There’s ugly symbolism in the deadly accident that took place in Tempe, Arizona, late on Sunday evening. A self-driving Volvo operated by Uber ran over Elaine Herzberg, 49, as the apparently homeless woman pushed a bicycle loaded with plastic bags into the street.　Even though Tempe police are not inclined at this point to blame the Uber vehicle -- Herzberg apparently stepped into the road suddenly from the shadows -- optics such as these are likely to set back the autonomous vehicle industry. An

President Vladimir Putin’s re-election Sunday to a fourth six-year term comes amid a feeling both in the West and in Moscow that he is ascendant as a global leader and that Russia has re-emerged as a global superpower. However, if one scratches beneath the surface of these assertions, it’s clear that Putin faces a growing number of complex challenges that are likely to deepen in the coming months and gradually erode his political momentum. Here are a few that will be the most difficult for him t

President Donald Trump knows little history. But he can read a short take, so someone should slip him a copy of Dwight Eisenhower’s brief note of June 5, 1944, on the eve of the largest seaborne assault in history, D-Day, with World War II at stake.　“The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do,” the supreme allied commander wrote in a message he intended to deliver only if the Normandy invasion failed. “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is

American farms are being pinched by a tightening labor market, a long decline in the number of undocumented migrants and more aggressive immigration enforcement in the nation’s interior.　“All types of farms and ranches are facing labor shortages, but the problem is critical in the fruit and vegetable sector where farmers are more dependent on hand-harvesting,” said Zippy Duvall, the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, in an email. “Even with all the mechanization and innovation tha

It makes sense to ask why the Trump administration was given almost a year to decide whether aluminum and steel imports were threats to national security, yet it took only 90 days for the president to act on that decision. But three months was ample time to peruse or even skim through some of the hundreds of pages on global trade to come to a constructive conclusion. Apparently, President Donald Trump couldn’t be bothered. Instead, on March 1, well before the mid-April deadline, he jumped the gu

Some of the most spectacularly wrong predictions in history have been made by those who claim that overpopulation is going to swamp the planet. Thomas Malthus, a British economist writing in the late 1700s, is the most famous of these. Extrapolating past trends into the future, he predicted that population growth would inevitably swamp available food resources, leading to mass starvation. That didn’t happen -- we continued to develop new technologies that let us stay ahead of the reaper.　In 1968

Perhaps the only surprising thing about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s firing was the brutal and sudden nature of the ejection. No meeting, not even a phone call, just a tweet.While many of Tuesday’s hot takes focused on Tillerson’s missteps, his departure is not really about him, of course. He’s a proven global leader who was hugely successful in a long career at Exxon, and was being rightly lauded by people like former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and former Secretary of State Condoleezz

President Donald Trump’s possible meeting with Kim Jong-un to discuss North Korean nuclear weapons is considered a fairly unpredictable event. It’s worth a look at how an economist might use game theory to think about such a summit, if only to explain why there is more room for things to go wrong than to get better.Game theorists often approach a problem by first considering where a series of strategies might end up, and then work backwards to understand current choices. When it comes to North K