The pernicious health effects of covid-19 are concentrated among older people, but it is the young and especially low-income Americans who suffer the greatest harm from the country’s disease-mitigating shutdown policies. The bleak jobs data released last week, showing that more than 20 million Americans were thrown out of work in April, was just the most recent in a series of reports highlighting the enormous nationwide pain.
Strategies for Monetary Policy is a new book from the Hoover Press based on the conference by that name John Taylor and I ran last May. (John Taylor gets most of the credit.) This year's conference is sadly postponed due to Covid-19. We'll have lots to talk about May 2021.
To understand the California divide over how to cope with the COVID-19 threat—many a resident happy to hunker down for the duration, with others willing to defy law enforcement in order to return to a life more ordinary—it helps to know the saga of Melvin Carter.
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has corrupted the World Health Organization (WHO), under the leadership of Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The WHO pursued politics over public health by helping Beijing spread disinformation about the outbreak and excluding Taiwan and its wealth of knowledge about the disease.
Let us start with a confession: As card-carrying members of the school-choice and testing-and-accountability wings of the education reform movement, we have at times been dismissive, even hostile, to local school board members. That’s because these elected officials, constrained as they may be by laws, regulations, and the leanings of those they employ, have often seemed willing to protect the status quo and resist changes intended to overhaul the jalopy we call American public schooling.
Many urgent challenges await the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and its governing board (NAGB) in the coming months, including whether the scheduled biennial testing of reading and math in grades four and eight is feasible during the 2020–21 school year. Present law requires that this happen, but what if schools aren’t open or if health precautions mean the assessors must don PPE to enter classrooms where spotty attendance also distorts the student sample?
At irregular and rare moments in history, something happens that fundamentally changes the economic, political, or societal order. These historical “ordering moments” are related to black swan events, seemingly unpredictable occurrences with extreme consequences. But all black swans are not created equal.
I have long felt that we are being conditioned, by politicians and others who benefit by having ordinary people afraid of each other and at each others’ throats, and by an entertainment culture that continually pumps out apocalyptic narratives in which the worst of our human nature rises to the top.
After eight years in office, then-Gov. John Hickenlooper left Colorado in a financial lurch when his second term ended in January 2019. The Legislature was awash in cash. The state’s finances seemed stable, but that was an illusion.
Stanford Law School (SLS) professors Pamela Karlan and Michael McConnell will be part of Facebook’s new Oversight Board, the company announced last week. The Oversight Board will have final say over complicated content moderation decisions — including on hate speech and misinformation — affecting Facebook’s 2.6 billion monthly users and Instagram’s more than 1 billion monthly active users, Facebook says.
Former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Vernon Law dispatched wisdom along with his legendary fastball, once saying; “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, and the lesson afterwards.” So true. Experience has taught us that school systems are slow to change, but the post-coronavirus economy will demand it.
In early February, China's ruling Communist Party was facing one of its biggest political crises in more than three decades. A rapidly spreading outbreak of the new coronavirus was a "massive risk and challenge" to social stability, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned top party officials in an internal speech that was later published publicly.
President Trump and governors’ coronavirus policy has remained captive to a singular, and quite possibly scientifically flawed, understanding of the epidemic.
The government's plan for saving small and medium-sized businesses from liquidation puts them in a bind that brings to mind the one Yossarian had to contend with. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: Chapter 11 bankruptcy may be many firms' best hope for surviving the present crisis. But to take advantage of it, they need credit—the cheaper the better.
Many Americans have been wondering if there will be a second coronavirus stimulus check, although millions have yet to receive their first one. Now it sounds like lawmakers are considering an alternative approach. They could allow struggling Americans to borrow from their future Social Security benefits to take a second coronavirus stimulus check soon.
