American capitalism is at a serious inflection point. Many Americans, including the two of us, are alarmed by enormous levels of inequality and by declining economic mobility. We are concerned that in many cases American markets are no longer the most competitive in the world. And, we worry that our country’s long-term economic strength will […]
Read More
WASHINGTON — Critics of big tech companies are eager to keep up their momentum — and some of the country’s wealthiest foundations are providing the financial firepower. Major nonprofits including the Ford and Hewlett Foundations have pledged millions of dollars in total toward taking on the power of the country’s corporate giants like Facebook and […]
Read More
There are about a dozen industries at the frontier of innovation. They include software and pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and data processing. Most of their workers have science or tech degrees. They invest heavily in research and development. While they account for only 3 percent of all jobs, they account for 6 percent of the country’s economic […]
Read More
Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher In Part 2 of our series on pivotal moments in the lives of the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, we spoke with Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator and democratic socialist. Mr. Sanders reflected on his education in […]
Read More
WASHINGTON — Elizabeth Warren is leading a liberal rebellion against a long-held economic view that large tax increases slow economic growth, trying to upend Democratic policymaking in the way supply-side conservatives changed Republican orthodoxy four decades ago. Generations of economists, across much of the ideological spectrum, have long held that higher taxes reduce investment, slowing […]
Read More
WASHINGTON — The Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr. would raise taxes on high earners and corporations by at least $3.4 trillion over the course of a decade if elected, his campaign said Wednesday, releasing a set of plans that are far less aggressive than his more liberal rivals’. Mr. Biden would raise a […]
Read More
BEIRUT, Lebanon — After a nearly two-hour wait at his bank, in early November, Fadi Aziz, a freelance web designer in Beirut, asked the teller to withdraw $1,000 from his account. The teller was courteous but firm: “You can’t withdraw more than $300 per week.” Mr. Aziz, who was traveling out of the country, protested […]
Read More
In 1980, highly paid workers in Binghamton, N.Y., earned about four and a half times what low-wage workers there did. The gap between them, in a region full of I.B.M. executives and manufacturing jobs, was about the same as the gap between the workers near the top and the bottom in metro New York. Since […]
Read More
TEVISTON, Calif. — Bertha Mae Beavers remembers hearing stories as a child about the promises of California, a place so rich with jobs and opportunity that money, she was told, “grew on trees.” So in the summer of 1946 she said goodbye to her family of sharecroppers in Oklahoma and set out for a piece […]
Read More
Twenty years ago this weekend, 50,000 people converged on Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization, which was holding a ministerial-level meeting in the city, and a plan championed by the world’s largest corporations to increase the organization’s authority over even more facets of people’s lives. The epic protests, televised worldwide, revealed that Americans were […]
Read More
Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Play | RadioPublic | Stitcher Are the impeachment hearings moving the needle on public opinion? With David Leonhardt out, Times columnist David Brooks makes his “Argument” debut to discuss the Democrats’ impeachment strategy so far. He thinks the inability […]
Read More
Immense wealth isn’t good for your reality sense. Billionaires aren’t necessarily bad people, and most of them probably aren’t. However, some are, and my unscientific sense is that billionaires are more likely than the rest of us to exhibit bad judgment warped by runaway egos, especially in the political sphere. It’s not hard to see […]
Read More
ImageA view of Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park, one of the many waterfront development projects begun during Mr. Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor.Credit…Raimund Koch for The New York Times Michael Bloomberg has a dramatic story to tell of New York City’s transformation should he decide to enter the presidential race. The city was in recession […]
Read More
This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday. Good for him. I’ll be surprised if Michael Bloomberg wins the Democratic nomination. We are living in a political era characterized by economic dissatisfaction and populism, and a 77-year-old Wall Street billionaire doesn’t look like an obvious […]
Read More
Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday invited the billionaire Bill Gates to meet so she could allay his worries about her plans to raise taxes on the wealthy and explain “exactly how much” he would pay. Speaking with the columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Conference on Wednesday, Mr. Gates, the Microsoft […]
Read More
This article is part of a continuing series on Visionaries. The New York Times selected people from all over the world who are pushing the boundaries of their fields, from science and technology to culture and sports. When policymakers, financiers and scientists describe the world decades from now, in the throes of climatic changes that […]
Read More
Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Play | RadioPublic | Stitcher Is Pete Buttigieg the best Democratic candidate to take on Trump? This week on “The Argument,” the columnists size up the South Bend mayor’s rise in Iowa and a new Times poll terrifying those […]
Read More
Sitting in the elegant sunroom of her Pacific Heights mansion with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Francisco socialite and philanthropist Dede Wilsey might seem an unlikely person to criticize the world of extraordinary wealth. “No civilization has survived where there is only rich and poor,” Ms. Wilsey said. She is being […]
Read More
Countries with strong governments often end up with weak economies, and India, after years of impressive growth, risks becoming one of them. The World Bank recently released its annual report comparing the ease of doing business in 190 countries, and India’s ranking improved to 63rd, up from 77th last year. India — along with Saudi […]
Read More
ImageA country upended: Protesters erected a barricade on a Santiago street last week. By Amanda Taub Photographs by Tomas Munita SANTIAGO, Chile — The suddenness of the protests, the anger that spilled onto the streets every day, might have been surprising anywhere. But in the country often lauded as Latin America’s great economic success story, […]
Read More
For more than two decades, the professional class has soothed its Sunday-night dread with prestige television’s tales of striving, scheming, anguish, greed and office politics. Underneath all those encomia to the acting and writing on “The Sopranos” or “Mad Men” or “Game of Thrones” was a baser pleasure: the gleeful catharsis of watching someone who […]
Read More
Escalating the war of words between Wall Street and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Leon Cooperman, a billionaire money manager, denounced her recent tweet encouraging him to “pitch in a bit more” because of his success in life, saying she sounded like “a parent chiding an ungrateful child.” “However much it resonates with your base, your vilification […]
Read More
Every quarter, we look to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis for new data on the total income and output of the economy. The nation’s topline indicator of economic performance is gross domestic product — the sum total of all that’s produced in our economy. If you pay attention to that indicator only, it would […]
Read More