With figures ranging from 33-year old Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to 90-year-old Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith endorsing a universal basic income, the idea may soon enter the US political mainstream. But Americans are being sold on a dangerous version of the UBI, designed as a resource rent rather than a product of social consensus. Smith recently penned …

Google is scrambling to distance itself from one of its engineers, who has gained infamy for publishing a 10-page criticism of the company’s “authoritarian” approach to achieving gender diversity. If the goal was to confirm the author’s thesis, Team Google is doing a great job. Titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the anonymous memo sets out a well-intentioned goal: Find non-discriminatory …

Intervening 10 years ago to contain the damage from the banking system’s excessive risk-taking in mortgage-backed securities, the European Central Bank initiated what has proven to be an exceptional and prolonged involvement in markets by central banks. Much has changed since then, yet too much remains the same. The risk of unsettling financial instability, while lower, has morphed and migrated …