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Aug. 1, 2013
President Obama has offered Republicans a deal on cutting taxes to spur more business, an idea popularized by the economist behind “Reaganomics” and the famous Laffer Curve. Laffer explain his theory and disputes recent “evidence” against it.
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July 31, 2013
Black male teen drop-outs experience a joblessness rate of 95 percent. But they're not the only ones struggling with insurmountable unemployment. What if there were a way to employ these people and simultaneously improve American infrastructure and slash the anti-poverty budget?
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July 29, 2013
The geography of the job market has changed in the past decade. Jobs typically held by teens are now being filled by older workers. In Boston, some organizations are trying to mobilize America's unemployed youth and bring them into the professional labor market. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
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July 26, 2013
Have inventors already developed the innovations that revolutionized homes in the developed world? Is there anything left to invent? There's plenty, argues Joel Mokyr; we just may not know what it is yet.
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July 25, 2013
Foreign workers in this country take up too many American jobs and keep domestic wages for high-tech low? Vivek Wadhwa doesn't think so. Responding to Wednesday's post, Wadhwa sees this competition as a necessary and healthy way to keep America innovative.
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July 16, 2013
After Goldman Sachs announced Tuesday their second quarter profits doubled from the same period last year, we take a closer look at how that happened, revisiting our two-part Making Sen$e report on how Goldman uses insider knowledge and taxpayer money to trade.
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July 11, 2013
Video games give players super powers and transport them to new worlds. How might this technology be used to transform society and your financial prospects? Economics correspondent Paul Solman visits researchers who use virtual reality to study its effects on human behavior in the real world.
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July 10, 2013
Thomson Reuters this week suspended the sale of especially early access to a key consumer confidence index, which drives high-frequency trading. We revisit a 2012 Paul Solman interview to discover what's so high about high-frequency trading.
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July 9, 2013
In the classical performing arts, more and more artists -- ever more highly skilled -- compete for fewer and fewer jobs, ever more poorly paid. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on how artists are learning to fine-tune their entrepreneurial skills in order to help them design their own careers in an unsure economy.
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July 9, 2013
The pressure is on. Today’s musicians are told to become entrepreneurs -- or else. But it’s not a new imperative, as the story of Gioachino Rossini’s career as an investor makes clear.
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July 5, 2013
The jobs report for June 2013 found that among teens alone, the jobless rate was almost 25 percent -- more than three times the rate for the nation as a whole. Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks to young people struggling in their search for work in his report on the bleak job picture for inner city youth.
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July 3, 2013
A major conference on the future of work begs the question: Will there be jobs? Journalist Frank Koller reports.
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July 1, 2013
In our own memorial to Gary David Goldberg, the creator of "Family Ties" who passed away in late June, we reprise Paul Solman's 1988 business story about his beloved old friend.
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June 27, 2013
A new report shows 45 percent of young adults who recently got a college degree are underemployed, and the next generation of classical performers are no exception. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on how artists are adapting to hard economic times and an incredibly competitive job market.
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June 27, 2013
Ever wonder how conductors know what to do with their hands? Paul Solman gets a lesson in conducting classical music from Diane Wittry, conductor of the Allentown Symphony.
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June 21, 2013
It's been said that money is the root of all evil. Does money make people more likely to lie, cheat and steal? Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on new research from the University of California, Berkeley about how wealth and inequality affects us psychologically.
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June 21, 2013
People who feel less well-off tend to act more charitably. But the feeling of being well-off, or not, can be manipulated, giving Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner hope that we can all be more generous and lead longer, happier lives.
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June 20, 2013
Usually, as a country's GDP goes up, that nation's well-being tends to rise as well. But for the last 35 years, as GDP has grown in the United States, Americans' average happiness hasn't increased. Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks to researchers about how they study the connection between money and happiness.
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June 20, 2013
Does being wealthy make us happier? Up to a point. Paul Solman visits the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, to explore the relationship between money and behavior, and gets some insight into his own state of mind.
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June 18, 2013
Virtual reality stretches who you are, explains its widely-regarded father, Jaron Lanier, who according to "suburban legend," can sometimes only experience it in limited form.
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June 17, 2013
What is the real price of the benefits we reap from interacting with free or convenient online networks? How can we make that system more transparent? Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks to Jaron Lanier, whose new book, "Who Owns the Future?", argues that digital networks are destroying jobs and exacerbating inequality.
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June 12, 2013
More people are working well past traditional retirement age. Is retirement as we know it a thing of the past? How long are we likely to work?
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June 12, 2013
Americans who work past traditional retirement age are extending their productive lives. They're also paying taxes longer, which may have big implications for the country's finances. As part of his Making Sen$e series, economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
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June 12, 2013
Encore Careers' Marc Freedman sums up the benefits of older workers staying on the job to support the really old and really young: "we could turn the dependency ratio into an abundancy ratio."
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June 11, 2013
What if government paid for the information it collected on its citizens? Jaron Lanier, widely regarded as the father of virtual reality and the author of "Who Owns the Future?", suggests that would be one step toward balancing the exploitative nature of the free technology that's making society more unequal.
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June 7, 2013
Controversial economist Robert Lerman has been around the world to see his favorite youth unemployment fix in action and believes in it more strongly than ever.
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June 6, 2013
Should we have let foundering financial firms fail in 2008? Economics correspondent Paul Solman sits down with economist Paul Krugman to discuss the provocative bestseller "The Great Deformation" by David Stockman and the government's role in mediating economic meltdowns.
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June 6, 2013
In the last round of our Stockman-Krugman debates, the New York Times columnist and Nobel economist explains why he thinks the author of "The Great Deformation" is an anachronism and has it wrong on 19th century America.
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June 6, 2013
David Stockman harbors fond remembrances of things past -- a 19th-century American economy that, he says, worked far better than today's, with one notable exception.
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June 5, 2013
Nobel economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman offers what he would do to fix our economic system.