Opinion

I recently returned from a trip to Japan. I’ve been going there for many years, so I can confirm that traveling in that country — especially for longer periods of time — is infinitely easier than it was just a decade ago. One of the main reasons is Airbnb. Ten years ago, lodging in Japan was limited to overpriced hotels ...

The food that people eat has become a major risk factor for disability and death worldwide. Yet countries and their philanthropic supporters seem not to be paying attention. They’re investing far too little in improving diets and preventing nutrition-related disease. The problem is part of a larger trend in human mortality. Until recently, in many low- and middle-income countries, malaria, ...

A lot of people these days think Facebook Inc. has become an incorrigible, toxic “regime of one-sided, highly profitable surveillance” under the near-absolute control of a “sovereign and singular ruler,” as University of North Carolina information scholar Zeynep Tufekci summed up in Wired a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sure the harshest Facebook critics are right. I agree, though, ...

In recent years, a number of economic ideas once considered unassailable have been called into question. The financial crisis and Great Recession throw much of macroeconomic and financial wisdom out the window, and now new evidence is challenging orthodoxy in a variety of areas. For example, recent studies suggests that labour markets don’t work the way economists traditionally believed, and ...

Tech or media? What to many people is an esoteric question could end up making a multibillion-dollar difference to Chinese companies that serve up content ranging from jokes to gossip. Technology firms, those ground-breaking companies with research teams hard at work building moats, are more highly prized than media counterparts that merely provide content. In the S&P 500, for example, ...

Will you cross a bridge if you don’t know what’s on the other side? Unlikely. That’s the dilemma investors face as they look forward to the London-Shanghai Connect stock trading link that’s scheduled to start by year-end. The program’s timing was announced this week by People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang, who also said authorities will quadruple daily trading ...

Having spent nearly a decade crafting new capital requirements to bolster the resilience of the country’s largest banks, the US Federal Reserve is getting ready to do some fine-tuning. The rules can certainly be improved — but what’s needed is more than tinkering around the edges. The Fed has two main tools to ensure banks have enough equity capital, the ...

I once congratulated Mario Draghi on his performance as president of the European Central Bank (ECB), telling him he had made only one mistake. “What’s that?” came the instant question. “Taking the job,” I replied. My point was that by the time Draghi was appointed, the ECB could no longer hope to be a conventional central bank, if indeed it ...

The field of weather forecasting holds a lesson that economists might do well to heed: Stop being so sure of yourself. The reputation of the economics profession suffered after the 2008 financial crisis, in large part because its practitioners were so overconfident. They have since been working to forge more realistic models of the economy, and re-examining some of their ...

Imagine if the US banned Facebook after Mark Zuckerberg’s disappointing performance last week on Capitol Hill. Something similar happened in Russia on Monday as the country’s internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, ordered internet providers to block access to the Telegram messenger. This being Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the ban isn’t just an attack on the freedom of communication and expression: It happens ...