Tag: economics

Growth is only worth something if it makes people feel good.

We wear slogan tees to signal our politics and identify ourselves to like-minded thinkers — but maybe they mask more than they reveal.

It’s a recognition that comes in the aisle of a grocery store.

Paying attention to the Poor People’s Campaign.

An important look at a dysfunctional industry, and a master class in profile writing.

Kansas is great at growing wheat, but growing wheat hasn’t been great for Kansas.

This is the most important pineapple-themed essay you’ll read today.

Supply side economics is clogging the overstuffed bowl of Oregon’s booming cannabis market, and there are not enough lighters in Oregon to smoke all the product.

Exactly what has Steve Bannon been up to since leaving the White House in August?

How the world’s worst investor fleeced clients who couldn’t complain.

Big economic anxieties, writ small.

What do you do when you’ve only got a G.E.D and your high-paying union job goes to Mexico?

The commodification of female friendship began in the suburban living room. Today, it’s booming online.

It was the thirtieth fire in less than two months. Who was trying to burn down Accomack County?

He was was a self-made, blue-collar millionaire in Reagan’s America. But when Percy Ross decided to give away his fortune, he made things simple: all you had to do was ask for it.

Have you ever thought really hard about donuts? Like, 7,000 words hard? Keaton Lamle did.

In Roads & Kingdoms, Milan Gagnon tells the stories of Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, and Konstanz, Germany — one city full of empty storefronts, and the other full of empty souls.

Ubiquitous digital payments: harbinger of a glorious future, or smokescreen for powerful interests that want to control (and undermine) choice and capitalism?

In Down East magazine, Kathryn Miles profiles marathon runner Gary Allen, founder of the Millinocket Marathon — an engine of revitalization in a downtrodden town.

Journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire traveled to the heart of DeVos-land — the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan — to learn more about Betsy DeVos and her family’s life-long attempt to dismantle the “nanny state.”

When writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Matt Black traveled through California, Ohio, and Maine to labor alongside the working poor, t hey found lots of things they expected — long hours, low pay, financial uncertainty — and one thing th ey didn’t: hope.

The ‘First Great Chocolate Boom’ occurred at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. The industrial revolution turned chocolate from a drink to a solid food full of energy and raised incomes of the poor. As a result, chocolate consumption increased rapidly in Europe and North America. As the popularity of chocolate grew, production spread […]

In a recent essay for Adbusters, Douglas Haddow posited that algorithms are the new “invisible hand” guiding our capitalist system. But before Haddow got to that conclusion, he explored the original idea of the invisible hand, and the man behind the phrase: If we want to interrogate the true nature of these numbers, the wizard […]

Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician and bubble expert, proposes a simpler theory explaining speculative panics in his study on the British Railway Mania of the 1840s. Odlyzko credits Railway Mania in part to a “collective hallucination,” an extreme form of groupthink wherein a significant chunk of society feverishly buys into a shared dream with no regard for the skeptics and […]

It’s not just the workers who get a lousy deal. Over the years, Bob Baber, the Quiznos franchisee, became increasingly frustrated by the terms of his contract. One of the issues that galled him the most was that Quiznos was allowed to (and did) place additional sub shops in his franchise area, creating what he […]

Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books, on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the new book from Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics: It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually […]