When this country began, land was the limit to progress and the simplest definition of our economic policy was to get more land. Land claime...

TL/DR Between 1980 and 2008, the number of Americans dependent on investments like 401(k)s for retirement tripled. (And I suspect it has con...

TL/DR: Freedom of religion means that in spite of my conviction that you will spend an eternity in hell for not believing what I believe, I ...

There is a dramatic difference in how the economy performs under Republican and Democratic administrations. The simplest explanation is that...

Trigger warning: This is an account of horror about the close of WWII. I've come to more often think of history as lifetimes. How far ba...

I'm intrigued by data but often the more data one gets, the harder it is to make it tell a story. It is easier to draw a line between tw...

Russia is invading a sovereign nation in the biggest land war in Europe in decades and all Trump can do is praise Putin's genius. Trump ...

The first modern Olympics game in 1896 had only 14 countries compete. In this winter Olympics we now have 91 countries competing but still j...

We live in a world of specialists. The bureau of labor statistics tracks 800+ jobs and even that is a small subset of all the jobs and occup...

Here's a theory about inflation that you may not have heard. I could be wrong but this theory is based on a lot anecdotal evidence that ...

More resources help. Hopefully future generations will find it bizarre that we so richly rewarded and so severely punished kids for their ch...

The BLS reports 2 numbers each month for new jobs. One is a result of household surveys. (Something like going door to door asking, "Di...

Since 1970, there has been only one year that ended with a lower unemployment rate than 2021. That was 2019. In this century, the unemployme...

Caption for picture of regulators with chainsaw and bolt cutters from Jonathan Levy's brilliant Ages of American Capitalism . "Incr...

You all know that I'm fascinated by economic progress and development. Medieval serfs had very few rights, on average died in their earl...

"Well, comorbidities explain a lot about who is dying of COVID," say the same folks who have - at various times - dismissed COVID ...

Inflation after a year of sharp contraction followed by a year of record growth is about as shocking as squealing tires on a car that goes f...

From John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. "... there has been a chronic tendency throughout human...

“A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.” ― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi One of my heroes died yesterday. Mi...

Curiously, poverty and wealth alike seem to lower employment rate for the children of the poor and wealthy. This first graph shows that as p...