The Council on Foreign Relations has published The Work Ahead Machines, Skills, and U.S. Leadership in the Twenty-First Century, which is an Independent Task Force Report chaired by John Engler and Penny Pritzker, Some of the discussion goes over familiar ground: innovation is needed, technology is changing work, economic growth is important, we should redesign unemployment assistance and sick leave for the modern work force, we should do more to assist displaced workers, and so on. But I want to focus on one chapter of the report, "Education, Training, and the Labor Market," and its discussion of that how the interaction between education and job training has been shifting.
The marshmallow test is one of those legends of social science that a lot of non-social-scientists have heard about. Relatively young children are offered a choice: they can either eat a marshmallow (or some other attractive treat) right now, or they can wait for some period of time (maybe 15-20 minutes) and then have two marshmallows. If you follow up on these children some years later, the legend goes, you find that those who were able to defer gratification early in life will have more success later in life. A satisfyingly moralistic policy recommendation follows: If we could teach young children to defer gratification, that skill might help them as they advance in life.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump agree on one thing: Managers of private equity funds should pay ordinary tax rates on their carried interest, not the lower rates that apply to long-term capital gains and dividends. They differ, of course, on what those rates should be. But if we made that change today, managers would pay taxes at effective federal rates of up to 44 percent, rather than the up-to-25 percent rates that apply currently.
Sweden seems headed toward a cash-free economy. Here are some comments from Stefan Ingves, Governor of Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, in a short essay called "Going Cashless:
I told my teenage son that the economics of Wakanda, the home country of the "Black Panther" in the recent movie, raised some interesting questions. He looked at me for a long moment and then explained very slowly: "Dad, it's not a documentary." Duly noted. No superhero movie is a documentary, and pretty much by definition, even asking for plausibility from a superhero movie is asking too much. But undaunted, I continue to assert that the economy of Wakanda raises some interesting questions. For some overviews, see:
Mexico won’t willingly write the check for Donald Trump’s wall. So the president is hunting for a way to make Mexico pay. That search isn’t going well.
Japan is aging fast. Here are some trends on total population and age distribution, according to projections from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Japan.