Opinion

  Voters in Washington state will be asked next month whether they want to adopt the nation’s first carbon tax — a powerful way to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. You’d think environmental groups would be doing everything they can to back that idea. You’d be wrong. THE COST OF CARBON Initiative 732 will be on the ballot on Election Day. It …

After four months of Brexit, a new chapter unfolds on Monday as British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with the first ministers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The meeting would be crucial as the leaders seek to lay out a roadmap for departure from the EU. The meeting of Joint Ministerial Committee (JME) would be the first since December …

  There was a time when ticket splitting was common. Voters would support one party’s candidate for president and the other’s for Congress. At its peak in 1972, ticket splitters represented 30 percent of voters, reports political scientist Alan Abramowitz of Emory University. Since then, the practice has gone into eclipse. In 2012, only 11 percent of the electorate were …

  I was in the middle of an e-mail to an old friend this week, and had written a sentence about a mutual acquaintance that was more than 50 percent positive but contained a snarky word or two. I paused. “Is that necessary?” I thought to myself. No, it wasn’t. So I deleted the sentence. Maybe it was the Neera …

  Does anyone remember President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia? The plan was to focus diplomatic and military assets in East Asia to contain a rising China. It was one of the reasons Obama said he was shrinking the American footprint in the Middle East. Well, the pivot is failing. On Thursday, the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, announced …

  The EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) took seven years of negotiations. But the proposed deal is on the verge of collapse in its final lap. As the Belgian region of Wallonia has refused to give it a go-ahead, the European Union (EU) leaders remain on tenterhooks. Canada’s patience is also running thin. On Friday, an emotionally-charged Canadian …

  In 2015, Forbes writer Adam Ozimek suggested that a “new liberal consensus” is forming in the economic-policy world. The data back him up. Many economics professors now tend to favor government intervention in the economy more than the general public. And the profession’s biggest public stars, from Paul Krugman to Thomas Piketty to Joseph Stiglitz, are now more likely to …

  It is not easy to keep an orderly house in an unsettled neighborhood. That’s the major hurdle facing Asian economies as the advanced world deals with unusual economic, financial, institutional and political fluidity. Judging from China’s gross domestic product data released this week, Asia is in a relatively favorable position to navigate the challenges. But the battle is far …

  Just over a year ago, Tesla sent out a software update to its cars that made its “Autopilot” features available to customers, in what the company called a “public beta test.” In the intervening 12 months, at least one customer died while the Tesla was in autopilot mode. Cars have crashed, regulators have cracked down, and the headlines proclaiming …

  Making predictions three weeks before the U.S. election is risky, but the likeliest bet right now is that the center will hold in American politics and Hillary Clinton will be elected president. That’s important for lots of reasons, the biggest of which is that it could begin to stabilize a very unsettled world. Nate Silver, a leading polling guru, …