In San Francisco, Tech Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness
In the midst of a housing crisis, an injection of cash into the superheated real-estate market seems likely to cause an uptick in evictions and displacement.
Read the best economics articles from around the internet, or watch the most insightful economics videos from platforms like Youtube, Vimeo or leading economics publishers like The Economist, Bloomberg, Quartz, Fortune and many more.
In the midst of a housing crisis, an injection of cash into the superheated real-estate market seems likely to cause an uptick in evictions and displacement.
For decades, cruise companies have gone to great lengths to bypass US employment laws, hiring foreign workers for less than $2/hour. They’ve sheltered themselves as foreign entities while simultaneously benefitting from US taxpayer-funded agencies and resources.
Politicians are floating the idea that the economy supersedes the needs of living, breathing human beings; cruise and airline companies are demanding bailouts and full control over the terms; senators are doing crimes in broad daylight; and billionaire corporatists who did the same are asking regular people for money.
In a process called “stretching,” the Star Breeze is getting pulled apart to make room for a new, 84-foot, 1,250-ton prefab midsection addition. Think of it like unsnapping (or unwelding) two Legos and putting another block in between. But with a boat.
We list the best hotels, hostels, B&Bs and guesthouses in Paris as recommended by travel experts from CNN, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, The New York Times and more.
I can’t explain airline pricing but I do know some plane tickets can be cheaper depending on where you buy them or, even better, where you appear to buy them from. This is all about leveraging foreign currencies and points-of-sale to your advantage.
The current Boeing 737s, the world’s most flown craft, are all longer than the original by up to 45 feet. And yet, on the inside, we’re getting squeezed. That’s because more space doesn’t equal more space in Airline World. It equals more seats—and typically less room per person.
Jeff Bezos’s big bet is that he can make buying from Amazon so effortless that we won’t notice the company’s creeping grip on commerce and its underlying infrastructure, and that we won’t notice what that dominance costs us. Amazon has unprecedented power to steer our choices.
Mohammed bin Salman is about to find out what happens when the world does not need his oil. In the past, the standard response to that hypothesis was condescending looks. Not any more. The prospect of Saudi becoming a debtor nation is real.
Many of the recent political shifts in the West—the election of Donald Trump, the rise of populism in Europe and Brexit—can be partially attributed to the fear of mass migration. Yet increasing migration is one of the quickest ways to make the world richer.
How to buy college football players, in the words of men who deliver the money. These men are fans who believe they’re leveraging football success $500 or $50,000 at a time.
Global finance is being transformed as billionaires get richer and cut out the middlemen by creating their own “family offices”, personal investment firms that roam global markets looking for opportunities.
In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.
The 2008 crisis and the government’s response made obvious the extent of economic and political inequality in the United States, and the absolute decline in wealth and well-being for a growing fraction of Americans. Evidence of decline is manifest to those of us living in America in the first decades of the 21st century.
The original “final edition” of the Apollo 11 flight plan, restored and reprinted for the 50th Anniversary of the moon landing that took place in 1969.
The decoy effect is defined as the phenomenon whereby consumers change their preference between two options when presented with a third option – the “decoy” – that is “asymmetrically dominated”. It is also referred to as the “attraction effect” or “asymmetric dominance effect”.
One of the most important economic stories of the past couple of decades is the rise of economic inequality in the United States and around the world. Since 1980, economists say, wage growth for the highest-paid workers has been roughly triple that for the lowest paid. In some cities, the disparity is wider.
The past four decades have been perhaps labor’s weakest since the Industrial Age. For a half-century, those working for hourly wages have won almost no real gains. The real average hourly wage in 2018 dollars adjusted for inflation was $22.65 in 2018, compared with $20.27 in 1964 — just an 11.7% gain.
When the Venetian merchant Marco Polo got to China, he saw many wonders. One of the things that astonished him most, however, was a new invention, implemented by Kublai Khan, a grandson of the great conqueror Genghis. It was paper money, introduced by Kublai in 1260.
Economists have fallen in love with the supposed rigor that derives from the assumption that markets function perfectly. But the world has turned out to be more complex and unpredictable than the equations. Human beings are rarely rational—so it’s time we all stopped pretending they are.
Walmart has an incentive to become the place people think about when they think of their financial future. Inside Walmart’s curious, possibly ingenious effort to get customers to build up their savings accounts.
There are two different tales we tell ourselves about houses. The primary story is about bright futures, long lives, children, grandchildren, and hard-earned success. The second story, the darker story, is about the horror of being trapped.
The shopping mall would have been inconceivable without air conditioning, as would the deep-plan and glass-walled office block, as would computer servers. The expansion of tract housing in postwar suburban America relied on affordable domestic air conditioning units.
Financial help from parents comes in many forms, and it’s the basis of so many success stories. So why do millennials act like it doesn’t exist? Harper’s Bazaar examines the myth—and tyranny—of the “self-made” success story.
Airlines were focused on finding the fastest possible boarding method, so planes can spend less time at gates and more time in the air, making money. They might have stuck with that aim if it weren’t for the other change, which has to do with the fight for overhead bin space.
Africa is changing so fast, it is becoming hard to ignore. In the short term, the continent faces many problems, but in the long term, it could rival China’s economic might. By the end of this century, Africa is set to play a much bigger role in world affairs. The Asian growth miracle is likely to slow Africa’s rapid rise could be next.
In America almost 40m people—one eighth of its population—live in poverty. Why does the richest big country in the world still have so many people living in profound need?
Housing affordability is a growing issue in America, and there’s a battle over how to fix it happening on blocks across the country. Zoning—the rules that govern how cities use their land—is on the front line. Cities and states across the country are proposing new upzoning laws to combat the housing crisis. Will they work?
A limit would help to slow the growth of economic inequality and prevent reckless risk-taking by CEOs who otherwise might feel motivated to try to drive up the stock price of their company and therefore their bonus.
The degrowth movement wants to intentionally shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being. This new accounting of economic success would focus on access to public services, a shorter work week, and an increase in leisure time. But is it a utopian fantasy?
Founding father and first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew kicked off the Keep Singapore Clean campaign 50 years ago. The aim wasn’t just to make the city more pleasant. A cleaner city, Lee Kuan Yew reasoned, would create a stronger economy.
The major chains — AMC, Regal Entertainment and Cinemark — no longer rely on teenage ushers to keep the floors from getting sticky. Instead, they have turned to a vast immigrant workforce, often hired through layers of subcontractors. That arrangement makes it almost impossible for janitors to make a living wage.
Sri Lanka has reclaimed two square kilometers of land from the Indian Ocean to double the size of its capital and retain talent, but will the investment pay off?
The High Line and its imitators are examples of “landscape urbanism,” a growing design movement that places green space in collision with old infrastructure. Rehabilitation projects follow a familiar playbook, aestheticizing the labor of the past even as they support a gentrified future.
The number of international tourist arrivals has been increasing more or less exponentially since the mid-20th century, and totaled about 1.4 billion in 2018. Europe has seen the biggest share, but the Asia-Pacific region is growing fast.
“Universal basic income” was for a long time an obscure term bandied about in economics circles. That’s no longer the case. The idea, usually involving a monthly cash grant to every person with no strings attached, has entered mainstream discourse. Small programs hint at how it might work — or not — on a national scale.
To have sitzfleisch means the ability to sit still for the long periods of time required to be truly productive; it means the stamina to work through a difficult situation and see a project through to the end. Angela Merkel has it in abundance – how do you cultivate this crucial skill?
Renewable energy is now comparable with the cost of building new coal and nuclear capacity. Existing, older power plants already have the capital investment sunk, so they are cheaper — but, in the case of South Africa at least, many of these plants are reaching retirement ages.
Operating in cash costs countries about 0.5% of their GDP every year. But cost isn’t the only incentive to move towards a cashless future. Many countries are going cashless at great speed. What are the advantages of ditching hard cash and what are the dangers?
Consultants seek to legitimate both the job cuts and the explosion of elite pay. Rather than simply improving management, to make American corporations lean and fit, they fostered hierarchy, making management, in David Gordon’s memorable phrase, “fat and mean.”
