Capitalism
The dominant economic system of the modern world — its history, its performance, and the debates it generates that are too often conducted without facts.
Economics
The theories, trade-offs, and real-world consequences behind the economic systems and policies that govern wealth, labor, and markets.
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Crude Oil
Crude oil is not a single commodity — it is a spectrum of hydrocarbons with wildly different properties, prices, and geopolitical implications, and the journey from underground reservoir to gasoline pump is stranger and more complex than most people realize.
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Food Insecurity
In the wealthiest country in history, one in seven households can't reliably afford enough food — and the number has climbed for three straight years, even as the government just stopped measuring it.
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Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
GDP is the most cited number in economics — and one of the most misread, because it measures activity, not wellbeing, and growth, not distribution.
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Inflation
Inflation isn't just rising prices — it's what happens when money loses purchasing power, and the causes, cures, and costs are far more contested than most economic commentary suggests.
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Interest Rates
Interest rates are the price of borrowing money — and when central banks adjust them, they are pulling the most powerful lever in macroeconomic policy, with effects that ripple across every corner of the economy.
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Labor Unions
Union membership in the U.S. fell from 35% of workers in the 1950s to 10% today — and the timing of that decline tracks almost perfectly with the stagnation of middle-class wages.
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Oil Prices
Oil prices are set by a global market shaped by supply decisions made in Riyadh and Moscow, demand trends in Beijing and Houston, wars and sanctions, and financial speculators — understanding them means understanding why economic shocks so often begin at the pump.
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Oil Production
Who pumps the world's oil, how much they pump, and why they pump it — the politics and economics of oil production explain more about geopolitics, recessions, and military conflicts than almost any other single variable.
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Private Equity
The industry that buys companies with borrowed money, extracts fees, and calls it value creation — and why the evidence on whether it actually creates value is surprisingly mixed.
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Supply-Side Economics
The theory that cutting taxes on the wealthy grows the economy for everyone — and forty-five years of evidence on whether it does.
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Tariffs
Taxes on imports are always paid by someone — the question economists actually argue about is who, and the answer is almost never the foreign country.
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The Consumer Price Index (CPI)
The CPI is the government's official measure of inflation — and understanding what it actually measures, and what it doesn't, changes how you read nearly every economic headline.
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The Federal Reserve
The most powerful economic institution in the world operates largely outside democratic accountability — by design, and for reasons that are more defensible than they appear.
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The Housing Crisis
America's housing shortage is not a mystery — it is the predictable result of zoning laws designed to preserve exclusion, and the political economy of homeowners who benefit from scarcity.
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The Minimum Wage
The economic consensus that raising the minimum wage destroys jobs collapsed under the weight of the evidence — and what replaced it is more interesting than either side admits.
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The National Debt
The U.S. owes $36 trillion — but the political conversation about what that means gets almost everything wrong.
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The Pentagon Budget
The United States spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined — and has failed every financial audit it has ever attempted, meaning no one can fully account for where the money goes.
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The Trade Deficit
The U.S. trade deficit is one of the most misunderstood numbers in economic policy — routinely treated as evidence of national failure when it is better understood as a consequence of America's role as the world's preferred destination for investment.
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The Unemployment Rate
The official unemployment rate is one of the most watched numbers in economics — and one of the most carefully defined, in ways that guarantee it understates the true extent of labor market distress.