Capital and Interest Theory

Are American workers becoming more productive? The data used to measure productivity are unreliable.

Email is supplanting regular mail and the Postal Service is fighting for its life--at its customers' and competitors' expense.

The New Scientist tries its hand at economic theory, and makes an awful mess of it. Callahan and Murphy explain where the piece goes wrong. 

The National Labor Relations Board is the Supreme Soviet of organized labor, and now it wants to wreck a thriving segment of the labor market, says Chris Westley. 

Brookings economists are fixated on finding the proper rate of unemployment and inflation. But their very model is wrong-headed, says Frank Shostak.

The Pulitzer Prize has been known for honoring great works and great folly. A newspaper colleague of mine in 1977 won a Pulitzer for a very moving (if, albeit, a bit staged) photograph of a legless Vietnam veteran sitting in a wheelchair in the rain watching an Armed Forces Day Parade in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Pulitzer also is still recovering from the Janet Cooke fiasco of 1981 when the prize committee had to rescind the award given to the Washington Post reporter who wrote a fake story about a nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict, the story called "Jimmy's World."

Neither the Fed nor Wall Street can undo the ill effects of past monetary expansions, says Frank Shostak.

Judge Jackson's decision in the Microsoft case assumes that superior technology doesn't win out in market competition. Is he right?

A stock price is not an objective rendering of value, but merely an opinion about the present and future worth of a company--and opinions can be wrong. 

In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith assailed American spending patterns. Consumers, he told us in The Affluent Society, spend too much on such fripperies as large tailfins on cars.