Follow @jentaub The United States is still struggling to understand and recover from the financial crisis that flared up in 2007-8. The story of the housing market, subprime mortgage lending practices, and the mistakes responsible for the crisis is both complex and essential to understand in order to avoid repeating.
Read the profile of Cass Sunstein in the May 2014 issue of The Atlantic! Follow @CassSunstein From last minute impulse buying at the grocery store to the way we treat the environment, it goes without saying that we are sometimes prone to making decisions that are not in our own best
What makes the economic relationship between the United States and China so fraught with anxiety, tension, and a surprising dependency on the successes and failures of the other? Particularly throughout the economic highs and lows of the 21st century so far, the question of China’s ascendance, even so far as surpassing
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Today is the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973. The ESA attempts to protect species from extinction as a “consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation.” The ESA uses quite broad language, protecting “any species”. There was some question
Follow @yaleSCIbooks “Global warming,” William Nordhaus declares, “is one of the defining issues of our time. It ranks along with violent conflicts and economic depressions as a force that will shape the human and natural landscapes for the indefinite future.” In his new book, The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Zygmunt J. B. Plater— It has been called The Most Extreme Environmental Case Ever, the two-inch long “snail darter” endangered fish “mis-used” by radical environmentalists to block completion of “a huge hydroelectric dam” in Tennessee. The snail darter is still today referenced as an example of extreme leftist
“Who owns your email? What about work place creation? Who owns what you come up with at work? Does it matter whether you used company technology to create and learn?” These questions, asked by Deven Desai of Concurring Opinions, and related discussions on the economics of human capital form the
The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot is an unusual inclusion in our September theme, “Memoir and Memory,” as the recorded memories, although told in the first person, were fabricated on behalf of Bagehot by historian Frank Prochaska. Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), called the “Greatest Victorian”, left no memoir of his life as a prominent
Given the failure of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha round of tariff cuts, the world economy has remained partly closed: agriculture is protected and one cannot freely sell industrial goods to developing nations. After the economic temblors of 2008, the prospect of American and European decline captures headlines and
Today’s raging partisan battles over climate policy and the Keystone XL pipeline are just the latest examples of a deeper debate about our future: Are we headed for a world of scarce resources and environmental catastrophe as environmentalists believe, or will market forces and technological innovation yield greater prosperity? In