Economics

This past year of the pandemic has, for many, been one of struggle and isolation. So films about single older working-class women dealing with economic and personal challenges might not seem inspiring at the moment. But the insights they provide into how belonging helps people navigate hardship make them worth a look.  read more »

For most people around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic seems a great human tragedy, with deaths, bankruptcies, and fractured mental states. Yet for some, especially among the green Twitterati and in some policy shops, the pandemic presents a grand opportunity to enact permanent lockdowns on economic growth, population growth, and upward mobility.  read more »

Downtown Calgary is a big deal (see photo above and photos following the text). Traditional American and Canadian downtown areas (central business districts or CBDs) are a holdover from the pre-auto era. Their geographical limits were largely set by the early Great Depression, with buildings that were well underway in planning by that time (such as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in New York). CBD’s were far more dominant at that time.  read more »

Wherever profit leads us,
to every sea and shore
For love of gain the wide
world’s harbors we explore.
  — Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679)  read more »

Over the last year of the COVID pandemic, we’ve heard over and over that “we’re all in this together,” But the quality (and “quantity”) of public health services for poor and working-class families was an issue before the Covid-19 pandemic.  read more »

Anyone who’s not concerned about the state of the middle class in SoCal should consider recent public notices on a pending auction of the Plaza Mexico retail center in Lynwood a wake-up call.  read more »

One of the most significant effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a large increase in remote work. The ability to work from home has rescued the U.S. and the world from a steeper economic decline. Fortunately, information technology made it possible for a much larger part of the economy to continue working than otherwise would have been possible.  read more »

In 1964, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) was on a roll. The state-owned but largely unsubsidized company had just finished seven years of uninterrupted profits. Moreover, in 1964 it opened the Shinkansen (meaning new main line) between Tokyo and Osaka in time for the Summer Olympics.  read more »

If Fisker ends up building electric vehicles with Foxconn Technology Group in Wisconsin, as seems likely, the stunning new development could make a huge winner out of what was an economic-development disaster — and put the state back into the business of making cars for the first time in 13 years.  read more »

When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently urged workers upset by the Biden administration’s decision to scuttle the Keystone XL pipeline to “learn to make solar panels”, he was oblivious to the fact that China and India dominate the solar panel manufacturing market.  read more »