(New “Mad Men” Sergey Brin and Larry Page | Source: Creative Commons) The British humorist Douglas Adams once summed up the trajectory of computers and the internet in four teleological sentences: “First, we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was […]

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The news of Steve Ballmer’s planned retirement next year, announced last month, brought the Microsoft CEO’s critics out of the woodwork. He was widely skewered as the beneficiary of “the luckiest dorm-room assignment in history”—down the hall from Bill Gates when both were Harvard undergrads. Vanity Fair business writer Kurt Eichenwald called Ballmer’s watch at […]

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(Source: sneurgaonkar/Flickr/Creative Commons) In 1995, we encountered a group of economic advisors to Governor John Engler of Michigan, intent on cutting property taxes. We reminded them of California’s 1979 Proposition 13. After Prop. 13 rolled back and froze property taxes, sales taxes reached crushing levels, budget crises became routine, local services collapsed, and public schools […]

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How’s your 401(k) doing? Working Americans ask themselves this question—and angst about the answer—an awfully lot these days. And why not? For most Americans, retirement has turned chillingly stark: Either you have a robust set of investments in your 401(k) or you’re facing a rocky retirement. This article was originally published in Too Much and […]

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Every American schoolchild learns about the value of the free marketplace. The thrust is that markets create optimal outcomes through a balance in the supply of goods and the demand for them. But there are some serious problems with this sunny view, like how the effects of today’s economic decisions may stretch over long spans […]

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