The New Republic

President Obama spoke today about economic inequality and the plight of the middle class more forcefully than he ever has before. He gave the speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, site of Theodore Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech in 1910. Here's what Obama said: READ MORE >>

Everyone wants money. But is the arrival of immigrants looking to bolster their earnings in the United States making things worse for the people already here? Immigration is estimated to decrease natives' wage between:   zero and nine percent   READ MORE >>

Sharron Angle, the Republican trying to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, made herself an easy political target when she told an interviewer that cutting unemployment benefits was the right thing to do: RALSTON: How would you have voted on that bill to extend unemployment benefits? READ MORE >>

Related Links: Steven Levitt's response to Scheiber's argument, and Scheiber's response to Levitt. READ MORE >>

One of the few papers I actually read as a grad student was written by a pair of economists named Josh Angrist and Alan Krueger. In the early '90s, Angrist and Krueger set off to resolve a question that had been gnawing at economists for decades: Does going to school increase your future wages? Intuitively, it seemed obvious that it did. When you compared the salaries of, say, Ph.D.s with those of high-school dropouts, the grad-school set almost always did better. The question was whether education accounted for the difference. READ MORE >>