When Thomas Edison was asked about conducting thousands of experiments without results, he responded that he always got results: He knew “several thousand things that won’t work.” America’s states are, Louis Brandeis said, laboratories of democracy, and recently Wisconsin successfully demonstrated what does not work when holding elections during a pandemic. After insisting for weeks that the statutory election schedule ...

Apple and Google have generated much hope and controversy with their plan to create a Covid-19 tracking app. Too bad it won’t work. Public debate has focussed on how to balance the right to privacy with the potential to save lives. There’s ample reason for skepticism — for example, “anonymous” Bluetooth tracking can be deanonymised. But that’s not what I ...

Just how serious will the economic impact of the coronavirus be? Amid vast uncertainty, some very large numbers are flying around, and there’s a lot of confusion over what they mean. Peering through this fog, it’s worth noting: Authoritative official forecasters are far more pessimistic in the short term than most private-sector analysts. When Goldman Sachs, for instance, recently said ...