The closer we look at the “recovery”, the weaker it looks. Last week we reported that most of the decrease in the ranks of the “unemployed” amounts to people leaving the workforce rather than new jobs being created. This week the WSJ notes that the longer people stay out of the labor force, the less likely they […]

Former NYC Comptroller Bill Thompson is looking to vault ahead of frontrunner Bill de Blasio in the city’s mayoral race, but a recent exposée of his tenure as comptroller will do little to help his chances. As Comptroller, Thompson was responsible for handling  investment decisions by the city’s pension systems. Thompson has touted this experience […]

Just as our cars are getting fancier, sleeker, smarter, and more energy efficient, so too are our roads. Coordinated traffic lights, crowdsourced, realtime traffic apps, the proliferation of ride-sharing communities, and even an experimental concept called “road trains” (in which cars sync speeds wirelessly and draft behind one another on the highway) all have the […]

This is the season when major pillars of the Obama administration’s foreign policy are coming apart so visibly that the mainstream media and even the administration itself are shifting from smug denial to grappling with painful truths. The reset with Russia is as much of a flop as the outreach to the Islamic world, the […]

Nurse practitioners in California have just been handed a major defeat in their campaign for more autonomy. State Senator Ed Hernandez introduced a bill to allow them to provide care without doctor supervision, but intense physician lobbying killed the bill in committee on Friday. This is bad news for California, and for the national push to […]

A new week has dawned, and the Indian rupee has continued its precipitous decline: The rupee was down another 0.5 percent against the dollar on Monday and a further 0.6 percent in early trading on Tuesday, to 66.43 rupees to the dollar, bringing its decline since early May to a little more than 20 percent.[…]Exporters […]

Happy Labor Day to our dear readers.

You may have heard of Uber, the innovative taxi startup that’s faced legislative roadblocks in city after city as entrenched interests in bed with local politicians dig in their heels.Well once again Uber is in the news for upsetting the status quo, this time for introducing fuel efficient vehicles into its fleet of luxury sedans […]

The lack of  price transparency in the health care system is one of those things that most people would agree is a problem if they think about it for a second. Nevertheless, given the tone of the mainstream debate on healthcare, most people seem to not think about it very much.If you end up in […]

Duke University’s first year MOOC offerings through the Coursera platform have been successful, attracting over 725,000 students from all across the world. And though Duke is enthusiastic to continue its experiments with online-only courses, the really interesting outgrowths of its success are the changes coming down the pike for Duke’s resident, paying students: after their largely positive […]