The chief scientific advisor to Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change released a report Monday that shows fracking will not increase the country’s emissions. The report was released to help Cameron’s administration make the case for taking advantage of the UK’s 1,300+ trillion cubic feet of shale gas. Vehement green protests are stalling exploratory well […]

Americans awoke to the possibility this morning that the US has found a ‘solution’ to the Syria situation. The Times is reporting that the US and Russia have reached an agreement to remove or destroy Syria’s chemical weapons by mid-2014 (the official state department framework document on this agreement is here).If this deal goes through, […]

One of the thorniest problems in health care is that new medical technologies often raise costs. Other industries have been able to dramatically lower costs by adopting new technologies, but health care gets more expensive every year as hospitals adopt new treatments and surgical tools.Economist Jonathan Skinner thinks this “costly paradox of health-care technology” traces […]

America’s neglect of its young men, specifically its failure to address the gender gap in education, may be hurting its international competitiveness. That’s the implication of Christina Hoff Summers’ excellent new piece in the Atlantic.We’ve known for some time that more girls are going to college than boys, but the disparity actually begins much earlier in life. Primary […]

It’s official: the Bharatiya Janata Party has selected Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as its candidate for prime minister for the 2014 parliamentary elections in India. While his candidacy is not unexpected—he has been the rising star of the BJP—it has exposed divisions not just in Indian society, but within the BJP itself.Senior party members, […]

Being an economist is dangerous work in Argentina; too much honesty and integrity can lead to a midnight phone call from the government threatening incarceration. Orlando Ferreres, a respected economist in Buenos Aires, was the latest economist to dare tell the people that the country’s inflation index is a fat pack of lies. Naturally, reports […]

Rosanna Fay is a career-minded woman who chose not to have children, anticipating many years of freedom and professional success—and then her parents began to age. She found that caring for them limited her career just as much as children might have. In an enlightening and sad piece in The Atlantic, Fay hits on the some of […]

When Showa, a Japanese company that supplies precision parts to companies like Toyota and Nintendo, went looking for a site for its first overseas factory, China was the obvious first choice. Many of Showa’s customers have factories there and it is the biggest market in the region. But in the end the company’s president chose […]

The day of reckoning has finally arrived for a number of short-haul Amtrak routes in the American heartland. After years of delivering subsidies for low-ridership routes connecting cities like Chicago and Indianapolis or Oklahoma City and Dallas, the federal money train is about to make its final stop, leaving the states to pick up the […]

China continues to build its naval fleet as tensions rise in South and East Asia. This is good news for the China Shipbuilding Industry Co., a state-run military contractor and the nation’s largest shipbuilder. The company announced plans to accept $1.4 billion in private investment, which will fund the building of larger, more threatening warships. From […]