The American Petroleum Institute is debating whether to support a price on carbon. It’s not every day that a top lobbying group contemplates taxing itself. That’s big news, and it’s tempting to call it a win for the climate. Not so fast. While API’s expected endorsement is indeed a sign of the times, it’s not a good one. For one, ...

Sometimes economists are just flat-out wrong. According to economic theory, annuities and reverse mortgages should be very popular for managing risk and liquidity — yet both products struggle for mainstream acceptance. Another favorite of economists is prediction markets: contracts with payoffs contingent on some real-world event. Their future is also highly uncertain. In essence, prediction markets let people “bet” on ...

Those Americans who cheered President Joe Biden’s announcement this week that the US would have enough vaccines to inoculate every citizen by the end of July might want to note the cold silence with which the rest of the world greeted the news. Biden’s triumphalism was more than a little grating, considering that the U.S., alongside most other rich countries, ...