Columns
New York Times Economic View, February 2021.
Balancing Privacy With Data Sharing for the Public Good
Socially valuable data can be combined with standards that safeguard individual privacy, an economist says.
New York Times Economic View, September 2020.
Community Colleges Can Be Engines of Economic Recovery
With proper funding and innovation, two-year public colleges can handle job training for millions of people.
New York Times Economic View, April 2020.
Online Learning Should Return to a Supporting Role
Winner-take-all economics and cost-cutting may make many in-person lectures obsolete, but the best education continues to be intensive, expensive, and done in person.
New York Times Economic View, January 2020.
The Robots Are Coming. Prepare for Trouble.
Artificial intelligence won’t eliminate every retail job, an economist says, but the future could be grim unless we start planning now.
New York Times Economic View, September 2019.
In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure
For students chasing lasting wealth, the best choice of a college major is less obvious than you might think.
The conventional wisdom is that computer science and engineering majors have better employment prospects and higher earnings than their peers who choose liberal arts.
This is true for the first job, but the long-term story is more complicated.
The advantage for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors fades steadily after their first jobs, and by age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up.
New York Times Economic View, July 2019.
Tuition-Free College Could Cost Less Than You Think
Paying for college seems out of reach for many Americans, so the idea of free college has broad appeal. Several Democratic presidential candidates and members of Congress have endorsed it.
But free college isn’t really free — someone has to pay for it. Eliminating tuition at all public colleges and universities would cost at least $79 billion a year, according to the most recent Department of Education data, and taxpayers would need to foot the bill.
That is a lot of money, but it is a smart and humane investment, and could be more affordable than you think.