Opinion

When it comes to productivity, only two things are undebatable: that the official rate of US productivity growth has stalled since at least 2007, having started to slow before then, and that there is no consensus about why or what to do about it. There is, additionally, some broad consensus that without stronger productivity growth going forward, standards of living ...

The idea of a grand bargain between the US and Russia is less popular in Washington than ever before. And yet one of the biggest foreign policy problems for the US — that of North Korea — cannot be resolved without Russia’s participation. In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made sure to rebuild a close relationship with North ...

More than a billion people worldwide live without reliable access to electricity. Providing them with power will require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, vast deployment of technology, and adaptable business and financial market strategies. Much of the job can be done with power generation systems that are not connected to a central grid, and with largely fuel-free technology. ...

The state of Illinois regulates many common trades that maybe it shouldn’t, such as those specified by the Barber, Cosmetology, Esthetics, Hair Braiding, and Nail Technology Act of 1985. And it doesn’t regulate one industry that needs to be: gun dealerships. Despite a gruesome spike in gun violence in Chicago in recent years, regulation of gun retailers is left to ...

Say at least this for the manifestoes that the Conservative and Labour parties have presented this month: Some honesty has returned to British politics as far as tax and spending decisions are concerned. This would be a cause for celebration were it not for an additional detail: When it comes to Brexit, the U.K.’s main parties are yet to wake ...

To Indian eyes, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s big One Belt One Road Belt (OROB) Forum — which attracted 29 heads of government and representatives of 130 countries — looked awfully familiar. It looked, in fact, like an imperial durbar — the sort of grand spectacle that the British in India used to arrange periodically, with princelings from across the subcontinent ...

Economists still get a lot of flak for failing to predict the 2007-2009 recession. These criticisms are often misguided. Nonetheless, there’s an important sense in which forecasting models were badly mistaken — and probably remain so today. Critics of forecasting tend to misunderstand its purpose. Forecasters know perfectly well that, in a random world, the one certainty is that their ...

A blind spider creeping through America’s judicial thicket might be heading to the Supreme Court, which will have to decide if the contentment or even the survival of the Bone Cave Harvestman spider species, which lives only in two central Texas counties, is any of the federal government’s business. If it is, what isn’t? The US Fish and Wildlife Service ...

The United States may have escaped most digital damage from the global ‘ransomware’ virus, though cyber experts fear more attacks. One possible explanation is that the malicious software (‘malware’) harms older versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which most Americans have replaced. Perhaps many users in other countries haven’t. Whatever the explanation, this is not the end of internet threats. ...

Britain’s ruling Conservative Party says it plans to establish a sovereign wealth fund. It’s a great idea — albeit one that comes decades too late, with North Sea oil revenue diminishing and the cupboard of U.K. assets available for sale to seed the fund already almost bare. Here’s what the party’s manifesto, released on Thursday ahead of the June 8 ...