The Joint Economic Committee of the US congress recently released an unusual document (pdf). The report, titled “What We Do Together,” presupposes that Americans feel a “sense of loss” for the “golden age” of social cohesion of the mid-twentieth century and then seeks to investigate all the ways that the American social fabric is decaying.
Kendrick Lamar frequently refers to himself as the world’s “greatest rapper.” He might be selling himself short.
US president Donald Trump sat down for a discussion about economics with editors from The Economist. It revealed that “Trumponomics” is not entirely grounded in reality.
In the 1950s, the health care industry accounted for only around 3% of jobs in America. Today, it’s nearly 13% of the labor market. At the current pace of growth, health care jobs will surpass retail jobs for the first time near the end of this year.
Ironically, hump day is the day of the week Americans are least likely to buy condoms. According to data from on-demand groceries company Instacart, condom purchases bulge on the weekend, and shrink to their lowest point by Wednesday. (To be fair, Instacart shoppers buy less of almost everything on Wednesday.)
Horse racing is dying in the US, but the Kentucky Derby, the sport’s signature event, is still going strong. The next running of America’s premier race is on Saturday, May 5 at Churchill Downs.
Puerto Rico, which is saddled with $74 billion in debt, filed for what could be the biggest local government bankruptcy by far in US history.
The average wages of American workers are about the same today as they were in 1975, adjusted for inflation. This has led academics, politicians, and journalists to claim, with justification, that living standards for regular Americans have stagnated.
Since the 1970s, coastal US cities have implemented laws that make it impossible for housing supply to equal demand. Proponents of these laws argue they are important for historic preservation, environment protection, and the livability of cities. Conveniently, such laws also happen to inflate the housing prices of many of their supporters—mainly the old and wealthy, who are the clear winners of these kinds of market-constraining regulations.
What is the most “normal” country in the world? Economically speaking, the answer may surprise you.
Foreign aid is nothing compared to the kindness of family. Every year, the biggest transfer of funds from the rich world to developing countries comes in the form of remittances—transfers from foreign workers back to friends and relatives in their home country.
Barnali Ghosh and her husband, Anirvan Chatterjee, were sick and tired of the “model minority” myth about South Asians in the US being high-achieving and politically docile.
The US tax code is a complicated mess, and the country can learn a lot from other countries about how to fix it. That’s the premise of reporter T.R. Reid’s new book A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System.
The global economy is doing well, and that might be an understatement.
Millennials have developed a reputation as job hoppers. Entitled and impatient, the story goes, young workers in the US get bored easily, jumping from company to company looking for better opportunities sooner than they deserve them. But if you examine the data, this narrative appears almost entirely wrong. In fact, it would probably be better if millennials job hopped more.
Americans spend approximately 2.65 billion hours preparing and filing their personal income taxes every year, according to the White House. That is more time than Americans spend on any of the following activities in a typical year: arts and crafts, golfing, attending museums, hunting, and dancing.
The US-based economists Felipe Goncalves and Steven Mello have both had the police give them a break. It gave them a brilliant idea for uncovering racial bias in policing.
US consumer confidence is at a 16-year high, surpassing the levels reached before the 2008 financial crisis and rivaling the heady days of the dot-com boom. But not everybody is feeling equally buoyant.
In the 1970s, Andy Warhol painted nearly 200 portraits of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. One of those paintings, completed in 1973 and simply titled ”Mao,” was sold to an unnamed Asian collector for $12.6 million at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong on April 2. It was the first time one of Warhol’s Mao portraits was sold in China.
Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to the US for a summit with president Donald Trump comes amidst tense times for free traders.
Inequality isn’t just rising between individuals, it’s also a rising between companies. That is, top-paying companies have boosted paychecks for their employees by much more than low-paying companies have for theirs.
Nearly 25% of all the video-game products and 20% of the mobile phones shipped internationally are counterfeit.
The United States is making less with more. Needless to say, that’s an ominous sign for economic growth.
The US Census Bureau has a problem. When asked to identify their race, Americans increasingly say that they are “some other race,” an unhelpful distinction for statisticians. “We are concerned that if no other changes are made to the way we collect data on race and ethnicity… that the ‘some other race’ population could become the second largest race group in the 2020 Census,” says Nicholas Jones, the Director of Race and Ethnic Research at the bureau.
