Economy

Initial claims for regular state unemployment insurance fell by 19,000 for the week ending December 31st, coming in at 204,000. The previous week’s 223,000 was revised down from the initial…

Sales of light vehicles totaled 13.3 million at an annual rate in December, down from a 14.2 million pace in November and a 15.2 million pace in October. It was…

Everywhere in education, you see incentives at work. The incentives, though, are so far removed from the actual goals of education that they produce perverse results.  Goodhart’s Law is usually…

A new year dawns bright, with the US hurtling over the fiscal cliff. The lame duck Congress voted for a pork-packed $1.7 trillion budget bill. As the saying goes, it’s…

The Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index fell to 48.4 percent in December, the second consecutive reading below neutral and the lowest level since May 2020. The survey…

The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the total number of job openings in the economy decreased to 10.458 million in November,…

During the last week of December 2022, amid one of our nation’s worst snowstorms, Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights and sowed chaos and confusion among not only travelers but…

My recent column on the need to theorize carefully about comparative advantage provoked several people to share with me, by email, their objections to my case for a policy of…

For most of the last century, the “progressives” have been taking over the nation’s education system at every level. Pick any teacher, professor, or administrator and the chances are high…

Juan Ponce de Leon Statue at landing site, Melbourne Beach, Florida.  Picture, if you will, a sixteenth-century conquistador in the New World. If you’re like most of us, the image…