It certainly took everyone in India by surprise. But then, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a flair for the dramatic. In an unexpected primetime address on Tuesday, he announced that in a few hours, millions of high-denomination currency notes would no longer be legal tender. It was the only way, he insisted, to deal with “the disease” of unaccounted-for ...

  A funny thing happened on the path to disruption. This decade, most of Silicon Valley’s big societal claims have turned out to be wrong. These claims arguably began around the time this cycle’s real expansion began, in late 2011. Two scholars’ 2011 text, “Race Against the Machine,” looked at some of the problems plaguing the U.S. economy — stagnant ...

  Noah Smith A little while ago, I wrote that libertarianism — the small-government philosophy codified by Robert Nozick and others in the mid-20th century — is looking a little shopworn. As efforts to slash government yield diminishing returns, and empirical evidence piles up that many government interventions are very beneficial, the minimalist state envisioned by Nozick et al. doesn’t ...