Economics

What Price Is Right?

Both government regulators and private companies regularly assign a monetary value to human lives. A new book argues that the price is too low, and can entrench inequalities.

June 10, 2021 issue

Robert Kuttner

Dividends of a Just Economy

What is keeping the government from acting on behalf of its citizens?

April 29, 2021 issue

A deteriorating bank-owned house, Moreno Valley, California, August 2008

Francesca Mari

The Housing Vultures

The investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis are dictating the bailout of this one.

June 11, 2020 issue

Ian Frazier

The Plushbottoms of Teton County

Life in the richest and most unequal county in America.

December 17, 2020 issue

David Oshinsky

Health Care: The Best and the Rest

Ezekiel Emanuel’s new book makes a comparative study of eleven of the world’s health care systems. Who are the winners and losers?

October 22, 2020 issue

President Trump after touring the Lima Army Tank Plant, Lima, Ohio, March 20, 2019

Jessica T. Mathews

America’s Indefensible Defense Budget

As a democracy, we are on an unusual and risky path.

July 18, 2019 issue

David Graeber

Against Economics

The discipline is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

December 5, 2019 issue

A student moving out of Howard University during the coronavirus pandemic, Washington, D.C., March 2020

Jonathan Zimmerman

What Is College Worth?

As tuition and student debt continue to skyrocket, it’s worth asking how much longer we can sustain this system.

July 2, 2020 issue

The Latest

Lynn Hunt

From the Local to the Global

Something seemingly small and insignificant—a provincial family, a signed slip of paper—can open up onto much wider worlds.

October 7, 2021 issue

Edward Chancellor

Waiting to Deflate

Two recent books try to explain the seemingly irrational behavior behind speculative bubbles, from the tulip craze of the 1600s to Bitcoin today.

August 19, 2021 issue

Peter C. Baker

Death Drives

Pedestrian fatalities are rising dramatically in the US, and Angie Schmitt’s Right of Way gives a rare look at why and what might be done about it.

July 22, 2021 issue

Anne Diebel

Cubicle Messiah

WeWork was hurtling into the future, with Adam Neumann leading the way. What led to its dramatic collapse?

July 22, 2021 issue

Caitlin Zaloom

The Broken Promise of Retirement

If the US does nothing to fix its retirement system, 2.6 million formerly middle-class workers will be plunged into poverty by 2022.

July 1, 2021 issue

Irina Dumitrescu

Don’t Get Too Comfortable

Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had is a collection of brief essays about how a person navigates the moral dilemmas of ownership and privilege.

May 27, 2021 issue

Cass R. Sunstein

Once Upon a Time There Was a Big Bubble

Robert Shiller argues for the power of stories in shaping economics.

January 14, 2021 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Prophet of Maximum Productivity

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

January 14, 2021 issue

Diane Ravitch

The Dark History of School Choice

How an argument for segregated schools became a rallying cry for privatizing public education.

January 14, 2021 issue

Astra Taylor

David Graeber, 1961–2020

David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, died aged fifty-nine on September 2, 2020. The New York Review, to which he began contributing last year, is collecting tributes from his friends and colleagues.

September 5, 2020