Justin Fox

The motor vehicles sold in the US have been getting bigger and heavier, with large pickup trucks leading the way. Large pickups also lead the way in killing others on the road — seven of the 10 (and 10 of the 13) 2023 model-year vehicles with the highest other-driver death rates were large or very large pickups, according to statistics released last week by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Since the 2025 budget law, aka the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, was enacted, US corporate income tax revenue has fallen 28%. This was an expected consequence of the law’s provisions that allow businesses to fully expense spending on research and development, equipment and some other investments rather than writing them off over several years, and it will be reversed to some extent as those write-offs aren’t taken on future tax returns. But the decline highlights the narrowing and fragility of a t

Labor force participation in the US, when adjusted for the age structure of the population, has never been higher than over the past two years. So why all the concern lately about how low it is? The simple answer is that age-adjusted labor force participation is not a statistic on offer from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the unadjusted rate is currently the lowest it has been — Covid-19 pandemic excluded — in 50 years.

At America’s colleges and universities, generative artificial intelligence is bringing on something of an existential crisis. Large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude “promise productivity while subverting the process of grappling with ideas, and with overuse they weaken the very muscles necessary to use them responsibly,” a University of Chicago chemistry professor wrote after his employer concluded a deal this month to provide Claude Enterprise to all students and fac

Enrollment in US public schools fell sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic as the shift to remote classes and all-around disruption of everyday life led some families to opt for homeschooling or in-person private schools and some to give up on schooling altogether. Public schools managed to stabilize their numbers after that, with enrollment rising slightly in the 2022–2023 academic year. But now they’re facing a longer-term problem — a lack of children. The number of annual births in the US is d

“Assimilate or go home,” read the sign at Senator Tommy Tuberville’s side as he held forth on the Senate floor last month about the proposed American System for Sustainable Immigration and Mass Immigration Limitations Achieved Through Imposing Oversight Nationally Act that he and Representative Andy Ogles were about to introduce (yes, that works out to ASSIMILATION). Tuberville of Alabama and Ogles of Tennessee are both media personalities more than Republican legislators, and there’s little cha

The paper that helped popularize the concept of a post-pandemic “urban doom loop” was finally published this February in the American Economic Review. A lot has changed since the authors of “Work from Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse” began circulating it in mid-2022, and there’s even been some talk over the past year of an office revival. But while this does seem like an indication that the publication process in academic economics takes way too long, nothing in the paper is really ou

While US financial markets brace for what could be the three biggest initial public offerings ever, most entrepreneurship in the US is headed in the opposite direction: New businesses are shrinking.

After a 76-year-old New Yorker was pushed to his death down a subway-station staircase earlier this month, the profile that emerged of his suspected assailant was distressingly familiar. Rhamell Burke had been released from Bellevue Hospital that afternoon after being picked up by police for threatening, erratic behavior earlier in the day. He had been arrested four other times since February, once for a subway station meltdown in which three Port Authority police officers were injured trying to

After a 76-year-old New Yorker was pushed to his death down a subway-station staircase earlier this month, the profile that emerged of his suspected assailant was distressingly familiar. Rhamell Burke had been released from Bellevue Hospital that afternoon after being picked up by police for threatening, erratic behavior earlier in the day. He had been arrested four other times since February, once for a subway station meltdown in which three Port Authority police officers were injured trying to