The price that matters is how long you have to work to drive your car 100 miles — “Gas prices are the highest they’ve ever been!” screamed a recent headline in the Los Angeles Times. “Pain at the pump drives Biden’s suffering in the polls!” trumpeted Politico. Really? About time to remind folks that by historical standards, it’s still pretty cheap to drive your car. How could that…

Afghanistan‘s new leadership has some tough choices to make if they want to avoid hyperinflation — One of the first places the Taliban went when they entered Kabul in August was the country’s central bank. There, they asked to “inspect” the bank’s billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves. Apparently, they expected to find those reserves stacked in old oil drums in the basement, the way…

Deep decarbonization of the U.S. economy, let alone of the entire world, is a daunting task. No single approach to climate policy is going to accomplish the mission by itself. That said, among the policy alternatives, carbon pricing is perhaps the most widely discussed, but also most widely misunderstood. Whether…

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw asks, “Can America Afford to Become a Major Social Welfare State?” By welfare state, he has in mind the Biden administration’s modest plans for better child benefits, healthcare, and education. Nothing as as radical as a universal basic…

The latest news from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not encouraging. A recent release of documents gives a preview of its forthcoming Sixth Assessment Report on the state of the global climate. …

What we can learn from the (mostly overblown) fears of America’s fiscal hawks — Harvard-trained attorney Michael Ginsberg’s new novel, Debt Bomb (BQB Publishing, 2021) is a warning to America of a coming fiscal catastrophe, written in the style of an international espionage thriller. I make no claims to be a literary critic. Don’t think you’re about to read a conventional book review. …

All signs suggest that Afghanistan is in for a rough ride under the Taliban. The most urgent worries include reprisals against Afghans who helped the United States, reversals on women’s rights, and the possibility that the country will become a haven for international terrorist organizations. But the state of the…

In a promising contribution to the debate over poverty policy, the Institute on Race and Political Economy at the New School has released a major welfare reform proposal that it calls a Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century. Details of the proposal (abbreviated GI21 in what follows) are set out…

The dreaded Phillips curve describes the runaway inflation of the 60s and 70s. The situation is very different today. — Anyone who has been following the U.S. monthly economic data lately has noticed that the rate of inflation has been rising over the past year as the unemployment rate has fallen. Here are the numbers: