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Economics

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Hayek Interviews.

China

United States Economy Still Weak, but More Feel Secure. Despite months of disappointing-to-dismal economic reports — capped by a Commerce Department release Thursday showing the economy had expanded at an annual pace of just 1.3 percent in the second quarter, barely above stall speed — a closely watched measure of consumer confidence surged to its highest level since February.

United States Economy Still Weak, but More Feel Secure

Economic experts pointed to several trends to explain how Americans were feeling better about the economy even though growth in jobs and the overall economy had weakened. First, the election is having a strong effect on economic perceptions. Second, though the recovery is weak, it has persisted, with employment and wages rising and some households feeling more secure. Though the unemployment rate has been stuck between 8.1 and 8.3 percent all year, employers have continued to add workers to their payrolls. Wages and consumer spending have strengthened.

Washington Versus America. No doubt there were boomtowns in the 19th-century Wild West that changed faster than D.C. did over the ensuing decade.

Washington Versus America

But the changes to Washington have been staggering to watch. High-rises have leaped up, office buildings have risen, neighborhoods have been transformed. Streets once deserted after dusk are now crowded with restaurants and bars. A luxurious waterfront area is taking shape around the stadium that the playoff-bound Nationals call home. Million-dollar listings abound in neighborhoods that 10 years ago were transitional at best. Budget Impasse Invites Recession Risk, Report Says. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said the economy was weaker than was projected in January.

Budget Impasse Invites Recession Risk, Report Says

The nonpartisan analysis predicted that, under current law, total economic output would shrink and the unemployment rate would rise to about 9 percent next year. That analysis echoes views expressed in other private and government forecasts. Can we save American capitalism? It’s no wonder, then, that large numbers of Americans have begun to question the superiority of our brand of free-market capitalism.

Can we save American capitalism?

This disillusionment is reflected not only in public opinion polls but on the shelves of American bookstores, where the subject has attracted many of the best economists in the country. Retooling American capitalism has become something of an national — and even international — obsession. Reader (70) What’s Happening to Men? Women today are entering adulthood with more education, more achievements, more property, and, arguably, more money and ambition than their male counterparts.

What’s Happening to Men?

This is a first in human history, and its implications for both sexes are far from simple. You can see the strongest evidence that boys and young men are falling behind in high school and college classrooms. Boys have lower GPAs and lower grades in almost every subject, including math, despite their higher standardized testing scores.[1] They are 58% of high school dropouts.[2] In the mid 1970s about 28% of men had college degrees.

The End of Men - Hanna Rosin. Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history.

The End of Men - Hanna Rosin

Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? John Ritter.

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Intersecting Ideas. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes. Commanding Heights: Storyline. A global economy, energized by technological change and unprecedented flows of people and money, collapses in the wake of a terrorist attack ....

Commanding Heights: Storyline

The year is 1914. Worldwide war results, exhausting the resources of the great powers and convincing many that the economic system itself is to blame. From the ashes of the catastrophe, an intellectual and political struggle ignites between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace, each determined to reinvent the world's economic order. Two individuals emerge whose ideas, shaped by very different experiences, will inform this debate and carry it forward. One is a brilliant, unconventional Englishman named John Maynard Keynes.

Bread and Roses Strike

‘Finance and the Good Society,’ by Robert J. Shiller. Photographs by Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters Shiller’s main line of argument is an extension of Kenneth Arrow’s classic 1964 article, “The Role of Securities in the Optimal Allocation of Risk Bearing,” which emphasized the importance of markets for protecting against risk.

‘Finance and the Good Society,’ by Robert J. Shiller

If firms and individuals cannot insure themselves against bad outcomes, they will be necessarily cautious; the economy will grow more slowly than it should. A company will not invest in a new factory if it cannot hedge against swings in exchange rates that might render its investment unprofitable. An individual will not consume to the full extent of his capacity if he cannot insure his house or health. By connecting the ranks of insurance seekers with specialists who pool risk and so reduce it, finance liberates animal spirits and boosts prosperity.

Shiller’s book is a lament that nearly 50 years after Arrow’s article, many forms of risk remain hard to buy and sell.

The Great Recession

Management /Communication.