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A century ago, Frank Knight wrote a book that put uncertainty in its rightful place at the heart of economics and entrepreneurship. I love that his last name was a [...]

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are the perfect partners for a president-elect whose signature phrase before his time in the White House was, “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crmvHJpCkfM.” About https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/technology/layoffs-tech-industry.html of Twitter’s employees were [...]

People get just 70 percent of their full Social Security benefit if they claim at 62, the full benefit at 67 and 124 percent of the benefit if they claim [...]

The https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/05/business/election-stock-markets.html in the value of the dollar on Wednesday looks like a vote of confidence in Donald Trump, who won the presidential election. But it’s not that simple. There’s [...]

A century ago, arbitration was a hot item. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Federal Arbitration Act on Feb. 12, 1925. It recognized private dispute resolution as a valid alternative to […]

Are the world’s most powerful corporations buying the brains of economists and legal scholars? It certainly sounds that way if you listen to the chief antitrust enforcer at the Department [...]

At first nobody stood up when Donald Trump stepped out from the wings to speak. There was an ovation, but a sitting one, from the well-heeled attendees of the Economic [...]

Gauti Eggertsson is an Icelandic-born economist at Brown University who has a knack for describing interesting economic phenomena. He https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr433.html and named the “paradox of toil,” which says that there [...]

This week I interviewed Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, about her https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2024/2/klobuchar-colleagues-introduce-antitrust-legislation-to-prevent-algorithmic-price-fixing. If you don’t know what algorithmic collusion is, it’s time to get educated, because you could be [...]

The United States needs a strategy for dealing with China as an economic and national security threat, and Donald Trump’s blustery “America First” approach ain’t it. Kamala Harris has a [...]

Old joke: If you teach a parrot to say “supply” and “demand,” you’ve got yourself a fine economist. I imagined I had a parrot economist on my shoulder when I [...]

Let’s say you’re an armchair economist and you think the U.S. economy is already in a recession (as https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/poll-economy-recession-biden people https://investors.affirm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/new-research-reveals-why-3-5-americans-think-economy-recession). Or maybe you’re sure it’s still growing. Either way, [...]

In Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, Kamala Harris did a pretty smooth job of reframing one of her biggest negatives — high prices — into a potential positive. If she can [...]

I understand why Vice President Kamala Harris is going hard against inflation. Politically, it’s the right thing to do. Economically, though, she’s like a general fighting the last war. Prices [...]

China and the United States tied for gold medals at 40 apiece, and the United States had more medals overall, but the most successful nation at the Paris Olympics was [...]

The chaos theorist Doyne Farmer has led an eventful life. He and fellow schemers beat the casinos by inventing a concealable computer that could predict (albeit with low accuracy) where [...]

Look out for the Social Security tax torpedo. It may be heading toward the hull of your retirement accounts as we speak. And if it hits, you may not even [...]

Donald Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/economy/trump-tax-cuts.html to eliminate taxation of Social Security benefits. That may be a political winner, but it’s bad idea economically for at least four reasons. First, those taxes support [...]

The secret to making money in the stock market is to buy low and sell high. Right? Not buy high and sell low. So loading up on stocks when the [...]

The economist and market strategist David Rosenberg took a lot of heat for predicting that the Federal Reserve’s big increase in interest rates would tip the U.S. economy into recession. [...]

There’s a story going around Wall Street that the Treasury Department is trying to help Democratic candidates in November by how it issues debt. I don’t buy it. Scott Bessent, [...]

No nation officially wins the Olympics, but that doesn’t stop journalists and others from trying to keep score by counting gold, silver and bronze medals. Unfortunately, the two main approaches [...]

Emmanuel Frimpong, 32, is a cocoa farmer in Ghana, mostly by default. He has a university education but couldn’t find another job so he works on the family farm. “Why [...]

Restaurants in Tel Aviv are full. High-tech exports remain strong. The shekel is holding its value. By some measures, Israel’s economy seems unscathed by the war in Gaza. But there [...]

It’s become conventional wisdom in some circles that sometime in the 1970s, the link between pay and productivity broke. Workers’ productivity kept rising, but their inflation-adjusted pay did not. “The [...]

Many new college graduates are having an awful time finding jobs, as I wrote in https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/opinion/college-graduates-job-market.html and in early https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/opinion/college-graduates-job-market.html. I’ve been trying to understand why, and I think I’m [...]

Mary Kay Henry had one big success and one big disappointment in her 14 years as president of the Service Employees International Union, which is one of the biggest and [...]

I understand why parents are unhappy with the proliferation of computers in school, as my Opinion colleague Jessica Grose documented in a recent series of newsletters. “One way or another,” [...]

At a May 1 rally in Waukesha, Wis., Donald Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnah6ruqkHw that when he was president “we had no inflation,” and that now “we have record horrible inflation” that is [...]

When I https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/opinion/college-graduates-job-market.html new college graduates last month to tell me about their job searches, I got back a ton of heartache. Unanswered applications. Lowered expectations. For some, a sense [...]

Scientists have figured out an easier way to turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide. That might seem like a dubious achievement, since carbon dioxide is something we exhale and carbon [...]

What if you could move to a new home but keep the mortgage that you took out on the old one, with the same balance, interest rate and time remaining? [...]

Financially speaking, the United States has been a Teflon nation. Bad things happen — near defaults, giant budget deficits, a Capitol invasion — but nothing sticks for long. The world’s [...]

Michael Ohlrogge has a theory about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the agency that makes sure ordinary depositors don’t lose their money when their bank goes bust. Ohlrogge, an associate [...]

Este es un hecho brutal para la clase universitaria de 2024: no hay suficientes trabajos de nivel universitario para todos ustedes. Algunos los conseguirán. Otros tendrán que conformarse con empleos [...]

Here is a brutal fact for the college class of 2024: There aren’t enough college-level jobs out there for all of you. Some of you will snag them. Others will [...]

Elon Musk is steering a dangerous course by promising what he now https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1783925863295422732 “supervised Full Self-Driving” mode for Tesla automobiles. Dangerous because it obscures who’s responsible for driving the car. [...]

The Federal Trade Commission used two very different rationales to get to its https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/noncompete-clause-ban.html this week on noncompete agreements. One of them is a no-brainer. The other is provocative but [...]

Put yourself in the steel-toed boots of a worker at Volkswagen’s auto assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. Let’s say you vote Republican — not a stretch, since Donald Trump got [...]

Before there was Elon Musk, there was William Crapo Durant. Billy Durant, as he was known, built one of the world’s biggest makers of horse-drawn carriages, bought control of Buick, [...]

Speculating about how the economy would perform under a second Donald Trump presidency normalizes the candidacy of a deeply flawed human being. But we’ll all have to live in Trump’s [...]

Science alone won’t stop the planet from overheating. But science coupled with political science just might. That’s the theme of a new book, “Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge [...]

We were surprised when inflation rose. We were surprised when inflation fell. And we were surprised again when inflation stopped falling. The message of all these surprises is that we [...]

The https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/10/business/cpi-inflation-fed inflation numbers that the government put out Wednesday show, once again, how little we understand what makes prices go up (and sometimes down). By “we,” I mean everyone, [...]

In 1857, William Stanley Jevons was 22 years old and was working as an assayer for the Sydney Mint. Two eclipses passed over Australia that year, and Jevons enthusiastically tracked [...]

Susan and Martin Cherry were perfectly placed to cash in on Monday’s eclipse. Their Cherry House Bed and Breakfast in St. Johnsbury, Vt., is in the zone of totality. They’ve [...]

What would life be like if artificial intelligence solved all your problems? You wouldn’t have to work anymore. You could get any luxury you wanted by raising an eyebrow. Feelings [...]

It would be great if Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had a copy of “The Portable Karl Marx” with her on her https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/business/janet-yellen-china-treasury.html this week. She could quote from it to [...]

Africa south of the Sahara is producing more than six times as much food as it did in 1961. That’s a much bigger increase than that of the world as [...]

So, who do you think is going to come out on top in the Final Four? I’m not asking about the N.C.A.A. March Madness basketball tournament. I’m asking about the [...]