Conversable Economist

There’s a common script about about artists who live hard and die young. It says that the combination of a self-destructive lifestyle and art means that they were in some way fully alive, in a way that would be impossible, say, for some happily married husband and father, living in the suburbs and working as an editor. Indeed, the script reaches beyond the young and the dead to those who become obsessive about the pursuit of something. In this case, it says that the purity and single-minde

The great historian David McCullough (1933-2022) won the Pulitzer prize for biography twice, for his books on Truman and John Adams, but he also wrote best-selling books on the Panama Canal, the Johnstown Flood, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wright brothers, and others. Here are his comments in a 2002 interview with Bruce Cole on the importance of writing as an act of thinking and learning (Humanities, “The Danger of Historical Amnesia,” July/August 2002, 23:4, my emphasis): &nbsp

Is new technology that replaces a worker a good thing? We have a tendency, it seems to me, to believe that most previous inventions turned out to have overall net social benefits, but to be worried that all future inventions will instead have overall net social costs. Philipp Ager and Davide Coluccia tackle the question of how the arrival of the sewing machine affected women in the second half of the 19th century in “Liberation Technology? The Impact of the Sewing Machine on Women” (

For teachers of economics, one familiar metaphor about tariffs is “rocks in the harbor.” Companies and countries go to considerable trouble and expense to build docks and interconnected transportation structure, and even dredge the harbor to assure smooth transit for vessels. Having done all that, it would seem peculiarly illogical to then dump rocks into the harbor, raising the costs of trade and offsetting the previous investments. The metaphor seems to have originated with Will

My tradition on this blog is to take a break (mostly!) from current events sometime in mid- August. Instead, I pre-schedule daily posts based on things I read during the previous year about three of my preoccupations: economics, editing/writing, and academia. With the posts pre-scheduled, I can then relax more deeply when floating on my back in a Minnesota lake, staring up at the sky. __________________ Economists often use the term “happiness” synonymously with the term &#8220

It is of course impossible to predict the effects of new AI technologies on total economic growth in a precise way, but there are strong reasons to believe that the effect will be modest for a decade or two, anyway. Charles Jones Jones explores some of the reasons in “AI and Our Economic Future,” in the most recent Journal of Economic Perspectives (Summer 2026). His arguments readily accept that AI capabilities both have grown very rapidly and will continue to grow very rapidly: inde

The US unemployment rate was 4.2% in June, which is low by historical levels. Nonetheless, lot of workers, and perhaps expecially young workers right out of college, are experiencing the US economy as a situation where it’s hard to get a job. For example, in the “The Job Market for Recent College Graduates,” I reviewed evidence that relative to other education groups, the unemployment rate for recent graduates is higher than usual, while in certain jobs, the job growth for tho

I have been the Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives since the first issue in Summer 1987. The JEP is published by the American Economic Association, which decided back in 2011–to my delight–that the journal would be freely available online, from the current issue all the way back to the first issue. You can download individual articles or entire issues, and it is available in various e-reader formats, too. Here, I’ll start with the Table of Contents for the just-released Summ

Back in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, the European Union passed the European Green Deal, setting a goal of having the EU be climate-neutral in its emissions by 2050. Here in 2026, 20% of that 30-year time window has now passed. The government of the EU have a reputation for strong action toward these types of goals. How is it going? Magnus Henrekson,  Christian Sandström  and Mikael Stenkula have edited a collection of 16 essays that provide a cautionary progress report in A Green Entrepreneur

Lots of students come to college looking for what I sometimes call a “golden ticket” major–that is, choosing a major that will assure future prosperity and status. Lots of first-year students show up declaring that their career path is to become a doctor, but a certain percentage of them make other plans after getting their butt kicked in their first real college-level intro chemistry or intro biology course. The huge increase in computer science majors in the last decade or so

The potential benefit of having the government require that certain jobs require an official license is quality control and protection. Personally, I rather like knowing that my nurse or doctor or dentist has gone through courses and training. The potential cost is that requirement to have a government license can become a way for those who have a job to limit the number of people who can do that job, and thus to push up their own wages, rather than offering benefits to consumers. What economist

When I talk with college students, and even high school students, a number of them have a profound sense that it is tremendously hard to find a job coming out of college. The level fear seems to me exaggerated, but some underlying shifts in the young-adult labor market seem quite real. Here’s a figure from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showing unemployment rates for recent college graduates and other comparison groups. The light blue line shows the unemployment rate for recent c

For those who can be fuzzy on global geography, like me, it’s perhaps useful to say that the Persian Gulf is a body of water bordered by eight countries: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman. These countries include some of the world’s most prominent oil exporters, who have shipping ports for their oil on the Persian Gulf. However, oil tankers leaving the Persian Gulf (and headed for the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and destinat

Tim Sablik acts as interlocutor in “Interview with Christiane Baumeister,” subtitled “On measuring the effects of oil shocks, changes in global energy markets, and forecasting tail risks” (Econ Focus: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Third Quarter 2026). Here are some of the comments that caught my eye: On her career choice: My father was a high school economics teacher, and I loved to spend time in his office browsing through his books. … When I had to pi

“Progress” is a word that often generates both a lot of positive vibes, and also a lot of pushback? Progress toward what? At what cost? So it’s perhaps useful to specify that when I refer to “progress,” I’m referring to an overall movement toward good things of life: in no particular order, longer and healthier lives; a rising standard of living, especially for the poor; more education for more people; environmental protection; leisure time; personal safety, r

How much does federally funded R&D benefit the economy? Sheila Campbell, Jaeger Nelson, Eli Schrag, Heidi Williams, and Caleb Wroblewski work through some ways of answering that question in “Estimating the Economic Effects of Federally Funded R&D” (Congressional Budget Office, Working Paper 2026-08, July 2026). (Full disclosure: Among her other roles, Williams is editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and thus my boss.) The authors use two alternative approaches

Tyler Cowen serves as interlocutor in “Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth” (Conversations with Tyler, July 8, 2026). Mokyr (Nobel, ’25) has a genius for looking at broad trends, and then sorting out kinds of explanations are most plausible. Here are a few points that caught my eye. Mokyr has a new book out called Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000, written with Avner Greif, and Guido Tabellini. Thus, som

A primary task of the Federal Reserve, separate from using monetary policy to set interest rates, is that it carries out bank “supervision”–which refers to taking a close look at a bank’s finances and record-keeping to be sure that the bank isn’t taking on too much risk. Often, this process is resolved by not giving the bank a top-level ranking in certain categories, but still saying that the bank financials are overall satisfactory. But when the situation at a give

There’s a lot of talk about “digital currency,” but as far as I can tell, my bank account and retirement account, along with my credit cards and mortgage payments, have already been maintained in digital form for many years now. I benefit from greater speed, less paperwork, and probably greater accuracy, too. The genuinely new idea at present is “tokenization.” Tobias Adrian dispassionately lays out the potential risks and benefits in “Tokenized Finance”

The most recent Federal Reserve Payment Study has published data for 2024 on “core noncash payment methods used in the United States by consumers, businesses, and governments, including payments by general-purpose and private-label cards, automated clearinghouse (ACH) transfers, and checks. This release also covers ATM cash withdrawals.”  One way to summarize the results is to look at the value transferred by different method; another is look at the number of noncash payments. You