Opinion

  Blue Apron, the leading meal-delivery startup, pitches itself as “disruptive tech,” but a recent BuzzFeed article shows that the tech is what’s being disrupted. This company is at the mercy of physical-world constraints just like the brick-and-mortar businesses it’s competing with. As tech looks to muscle its way into more parts of the economy, this may become a theme. ...

  Tyler Cowen Hillary Clinton thinks U.S. corporations live for the short-term, obsessing over the next quarterly earnings statement to the neglect of their longer-run prospects. That’s a common criticism and the evidence to support it includes testimonials by corporate chief executives, a variety of corporate scandals and high and rising corporate discount rates on future cash flows. Still, it’s ...

A reactionary is someone who wishes to return, usually unrealistically, to an earlier and more appealing era. We have two reactionaries running for president. Both peddle agendas that promise to re-create a reassuring past. We are being fed different varieties of nostalgia. Neither will work. Donald Trump is most explicit. He pledges to “make America great again.” What does this ...

  If there’s a golden rule for central bankers in the 21st century, this is it: Seek clarity and avoid uncertainty. A central bank’s target should be clear. The data it uses should be known. The analysis it conducts on that data should be comprehensible. And, certainly, politics should have nothing to do with its decisions. Negative Interest Rates Yet ...

Canada is an unlikely model for climate-change policy. As things stand, it’s a long way from keeping the promise it made as part of the Paris agreement to sharply cut carbon emissions. But its government is now proposing to make this right — and with an approach that deserves to be widely copied. The Cost of Carbon This week Prime ...

  2004: Tropical Storm Jeanne claims around 2,800 lives. 2010: Earthquake leaves more than 250,000 dead. 2016: Hurricane Matthew kills more than 800. Natural disasters have been visiting Haiti with alarming regularity (every six years). It has received massive foreign funding during these crises. But sadly, the foreign intervention has failed to build local capacity and assist masses in bringing ...

  Wang Jianlin, China’s richest man, has been on a Hollywood shopping spree. As chief executive of the Wanda Group, he’s acquired Legendary Entertainment, producer of “Jurassic Park,” and is in talks to pay $1 billion for Dick Clark Productions, producer of the Golden Globes and other live television events. An earlier purchase, AMC Entertainment, recently announced plans to buy ...

It’s election season, and that means it’s time for partisans to pose as economists and strategists in order to explain how much the markets support their favorite candidate (see this or this or this). It is an exercise fraught with a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives markets at best — or intellectual dishonesty at worst. So let’s get this out ...

  Mark Gilbert The U.K. government has approved the country’s first hydraulic fracturing wells in the north of England, overruling the objections of the local council in Lancashire. It’s the correct decision given the nation’s growing energy needs; but rising opposition to fracking shows the nascent industry in the U.K. needs to do a better job of convincing the public ...

  Brazilian bank workers are in a funk. Inflation is eating away at their salaries, even as banks are still making pretty good money in the face of Brazil’s recession. So on Sept. 6, tellers, clerks and other bank employees did what union bosses told them to do: They walked off the job. On Oct. 4, employees rejected a 7 ...