Apple, America, and a Squeezed Middle Class

I learned quite a bit about Apple from the NYTimes article by Duhigg and Bradsher. One particularly striking passage: In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in [...]

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Obama’s Third State of the Union*

Some of my economics colleagues were certainly unimpressed by the President’s focus on encouraging manufacturing in the United States, and his condemnation of the outsourcing of jobs. Economists tend to have a great deal of faith in market forces, and consider the market price an accurate reflection of “all relevant information.” In economics, aiming for [...]

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One Percent Education

Simply could not have said it better than Neal Gabler [ht:cr], Some may see this obsession with perfection as the culmination of a long trend; tiger moms have been pushing their children to be intellectual decathletes for generations. But it may actually be a reversal of an even longer trend. At the turn of the [...]

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De Nada

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Pity the Billionaire

Thomas Frank hits the nail on the head when describing responses to the crisis in his new book, Pity the Billionaire. First, there is the Tea Party response, which views the problem as government intervention, despite strong evidence that deregulation of financial markets and institutions is the greater culprit. Thomas Frank writes that this response [...]

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Republic, Lost

It’s hard to list all of the problems with American democracy: negative attack-campaigning, excessive lobbying influence, a lack of transparency, polarized political gridlock, a cable-news media with low journalistic standards, and a lack of civic engagement. But as explained by Lawrence Lessig, this tree of corruption of democracy has a single root: campaign finance. Attempts [...]

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