Policy

To President Barack Obama and many other Democrats, Europe continues to exercise something of a fatal attraction.  The “European dream” embraced by these politicians — as well as by many pundits, academics and policy analysts — usually consists of an America governed by an expanded bureaucracy, connected by high-speed trains and following a tough green energy policy.

One hopes that the current crisis gripping the E.U. will give even the most devoted Europhiles pause about the wisdom of such mimicry. Yet the deadliest European disease the U.S. must avoid is that of persistent demographic decline.  read more »

President Barack Obama‘s “pivot” on jobs this week shows that the president has finally — if belatedly — acknowledged the real misery caused by the Great Recession. However, it does not shed his complicity in the ever deepening employment crisis. Unemployment remains high, exceeding 9% — 16% if you include part-time workers. The percentage of adults in the workforce is bouncing near a 30-year low.  read more »

Many commentators correctly attribute the UK rioting to decades of misgoverning and miseducating youth. Contributing to this has been the breakdown of family discipline, the replacement of working fathers as role models and the creation of a culture of entitlement. Tony Blair has talked about a breakdown in public morality. Less convincingly, many on the left have attributed the cause to the social expenditure cuts of the Cameron Government, cuts that have actually made barely a dent in the proceeding Blair/Brown years of tumescent expenditure growth.  read more »

CNBC reports the information technology (IT) sector is “where the jobs are.” And the Los Angeles Times writes that tech jobs in San Francisco are a “rare bright spot in the nation’s troubled economy.”

EMSI’s most current data, however, paints a slightly less rosy picture.  read more »

The title raises the obvious question: Does Chicago need saving?

I guess the answer is clear. Aaron Renn published a reviewofthe 2010 census, and for Chicago it was not pretty. Since 2000 the city lost over 200,000 people: nearly 7.5% of its Black residents, and almost 6% on non-Hispanic Whites. Only the Hispanic population grew, but at an anemic 3.4%. Even the metro area writ large isn’t doing all that well, growing by only 3.9% (against the nation’s 10%).  read more »

You don’t have to like Rick Perry or his sometimes scary neo-confederate politics to admire what has been happening in Texas over the past decade. Rather than trashing the state in order to demean its governor, perhaps the mainstream media should be thinking about what the Lone Star’s success story means for the rest of the country.  read more »

The riots that hit London and other English cities last week have the potential to spread beyond the British Isles. Class rage isn’t unique to England; in fact, it represents part of a growing global class chasm that threatens to undermine capitalism itself.  read more »

As the United States continues to fight its way out of the Great Recession, more attention has been directed to the question of why is has taken so long for workers to find re-employment. In economist parlance, this is primarily a question of “structural unemployment.” This describes the type of unemployment that results from a mismatch of worker skills and the skills demanded by employers.  read more »

I was watching Book TV on C-SPAN last week and I came upon Mr. Ha-Joon Chang talking about his book “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.” For example, Thing #1 is “there is no such thing as a free market.” I actually use this line in my finance and economics courses.  read more »

Los Angeles today is a city in secular decline. Its current political leadership seems determined to turn the sprawling capitalist dynamo into a faux New York. But they are more likely to leave behind a dense, government-dominated, bankrupt, dysfunctional, Athens by the Pacific.

The greatness of Los Angeles stemmed from its willingness to be different. Unlike Chicago or Denver or New York, the Los Angeles metro area was designed not around a central core but on a series of centers, connected first by railcars and later by the freeways. The result was a dispersed metropolis where most people occupied single-family houses in middle-class neighborhoods.  read more »