The decline of the American labor movement is startling. In only 50 years, membership has dropped 80 percent. No mainstream American institution of note has dissipated at this pace before. Today, more Americans receive disability payments than belong to private-sector unions.
The attempt by the Department of Justice to block the merger of American Airlines and U.S. Airways offers a glimpse into one of the great public policy innovations of the past couple of centuries: American anti-trust law.
Higher education is undergoing a metamorphosis. Cost-saving measures such as online learning and the ubiquity of technology might seem to make today’s undergraduate experience vastly different from their forbears’. That is a mirage. The most essential elements of an education are unchanged.
A great debate under way regarding the successor to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke seems to come down to economists Lawrence Summers or Janet Yellen. The debate is full of interesting insight but it’s the immediate challenges of the Fed that matter more.
Over the past two years, Indiana has replaced licensing and compensation rules for public schoolteachers that required degrees exclusively from teachers colleges.
U.S. economic growth accelerated in the April-June quarter to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.7 percent. The Bureau of Economic Analysis said the rate released Wednesday was based on incomplete data and would be revised over the next month.
For more than three decades, China’s economy has dazzled observers, with annual growth frequently sneaking into double digits. But the wide-eyed narrative of boundless wealth that has accompanied this growth is suffering a couple of hiccups.
Over the past 30 years, the number of people in the world living in “real poverty” has dropped from just under 2 billion to fewer than 1.1 billion. This is a drop from roughly 40 percent to 15 percent of the world’s population.
Same-sex marriage or household arrangements possess no economic consequences. However, the debate itself does have consequences because it crowds out honest deliberation on the real problems of collapsing families.
Political folklore has it that economists are infamously divided between Keynesian and classical explanations for the cause of the boom-and-bust cycle.
Our immigration policy is broken. We could absorb many of the best-educated workers in the world, but we encumber them in decades of costly red tape or send them to boost the economies of Canada, Britain and Germany.
I am always reluctant to fill this column with my recent research, but last week’s release of the annual Conexus Manufacturing Scorecard begs comment. Indiana did much better in the cost of worker benefits and continued to lead in the size of manufacturing and logistics. Indiana also ranked third in the pace of manufacturing recovery […]
I am often asked to explain why more and better local amenities matter to job creation. It is a simple concept, really. Families make choices about where to live based upon a variety of factors, including playgrounds, safe and attractive neighborhoods, and recreational activities. They will sacrifice to obtain these things, commute long distances and even forgo higher wages.
The Congressional Budget Office’s most recent assessment of the cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in late May, occasioned far less thoughtful discussion of the role of government than it should have.
Among economists of all stripes, it is well understood that international trade increases wealth, reduces poverty and generally makes everyone better off in the long run. The only real question is whether the total economic benefits are immediately realized or take just a few years to mature.
A recent study by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, sheds a great deal of light on the sausage mill of policy research, and the courage and integrity of the process of policy research altogether.
At the beginning of the Great Recession, in December 2007, there were more than 26 full-time workers for each part-time employee looking for full-time work. By June 2009, that number had shrunk to less than 15 full-time workers for each part-timer. There it has remained.
Brain drain is a genuine problem in Indiana. But instead of slowing this trend, our higher education financing policies accelerate this problem by pushing more students into majors that are in demand elsewhere.
Indiana enjoys what economists call a “structural surplus” in state tax revenue. This means the several-hundred-million-dollar surplus is a permanent affair when viewed against current expenditures. It would be astonishing if this did not lead to calls for a tax cut, and so it has.
Along with the sadness and anger that accompanies the Boston bomb explosions should come the realization that this could well be our lot for decades to come. We should expect and prepare for the worst.
