The “15-minute city” is getting some attention from urban planners. The idea is that everyone should be able to access the key destinations in their day-to-day life–work, food, schools, recreation–within a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or mass transit ride of their residence. Cars would then be unnecessary for many daily tasks. Most Americans do not live with the experience of a 15-minute city: for example, the average commute to work, typically by car, is about 25 minutes each way. Here, I’ll sidestep the potential environmental or exercise-related benefits, and instead turn to an interview with ..read more

I have been the Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives since the first issue in Summer 1987. The JEP is published by the American Economic Association, which decided back in 2011–to my delight–that the journal would be freely available online, from the current issue all the way back to the first issue. You can download individual articles or entire issues, and it is available in various e-reader formats, too. Here, I’ll start with the Table of Contents for the just-released Spring 2024 issue, which in the Taylor household is known as issue #148. Below that ..read more

Lawsuits are still pending, but the current schedule if for a congestion pricing scheme to begin in Manhattan on June 30. An online issue of Vital City published on May 1 has a group of short and readable explainer articles on aspects of the plan. In the opening essay, Josh Greenman lays out the basics this way: The congestion pricing plan has twin, closely related objectives: to reduce stubbornly high automobile traffic in Manhattan, and to raise at least $1 billion, and ideally more, in capital funding annually to support public transit. MTA officials expect the plan to reduce the ..read more

Why leave a tip? You have already received whatever food or service you are going to receive. Maybe if you are a very regular customer, tipping could lead to better service in the future. But most people who leave tips do so even if they are stopping off at, say, a restaurant in a city they are never going to visit again, or getting a ride from a driver they will never meet again. Tim Sablik discusses the evolution of the tipping norm in “Tipping: From Scourge of Democracy to American Ritual,” subtitled “Over the course of the 20th century, tipping went from rare and reviled to an almost uniqu ..read more

It would be nice if the processes of economic growth were well-mannered: for example, if it benefited all workers and industries and groups equally–or perhaps with some additional benefit for those with lower incomes. But of course, growth isn’t a neat process. As technology and tastes evolve over time, some firms do better, some industries to better, some places do better. Even when growth is a net plus for the economy over time, some firms and industries and places end up worse off. As it turns out, an ability to tolerate these disruptions of growth may be one of the secret weapons for the U ..read more

The United States has had an industrial policy aimed at boosting its domestic shipbuilding industry since the passage of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, commonly known as the Jones Act. Whatever the arguments for the passage of the bill a century ago, it has over time been a disaster for the US maritime industry, and continues to impose significant costs on other parts of the US economy. Colin Grabow goes through the arguments in “Protectionism on Steroids: The Scandal of the Jones Act” (Milken Institute Review, Second Quarter 2024, pp. 44-53). The Jones Act “requires that vessels engaged in ..read more

Extremely high levels of wealth are were not typically generated by people who were saving out of the income that they earned. Instead, high levels of wealth are typically about assets that rose considerably in value–sometimes land or real estate, often stock in a company. Billionaires like Elon Musk or Kim Kardashian don’t have a basement full of dollar bills, like Scrooge McDuck. Instead the bulk of their wealth is held in shares in corporations, where those shares have risen in value over time. Thus, if you want to impose taxes that will affect the wealth distribution, raising the top-level ..read more

The IMF publishes a Fiscal Monitor report twice a year about levels of spending and taxes around the world. The April 2024 report, subtitles “Fiscal Policy in the Great Election Year,” contains some warnings about the size of US budget deficits. For context, here a table with fiscal balances for high-income countries, with actual data for 2019-23, and projected data from 2024-29. You can see that before the pandemic in 2019, the US already had a higher-than-average budget deficit. When the pandemic hit, deficits go up everywhere, but among high-income countries are largest in the US. The US de ..read more

The Dunning-Kruger effect can be paraphrased in this way: “On any particular topic, people who are not experts lack the very expertise they need in order to know just how much expertise they lack.” Corey S. Powell interviews David Dunning on how the underlying idea has been developed since the original paper published in 2000 (“David Dunning: Overcoming Overconfidence,” Open Mind, April 5, 2024). For those who have only seen “Dunning-Krueger effect” deployed as an insult, it’s perhaps useful to briefly review the original paper from 25 years ago: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties ..read more

David A. Price interviews Ulrike Malmendier, “On law versus economics, the long-term effects of inflation, and the remembrance of crises past” (Econ Focus: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, First/Second Quarter 2024, pp. 22-26). One theme of the interview is Malmendier’s recent work which emphasizes that living through a salient event can leave a lasting mark. I mentioned how my early life path was influenced by my dad experiencing World War II and how everything can get destroyed — the house gets destroyed, you lose all your possessions and savings, and maybe your country’s currency isn’t wo ..read more