Opinion

To adapt Thomas Pynchon, if the wrong question is asked, the answer doesn’t matter. Today, the world seems to be consciously framing its energy problems in a way that avoids the right questions, and thus true solutions. Human advancement is intrinsically linked to the development of motorized power driven by fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the resource itself is finite and has ...

Sparkling in the sunlight that inspired 19th-century romantic painters of the Hudson River School, Sing Sing prison’s razor wire, through which inmates can see the flowing river, is almost pretty. Almost. Rain or shine, however, a fog of regret permeates any maximum-security prison. But 37 men — almost all minorities; mostly African Americans — recently received celebratory attention. It was ...

Four decades ago, two University of Rochester professors came up with a definitive theory for that “awesome social invention” known as a publicly held company. The firm, they said, was but a series of contractual agreements between the owners and their agents—the managers. And there the matter rested. Until a 20-F filing at the US Securities Exchange Commission by Bangalore-based ...

The headlines liken it to a “raid” or a “power grab.” But the European Union’s threat to repatriate euro clearing away from London is starting to look like a headache nobody actually wants to see happen. Which, all told, is probably a good thing. EU Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis recently unveiled the legal framework of how the bloc plans to supervise ...

Usually when a president agrees to send more troops to a war zone, it’s part of a broader strategy. George W. Bush approved the surge of forces to Iraq as part of a population-centric counterinsurgency war plan. Barack Obama did the same in his first year when it came to Afghanistan, though he eventually regretted the decision, and spent most ...

Edmund Burke saw society as a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. A failure to understand this relationship underlies a disturbing global tendency in recent decades, in which the appropriation of future wealth and resources for current consumption is increasingly disadvantaging future generations. Without a commitment to addressing ...

Goldman Sachs is embracing the machines. The firm that has long cultivated an image of relationship banking and trusted advice — in reality Goldman was always more of a trading house than rivals Morgan Stanley or boutiques like Lazard — now says it plans to hand over about half of the IPO process to computers. Goldman is trying to portray ...

Silicon Valley tech moguls are conducting an enormous experiment on the nation’s children. We should not be so trusting that they’ll get it right. Alphabet Inc. unit Google has taken a big role in public education, offering low-cost laptops and free apps. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook Inc. is investing heavily in educational technology, largely though the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Netflix ...

The Trump administration is determined to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — which created a single market from Mexico’s southern border to the Yukon — but the main political appeal of this policy rests on a popular myth: that “fair” trade requires the United States to have a surplus or balanced trade with both Mexico and Canada. ...

First they conveniently lost their voice; then they miraculously got it back. But now that the pundits of India’s economic establishment are talking again, all investors hear is discord. The biggest casualty of the war of words between the finance ministry in New Delhi and the central bank in Mumbai is India Inc. Without clarity on where policymakers want the ...