America’s oil and gas boom has been one of the biggest economic stories of the past decade. The doubling of daily US oil output and the 50 percent increase in natural gas production have transformed energy markets and are altering the geostrategic landscape. Russia, for example, is desperately lashing out, while Saudi Arabia is showing signs of an ambitious political, …
The $12-million iPhone
Several years ago, I had a bit of fun estimating how much an iPhone would have cost to make in the 1990s. The impetus was a story making the rounds on the web. A journalist had found a full-page newspaper ad from RadioShack dating back to 1991. He was rightly amazed that all 13 of the advertised electronic gadgets — computer, camcorder, …
Robots Will Save the Economy
See our commentary, with Michael Mandel, in The Wall Street Journal – Robots Will Save the Economy.
What’s behind the startling decline in publicly traded U.S. firms?
An underreported story of the last two decades is the sharp decline in the number of publicly traded U.S. firms. In 1996, U.S. stock markets boasted 7,322 listed firms. By 2015, however, that number had dropped by more than half, to 3,200. If we adjust for population, the U.S. had 2.2 public firms per hundred thousand people in 1975, but …
Are the pessimists right about America’s slow-growth future?
In his big new book on the history and future of innovation, Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon argues that information technology is a spent force. Computers and networks just aren’t as powerful as previous inventions, he argues, and the U.S. should expect another 25 years of relative stagnation. He thinks productivity growth up to 2040 will be just half our …
