A piece of land can be a home, a farm, collateral for a loan, or an inheritance. Or it can just sit there, producing nothing beyond what its occupant can defend by hand. The difference rarely has anything to do with the soil; it comes down to whether the person standing on that land can say “this is mine” and have the law actually back that claim. Zimbabwe already ran this experiment, and the results are not ambiguous.

The death of former mainland Chinese premier Zhu Rongji on August 12 has renewed discussion of his economic legacy. Zhu—who served as premier from 1998 to 2003 after previously overseeing much of mainland China’s economic policy as vice premier—was one of the principal architects of the market-oriented reforms of the 1990s.

American intelligence officers are using chatbots to decide who the US should bomb next. 

“Survey response rates for the monthly Jobs Report have declined steadily over the past decade, creating a direct risk to the quality of data that guides trillion-dollar policy decisions.” 

The August jobs report was much celebrated by the White House, which pointed to a reported gain of 162,000 jobs in August. The White House called the gain “explosive.“ It would be nice if one month’s worth of job gains pointed to an economic revival, but that is unfortunately not the case.

“More American service members have died in the Middle East during the ongoing Iran war than the Pentagon has disclosed publicly...” 

Open the financial pages and a strange creature stares back at you. The S&P 500 has climbed over 90 percent in three years. The top 10 percent of earners now account for nearly half of all consumer spending. Moody’s, Morgan Stanley, and the New York Fed agree on the shape of the thing: the economy has split in two. Asset-holders ride the upper arm of the “K” upward while wage earners slide down the lower one, watching groceries, rent, and insurance devour paychecks that no longer stretch.