Economics

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

Terri Childs and her daughter Miracle in front of their apartment in the McBride housing project, shortly before it was closed and then demolished, Cairo, Illinois, 2018

Jason DeParle

How to Fix Child Poverty

The National Academies estimate that child poverty costs the country $800 billion to $1.1 trillion a year—including lower adult earnings, worse health, and higher crime.

July 23, 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

Robert Kuttner

The Crash That Failed

Adam Tooze’s ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’

November 22, 2018 issue

Day laborers waiting in a parking lot during the week the US unemployment rate hit nearly 20 percent, Arlington, Virginia, May 6, 2020

David Blanchflower

The Pandemic Jobless Youthquake

Even for those with college education, the graduating class of 2020 from universities is going to have a tough time. But minority youngsters with less education are going to be especially hard-hit.

May 8, 2020

Notes of held by White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx during the Task Force’s daily briefing on the morning the government reported an unprecedented 6.6 million jobless claims due to the pandemic, Washington, D.C., April 2, 2020

Joseph E. Stiglitz

A Lasting Remedy for the Economic Crisis

For the past forty years, we’ve been underfunding government—including spending that prepares us for crises and disasters—and that’s made our economy and our society less resilient.

April 8, 2020

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

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

Astra Taylor

Remembering David Graeber

“He always said anarchism isn’t an identity, it’s a way of being, something you do—and he was true to that formulation.”

September 5, 2020

A migrant domestic worker from the Philippines, Hong Kong, 2015

Robert Kuttner

Can We Fix Capitalism?

September 24, 2020 issue

Willa Glickman

A Shuttered Garage, a Devastated Trade

The taxi industry has been brutally crunched on two sides—from skyrocketing operating costs, on the one hand, and a sharp decline in business, on the other.

June 29, 2020

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

An abandoned Standard Oil gas station, Tonalea, Arizona, 2008

Bill McKibben

Big Oil Runs Out of Gas

People used to worry that the fossil-fuel industry would hit “peak oil” and we’d run out of crude. It now seems far more likely that it’s going to run out of money instead.

May 12, 2020

Maeve Higgins

Essential Yet Disposable

People who have a tax ID number—so that they can work without formal authorization by paying taxes—are the only taxpayers excluded from the stimulus package, left to fend for themselves as the coronavirus engulfs their communities.

April 27, 2020

The first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society with founding members Friedrich Hayek (left, at desk) and Ludwig von Mises (front row, second from right), Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland, 1947

Edward Chancellor

The Long Shadow of the Austrian School

May 14, 2020 issue

A man reading the paper outside a deli on Tenth Avenue, Hells Kitchen, New York City, March 24, 2020

Willa Glickman

Time to Deliver Justice to Delivery Workers

The pandemic is disrupting old established modes of business and exposing frailties in our political and economic order that suddenly look untenable. Maybe now, said Mel Gonzalez of the Delivery Justice Coalition, “We can do things that seemed impossible before.”

April 2, 2020

Traders working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange just before trading went electronic, New York City, March 20, 2020

David Blanchflower

Pandemic Economics: ‘Much Worse, Very Quickly’

This $2 trillion rescue package may prove to be only the opening bid in the long-term efforts that will be required to save the US economy from a depression.

March 26, 2020