It’s a reminder that prices in emerging markets are hardly as stable as those of us in developed economies might expect — and also that instability may come from the most innocuous places. While inflation is usually far from the minds government officials in the
Krugman spells out the Paradox of Thrift: when the interest rate goes to zero — like the past five years — cuts in spending reduce the incentive to invest, which is contrary to the normal regime: For those who don’t know or don’t get the paradox
Noam Scheiber says that populist Elizabeth Warren is Hillary’s worst nightmare. Noam Scheiber Judging from recent events, the populists are likely to win. In September, New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, running on a platform of taming inequality, routed his Democratic mayoral rival, Christine Quinn,
Large-scale destruction is well known in Detroit, but it is also underway in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo and others at a total cost of more than $250 million. Officials are tearing down tens of thousands of vacant buildings, many habitable, as they seek to
American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions
Paul Krugman (and Larry Summers) peer behind the backdrop and see the postnormal economy may be with us for decades. excerpt what if the world we’ve been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist,
Roxane Gay counters Michelle Cottle’s ’ rankly condescending piece of shallow provocation for Politico’, in which every double-bind in the 'feminist mandates’ is marshaled to undercut Michelle Obama. excerpt Women so often face impossible choices in life, in work, in feminism. We are either “independent and empowered” or we’re tools of the patriarchy. For
A GLIMPSE into the future of retailing is available in a smallish office in Hamburg. From there, Otto, a German e-commerce merchant, is using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve its activities. The firm is already deploying the technology to make decisions at a scale, speed
The average age of a Japanese farmer is now 67, and in all developed nations the average age is 60. Agriculture ministers from the G7 last year were worried about how this high age could lead to issues over food security. And as the world population
I disagree with several premises in this paper, most notably that we will need to be able to ‘predict where failures might occur’ in operating AI systems, like driverless cars. Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey.