This poor city is surrounded by the temples of the new American economy that has, in nearly every way imaginable, passed it by. Just outside the northern city limit, Facebook is expanding the blocks-long headquarters it built seven years ago. Google’s offices sit just outside the southern edge, and just a few miles to the […]
San Francisco already has built or conserved over 20,000 units of affordable housing of various types, which is about 5% of all units in the city. Also, about 40% of housing units citywide are rent controlled, making them more affordable than market rate units. With its high land acquisition costs, expensive labor and complex regulation, […]
Tuesday’s election highlighted that more voters like Donald Trump’s policies than like him. Consider this week’s voter embrace of Mr. Trump’s pro-growth energy positions, via nationwide rejection of initiatives to raise energy costs. Most notable was Washington State’s defeat of a carbon tax for the second time in two years. Climate activists designed the 2016 […]
With all precincts reporting but not all ballots counted, voters passed school construction bond measures in 89 of 112 K-12 and community college districts. And they passed parcel taxes in eight of the 13 school districts that had placed them on the ballot to create new sources of revenue or to extend existing parcel taxes. […]
About 130,000 more residents left California for other states last year than came here from them, as high costs left many residents without a college degree looking for an exit, according to a Bee review of the latest census estimates. They most often went to cheaper, nearby states – and Texas. Since 2001, about 410,000 […]
Where in the country you drive an electric vehicle matters a lot for the environment, a point made repeatedly — both by economists (here and here) and by engineers (here and here). You know what else matters a lot? How much you drive. This gets very little attention, but has major implications for the environmental […]
Unfilled jobs in the U.S. exceeded the number of unemployed Americans by more than one million as the summer came to a close, a sign it is increasingly difficult for employers to find workers. There were a seasonally adjusted 7.01 million job openings on the last business day of September, the Labor Department said Tuesday. […]
The homeownership rate in California equaled the national rate from 1950 well into the 1960s. Yet, by 2005, California’s homeownership rate was 13.3 percent below the national average and the 49th lowest in the nation. In the second quarter of 2018, the homeownership rate in California was 54.3 percent, the third lowest in the nation, […]
A new study of Seattle’s minimum wage is being presented in some corners as a progressive vindication. But the details are pretty much what any Econ 101 student would predict: bad news for young, unskilled workers trying to gain a foothold in the economy. In 2015-16, Seattle phased in a wage floor of $13 an […]
Piketty (2017) argues in favor of a multidimensional and relational approach to the analysis of wealth inequality. Speci cally, he suggests that social classes should be ana- lyzed in terms of the power and production relations between social groups, not just the percentiles in statistical distributions into which various groups fall. We propose such a […]
In the United States more than almost anywhere else, wealth and income are concentrated among business owners and landlords. And that club, blessed by capitalism, is becoming increasingly difficult to join. Business owners and landlords tend to be about four times as wealthy as the average American. That’s more than almost any other country included […]
But there is a villain in this story — and his name is Uncle. He committed two heinous crimes, for which he deserves to be frog-marched to the dock, tried, convicted and (cue Judge Alvin Valkenheiser from Nothing But Trouble) sent for a ride on Mr. Bone Stripper. The first of his offenses is the […]
The slow unraveling of the case against Chevron has been eye-opening, not least for the glimpse it offers into the way money moves through the progressive activist world.
THE GULF between principle and practice is often fatal for policies—and for political careers. Britain’s government faces a backlash over universal credit, a reform combining six welfare programmes into one. This was widely seen as a good idea about a decade ago. But a series of administrative failures, a senseless decision to make payments well […]
If you were to ask most Americans which is the poorest state in the nation, they might say Alabama or Mississippi, with their low average incomes and concentrations of African-American poverty. In fact, the state with the largest share of people in poverty is California. As the most populous state, it also has by far […]