America's political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas - beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity.

So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment.

You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.

Simple doesn't mean stupid. Thinking that it does, does.

The trouble with poverty, as an issue, is that it has basically exhausted the patience of the general public.

If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.