When it comes to peering ahead into the autonomous vehicle future, some crystal balls are better than others. I recommend the recent report written for a group called SAFE by Charles Carson, Erica Groshen, Susan Helper, John Paul MacDuffie, W. David Montgomery, and Richard Mudge, America’s Workforce and the Self-Driving Future Realizing Productivity Gains and Spurring Economic Growth (June 2018).
When the G-7 gatherings originated in the 1970s, they included only finance ministers who typically met with little notice or publicity. They were working meetings. But in the 1980s, they became public events with top government leaders present. As the Council of Foreign Relations has noted, it "The G-7 serves as a forum for highly industrialized democracies to coordinate economic, security, and energy policy."
Bangladesh has over 160 million people, which makes it the eighth most populous country in the world (just behind Pakistan and Nigeria, just ahead of Russia, Mexico, and Japan). I can't claim that I've been paying close attention to its economy, but I was nonetheless started to see that Bangladesh has shifted (in the World Bank's classification) from being a "low-income" to a "middle-income" country.
When market forces of supply and demand become involved with parts of the human body, the result can be a high degree of ambivalence. In the US, for example, a system has evolved where the health care system primarily relies on volunteers for blood, but on paying those who donate blood plasma. Not coincidentally the system of paid US now supplies nearly two-thirds of all the blood plasma available in the world.
Intergenerational economic mobility has two aspects. "Absolute" mobility refers to the difference between one generation and the next. In an economy that grows substantially over time, absolute intergenerational mobility can be widespread--that is, most adults currently in the workforce would have higher income than did their parents at the same age. In contrast, "relative" mobility refers to whether the ranking of current adults--say, whether they are in the top 10% or the bottom 10%--is correlated with the ranking of their parents.
Macroconomists were notorious for their disagreements before 2007. Such wrangling only increased with the carnage of the Great Financial Crisis and its aftermath. The Oxford Review of Economic Policy has now devoted a special double issue (Spring-Summer 2018) to a symposium on the topic of "Rebuilding macroeconomic theory." Lots of big names (to economists!) are featured, and at least for now, all the papers are freely available and ungated.
QALY is an abbreviation for "quality-adjusted life-year." It refers to gains in health, which combine a time dimension and an adjustment for quality of life. Peter J. Neumann and Joshua T. Cohen offer a quick overview in "QALYs in 2018—Advantages and Concerns," a "Viewpoint" article written for the Journal of the American Medical Association (May 24, 2018). Thus, even if you strongly dislike the idea of a QALY, you might want to be aware that your doctors and health care administrators are paying attention to them.