Opinion

  At their post-Civil War apogee, 19th-century Republicans were the party of activist government, using protectionism to pick commercial winners and promising wondrous benefits from government’s deft interventions in economic life. Today, a Republican administration promises that wisely wielded Washington power can rearrange commercial activities in ways superior to those produced by private-sector calculations in free market transactions. According to ...

  The issue of what the UK does or doesn’t owe the European Union risks becoming a landmine in the Brexit negotiations. Britain should pay what it legitimately owes for EU services it signed up to. Divorce is never cheap. But by seeking to maximize payment, and by making payment a precondition for the rest of the talks, the EU ...

  Economists have come to rival even journalists and politicians in lack of public esteem. That might be partly because so many economists seem as interested in journalism and politics as in advancing their science. But there’s also a deeper problem: Far from advancing, the science of economics has been going backwards. Economists tend to be either practitioners or theorists. ...

  North Korea allegedly carried out a ballistic missile test on early Sunday. But there was no confirmation from Pyongyang. The US Strategic Command reported that it was a medium- or intermediate-range ballistic missile. Japanese government confirmed that the missile fell in seas between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Kim Jong Un, the reclusive leader of the pariah state, warned ...

  When it comes to robots displacing humans from the job market, government bureaucrats are generally not what springs to mind. The recent McKinsey report on the future of jobs estimates the automation potential of administrative jobs at just 39 percent, far less than the 73 percent potential for accommodation and food services. And yet the public sector is one ...

  So it turns out nothing really is something in the bond market. Big Wall Street firms may lament the persistence of zero interest-rate policies in the US, but they look downright ostentatious when pitted against Europe’s vortex of negative-rate policies. In the past week alone, the volume of negative-yielding euro-zone debt surged 30 percent, to a record 2.6 trillion ...

  The unfunded liabilities of public pensions are out of control across the country. My state, Illinois, is the most severe case, with only 40 percent of those liabilities funded. Given the magnitude of the problem, and the political and legal obstacles to fixing it, it remains tempting to underplay the importance of straightforward financial changes that could put the ...

  You’ve heard the criticism. Too many American corporate managers are addicted to “short-termism.” They postpone investments and other costs, sacrificing future performance for present profitability. Either they’re pressured by “activist investors” or want to inflate the value of their stock options. If true, it could help explain the economy’s lackluster performance. Now, a new study asserts that it is ...

  At this point last year, Twitter was a company that had a hard time attracting new people to surf and tweet, but it was quite skilled at generating ad dollars from its die-hard users. Now Twitter’s problem has reversed. It’s still a mess of a company, but in a fresh way. People are using Twitter more, but advertisers are ...

  The news from Afghanistan is as relentless as it depressing: six aid workers murdered by IS, at least 20 dead from a suicide bombing at the Supreme Court, more territory lost to the Taliban, more opium growing in the fields. Maybe that explains Donald Trump’s silence on the war since becoming president. But it does not excuse it. The ...