NEW YORK – The foundation of American economic prosperity is being undermined by increasingly dominant firms and outdated corporate-governance practices. Fortunately, there are simple steps that regulators can take immediately to put the economy – and American society – on a sounder footing. As public discontent forces a political reckoning ...

NEW YORK – Across Western advanced economies, a widespread sense of malaise has given rise to a debate about what the state can and should do to ensure economic justice, particularly for those at the bottom of the income ladder. As always, the fundamental question is whether public policies would help or hamper growth and dynamism. In much of ...

NEW YORK – Although robots that can perform human labor will put downward pressure on wages in the short term, they also will increase the rate of profit, encouraging more investment and a recovery in the wage rate. It is not so much the economics of new technologies that should worry us, but rather the politics and ethics. The robots are ...

NEW YORK – Argentina's creditors are being asked to accept a proposal that would reduce their revenue stream but make it sustainable. A responsible resolution will set a positive precedent, not only for Argentina, but for the international financial system as a whole. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed humanity toward the worst global recession ...

Directing businesses to fight the pandemic would help workers more than an infrastructure splurge. The ink had barely dried on the $2 trillion Covid-19 rescue package enacted March 27 when congressional Democrats and Republicans, along with President Trump, hinted that it wouldn’t be enough. After signaling that the largest “stimulus” package ...

PARIS – The silence of most economists on the underlying causes of the political ructions erupting throughout the West – and on what, if anything, can be done to restore economic vigor – has been deafening. And it provides further evidence of the profession's refusal to acknowledge the need for change. The West is in crisis – and so is ...

NEW YORK – Too many politicians and economists blame austerity – urged by Greece's creditors – for the collapse of the Greek economy. But the data show neither marked austerity by historical standards nor government cutbacks severe enough to explain the huge job losses. What the data do show are economic ills rooted in the values and beliefs ...

NEW YORK – Some economists overlook the modern idea that a country's prosperity depends on innovation and entrepreneurship. They take the mechanistic view that prosperity is a matter of employment, and that employment is determined by "demand" – government spending, household consumption, and ...

Business leaders often argue that the widening education gap – the disparity between what young people learn and the skills that the job market demands – is a leading contributor to high unemployment and slow growth in many countries. For their part, governments seem convinced that the best way to close the gap is to increase the number ...

It is widely assumed that people in economically “advanced” countries do not differ significantly in how satisfied they are with their jobs. Because they are about equally productive, the reasoning is, they must produce things the same way, and so their work experience must be the same, ...

This essay is adapted from Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change, published this month by Princeton University Press.

The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th. Mass Flourishing is a history linking this story to the rise and fall of homegrown innovation. ...

ONE source of the outsize inequalities in America is the dynamism that made economic activity so rewarding. An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains. To tax all of those gains would close off the prospects for success that many entrepreneurs need if they are to undertake ambitious ventures — a ...