produced. What it shows is the power of voluntary social cooperation.
There are only two certainties in this world, so the saying goes — death and taxes. The macroeconomist might add recessions to that list. All three of them may well be inevitable, but maybe we can make each of them just a bit less bad.
Some Americans like to mock France and Sweden for their high taxes. Yet California — whose economy is bigger than that of both countries — has comparable tax rates, when federal and state tolls are combined, and a new study suggests that they are causing some top earners to leave the state entirely.
When will the world have its first trillionaire? A recent report from Oxfam International predicts one within a decade, noting that the five wealthiest men in the world are 114% richer today than they were in 2020.
I have news for you: The United States is becoming more redistributionist. Whether you like it or not.
Economists are used to the idea that intervening in concrete ways — spending on development projects, for example, or on social services — can improve outcomes. But what about psychological interventions?
Last year at this time, 85% of economists in one poll predicted a recession this year — and that was an optimistic take compared to the 100% probability of a recession forecast two months earlier.
Sometimes the real action is in the dog that didn’t bark. What is striking about the European Union’s pending regulations on artificial intelligence is what’s missing: There is no ban on open-source AI.
Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina on the strength of a radical promise: that he would replace the highly inflationary Argentine peso with the stable US dollar.
Artificial intelligence is likely to transform our world in many ways, but one that hasn’t received much attention is the technology’s looming impact on real estate. As AI becomes an essential component of both business and daily life, the value of places where those who work on AI want to live will rise, provided these locales have reasonable infrastructure.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, one of the most commonly debated issues in the technology community is safety — so much so that it has helped lead to the ouster of OpenAI's co-founder Sam Altman, according to Bloomberg News.
Can a single self-published paper really refute decades of work by three famous economists? If the paper is the modestly titled “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” then the answer — with qualifications — is yes.
All of a sudden there is a flurry of activity around artificial intelligence policy. President Joe Biden is scheduled to issue an executive order on the topic today. An AI safety summit is being held in the UK later this week. And last week, the US Senate held a closed-door forum on research and development in AI.
What do we know, and not know, about macroeconomics? My co-author and I are currently revising our economics textbook — one of our decisions is to emphasize the Great Recession and the pandemic over the Great Depression — so I might be expected to have an answer to this question.
According to Gary Gensler, chair of the SEC, a market crash caused by artificial intelligence is “nearly unavoidable.” Like many other regulators, he has called for new regulations on AI to prevent such dire scenarios.
When it comes to international trade and investment, AI will create some obvious winners and losers. It’s the second-order effects that may prove more interesting.
When the revolution in higher education finally arrives, how will we know? I have a simple metric: When universities change how they measure faculty work time.
If you are tiring of the green energy revolution and can’t quite get on board with the mission to Mars, yet still would like to join a worthy cause with the potential to transform millions of lives, allow me to make a recommendation: transparent hospital pricing.
When I first read about the discovery of a vast new deposit of lithium in a volcanic crater along the Nevada-Oregon border, I can’t say that I was surprised.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to greatly enhance human capabilities and improve lives. But the implications are far-reaching and not fully understood. In this episode of The Active Share, Hugo sits down with Tyler Cowen, best-selling author, podcast host, and Holbert L. Harris chair of economics at George Mason University, for a conversation about the impact of AI on labor, capital, business models, and global connectivity.
We seem to be in what I can only call an “AI lull.” The initial excitement about ChatGPT, which started in January, has receded. Google searches for ChatGPT peaked in April and are now down significantly, as is customer engagement with ChatGPT.
Argentina’s leading presidential candidate, Javier Milei, has some unorthodox ideas about policy (he wants to abolish central banks), politics (he is libertarian) and pets (he has five cloned dogs). One of his proposals, however, is simple common sense: dollarizing Argentina’s economy.
It is a radical suggestion, no doubt, but some analysts predict that AI might enable the US economy to achieve an annual growth rate of 30%.
By the end of the five-year deal that the United Parcel Service and its drivers just agreed to, full-time drivers will make about $170,000 a year, counting healthcare coverage and other benefits. That’s up from $145,000 currently.
Is it possible for economic news to be a little too good? If many economic worries seem to be dwindling, is that reason to be scared? After periods of success, are economies due for a comeuppance — perhaps even for reasons stemming from their earlier achievements?
Everyone can be happy about the recently reported decline in the US inflation rate, but how and why did it fall so quickly without causing a recession on the way down?
One way to deal with the current global economic uncertainty is to search for consistent and reliable indicators to help you navigate the chaos. Another way is to focus on some time-honored verities about savings and human capital.
During the postwar Bretton Woods years, the price of gold was pegged at $35 an ounce, but after Richard Nixon severed the dollar’s final link to gold in 1971, prices soared to more than $800 an ounce by 1980.
