Opinion

  Let’s be clear: America is an undertaxed society. Our wants and needs from government — the two blur — exceed our willingness to be taxed. This has been true for decades, but it’s especially relevant now because the number of older Americans, who are the largest beneficiaries of federal spending, is rising rapidly. Unless we’re prepared to make sizable ...

  A third strongman has managed to do what the two before him couldn’t: Sever the link between the stock markets of China and India. The correlation between the CSI 300 and the Nifty 50 indexes survived Xi Jinping’s ascent to power in 2012 and Narendra Modi’s election in 2014. Donald Trump, however, has succeeded in driving through a wedge. ...

  Smokestacks and tailpipes may be the biggest and most obvious sources of greenhouse gases, but they’re not the only ones to worry about. An invisible, underappreciated one is right in America’s front yards: leaking pipes that carry natural gas into people’s homes. The good news is that scientists have devised a clever way to find these leaks, by attaching ...

  The leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met in Manila, where Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte stressed over the non-interference in one-another’s internal affairs. He said that the principles of the regional block are based on international law, mutual respect for independence, sovereignty, equality, territorial integrity and national identity of all nations. Duterte urged his fellow ...

  In recent decades, psychologists and economists have produced a flood of new findings about how human beings think and act. Those findings offer compelling lessons about how to change people’s behaviour. Governments have taken notice — and so has the private sector. There are terrific opportunities here, but also real risks. Behavioral scientists have established, for example, that people ...

  Since becoming president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi has rarely looked as relaxed as he did in Thursday’s press conference. It’s not hard to see why: The euro-zone economy is gathering speed, confidence is soaring, and unemployment is tumbling. The recovery is also spreading across the region, reducing the risk that some countries may need a different ...

  Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella isn’t one for straightforward communications. On Thursday night, when analysts plied him with politely worded questions about the change in Microsoft’s business model, they were treated to classic bits of cryptic wisdom such as this one. To me, that’s why Azure is pretty strategic for us, not just for the attachment of high-level ...

  The French are too intellectually vain to borrow others’ political ideas, but too interested in style not to appreciate and appropriate that of others. So, on May 7 they might confer their presidency on a Gallic Barack Obama. In 2008, Obama, a freshman senator, became a national Rorschach test, upon whom Americans projected their longings. Emmanuel Macron, 39, is ...

  Globalization has fallen out of fashion. Free trade breeds inequality, the critics say. International cooperation precludes national development. Closed economies are preferable to open ones. These statements could not be more misguided. The main reason I know this has to do not with job creation or productive employment or even global gross domestic product. It has to do with ...

  Donald Trump is not wrong: Judging a presidency on its first 100 days is an inherently ridiculous exercise. There is, however, a less ridiculous way to assess Trump’s first few months, and he does not fare well. It’s worth noting that when President Franklin Roosevelt first used the 100-day standard in a 1933 radio address, he was referring to ...