Supply-Side Innovations and the Opioid Cycle

At first, users paid real money for the upkeep of virtual chickens, sheep, bees, and cattle, earning cash back in the game by keeping the animals alive. Riding high on the good publicity, Farm Bank soon went one step further, launching real-life farms...

I decided to ask my six-year-old son what he thought money was. “Gold,” came the confident answer. It turns out that he was thinking of pound coins...

In the bigger picture, the economic history of Britain since the mid 19th century is, inevitably, a history of relative economic decline...

To the vast majority of bitcoin investors, success means its price continues to rise. But if that is all there is to it, someday a little boy will yell, "the Emperor has no clothes", and the price will come crashing down...

The currency was literally shrinking, and Newton’s first task was to sort the situation out. Making his life still more complicated, international values were based on silver, but the value of gold was soaring...

Winning or losing the trading race can be a matter of nanoseconds...

They cover the first bubble in 1720, the Latin American mining stocks bubble in the 1820s, the UK railway stocks bubble of the 1840s, the Australian land bubble of 1886-93...

History confirms the intuition that ‘ending poverty’ has little political traction as a near-term goal when mass chronic poverty is seen to be the norm and poor citizens have little political influence...

In the United Kingdom, in the shadow of a bleak Brexit, brilliant figures have emerged. One of them is Grace Blakeley, a very young commentator on economic issues...

“I wanted to go to college to avoid being a third-generation janitor.” The man on stage at this California town hall tells a familiar story. He’s now a beloved high school principal, but to finance his education, he took out a loan—$80,000.

I was back in Oakland for my new job. After nearly a month of looking for a place to live, I got a text from Jenny: “Would you consider a shack?”

It was under extreme pressure from both press and regulators that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg finally turned over 3,000 Russia-linked adverts to Congress. Google and others were only marginally less evasive.

"Britain has no leverage, Britain is desperate … it needs an agreement very soon. When you have a desperate partner, that’s when you strike the hardest bargain.” So warned former US treasury secretary Larry Summers...

People keep complaining about “income inequality” and writing books about how grindingly difficult it is for an alarmingly large number of Americans to get by...

A rentier economy (Christophers uses the term unapologetically) is driven by profits, which have increased in real terms as the poor have been denied social housing...

‘Performativity’ has, for example, been employed by the French economic sociologist Michel Callon as a way of denoting the capacity of a mathematical model or other aspect of ‘economics’ to be more than a representation of some external reality.

John Maynard Keynes once remarked that ‘practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’

Since the end of 2015, Portugal has been the scene of an unusual political drama. After failing to win a majority in parliament, the country’s long-established centre-left machine rejected the offer of a ‘grand coalition’ with its conservative rival to implement the demands of Brussels and Frankfurt.

The progress of science is generally linear. As new research confirms or replaces existing theories, one generation builds upon the next. Economics, however...