Annie Lowrey

Earlier this month, the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare was assassinated during morning rush hour on a busy block in Midtown Manhattan; the alleged killer’s confession went viral, in particular the line “the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.”
The murder led to a mass airing of grievances with American insurers and, among those who felt that the industry had it coming, a haunting moment of collective glee.

No federal agency is as hated as the IRS, and perhaps no federal agency deserves so much hate.
The average American spends 13 hours a year completing the agency’s ugly, indecipherable forms. The process is so onerous that Americans fork over $10 billion annually to tax preparers, who nevertheless screw up an estimated 60 percent of their clients’ returns. The IRS audits low-income working families more often than it audits all but the very richest families.

The Biden administration passed $3 trillion of legislation aimed at revitalizing the American economy and fostering green, equitable, “middle-out” growth. It sent checks to voters, canceled student-loan debt, made direct deposits to parents, showered the country in tax credits, and financed the construction of roads, transmission lines, and bridges.

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Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. He has inflation to thank.
In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, Americans said the economy was bad—and the economy was bad because prices were too high. This was always going to be a problem for Kamala Harris.

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The twinge begins in the afternoon: toes. At my desk, toes, itching. Toes, toes, toes.
I don’t normally think about my toes. But as I commute home in a crowded subway car, my feet are burning, and I cannot reach them. Even if I could, what would I do with my sneakers? My ankles are itchy too.

Joe Biden is, at the moment, losing his reelection campaign. And he is doing so while presiding over the strongest economy the United States has ever experienced.
The jobless rate is below 4 percent, as it has been for nearly two and a half years. Wage growth is moderating, but it is higher than it was at any point during the Obama administration; overall, Biden has overseen stronger pay increases than any president since Richard Nixon.

Inflation, finally, has cooled off. Prices have increased 2.5 percent over the past year, down from increases as high as 7 percent during the early pandemic. Rents are high but stabilizing. The cost of groceries is ticking up, not surging, and some goods, such as eggs, are actually getting cheaper. But American consumers are still stretching to afford one big-ticket item: their cars.

Holding her infant patients, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha felt a deep sense of frustration. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do as a pediatrician,” she told me, describing counseling her patients’ parents about vaccines, a healthy diet, safe sleeping, and car seats. But Hanna-Attisha practices in Flint, the poorest city in Michigan and one in which more than half of children grow up in poverty.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the agency responsible, one would imagine, for housing and urban development. Over the past two decades, America has done far too little urban development—and far too little suburban and rural development as well. The ensuing housing shortage has led to rising rents, a surge in homelessness, a decline in people’s ability to move for a relationship or a job, and much general misery.

Earlier this year, I moved from San Francisco to New York with my dogs, kids, and husband. My family rented an apartment. And once we figured out that we liked it here and wanted to stay, we looked to buy a place.For roughly 11 minutes, before realizing that literally any other activity would be a better use of our time. Brooklyn has 1.1 million housing units. Just a dozen of them seemed to fit our requirements and were sitting on the market. All of the options were too expensive.

A decade and change ago, as the world woke up to the catastrophe of climate change, campus activists were looking for ways to heal the environment at scale. They landed on an unusual one: the free market. Climate change is the world’s biggest unpriced externality, in that neither the producers nor the consumers of fossil fuels pay for the damage they cause to the environment. Gas is too cheap; ultimately, every living thing on the planet bears the cost.

Since last spring, roughly 100,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City. This is a city of immigrants, welcoming to immigrants, built by immigrants. People who were born abroad make up a third of New York’s population and own more than half of its businesses. Yet the city has struggled to accommodate this wave of new arrivals. Migrants are selling candy on the subways, sleeping on the streets in Midtown, waiting for spots in homeless shelters.

What does Harvard do? What is Yale for? What is Dartmouth’s purpose?The schools themselves have ready answers to those questions. Harvard says it exists to “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society” through the “transformative power of a liberal arts education.

Dr. Dre on the radio, The Matrix on the big screen, The Sopranos on TV: The year 1999 was wonderful for many reasons, including economic ones.That year, the median household income rose to a record level, a watermark that held for nearly two decades. (The average American family was poorer when Donald Trump was running for office than when Bill Clinton left office.) Wages were growing across the board—all kinds of workers were getting consistent raises. Productivity growth was strong.

The chef presents me with a nugget of raw meat, tinged yellowish gray, then takes it back and drops it in a pan. “Today, you’re going to be having our whole-muscle chicken filet,” Daniel Davila tells me, searing the morsel. He lets it rest, chars some tomatoes and scallions, and throws together a beurre-blanc sauce. “Kind of a classic,” Davila says.

Photographs by Venice GordonThe monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god.

Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed 13 charges against Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, accusing it of mishandling customer funds and a litany of other white-collar crimes. It also charged Coinbase, a public company and the biggest U.S. crypto business, with failing to register as a broker-dealer.

Republicans and Democrats have reached a debt-ceiling deal. Republicans will agree not to blow up the global economy if Democrats trim federal spending over the next two years, claw back money from the Internal Revenue Service, speed up the country’s energy-permitting process, and impose new work requirements on the food-stamp and welfare programs, among other changes.Perhaps this is the best deal the two sides could have reached. Perhaps it is not that big a deal at all.

Whispers about insolvency. A bank run. A desperate attempt to raise funds. A bank failure. Market gyrations. Concerns about financial contagion.History is repeating itself. Today, California regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank, a lender aimed at start-ups, technology firms, and wealthy individuals. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation stepped in as the bank’s receiver.

Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan and a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, told me that when she hit her mid-40s, she had an “aha moment.”“I was thinking, It’s so great having gotten to this stage of my career where I’m a little more established. It’s very freeing,” she told me. “And I realized: Oh, I think I just aged out of sexual harassment.

After my second son was born, my family crossed a painful threshold: We started spending more on child care than we do on rent. The situation is temporary, I keep telling myself—promising myself, praying for myself. My older son will be able to enroll in kindergarten in two years and my younger son in four. But it is excruciating. And I say that from a place of privilege. Most American families earn less than mine does. That does not make day care any cheaper for them.

Brad DeLong felt confident that the story started in 1870.The polymath economist was writing a book on economic modernity—about how humans transitioned from eking out an existence on our small planet to building a kind of utopia on it—and he saw an inflection point centuries after the emergence of capitalism and decades after the advent of manufacturing at scale. “The Industrial Revolution is good.

Andrew Yang—an entrepreneur, a policy celebrity, and a proud nerd—recently co-founded Forward, America’s newest political party. During Yang’s gadfly bids for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and last year’s Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City, his advocacy for a universal basic income gained him a cult following.

This week, President Joe Biden announced debt relief for as many as 43 million Americans with government-issued student loans. The government is erasing up to $20,000 in debt for Pell Grant recipients earning less than $125,000 a year, and up to $10,000 for individuals who did not receive Pell Grants. In addition, the White House is planning to cap monthly payments for undergraduate loans at 5 percent of a borrower’s discretionary income and forgive the balance after a decade.

“Frustrating” was one word a young progressive activist named Annie Wu Henry used to describe today’s Democratic establishment.In her mind, Wu told me in an interview, Democrats were falling short in terms of addressing the country’s affordability crisis, eliminating student debt, protecting the rights of immigrants and LGBTQ Americans, and ensuring access to abortion.

Here’s a bit of esoterica I think about from time to time: Mark Zuckerberg has a mortgage.Or at least, he had one. A decade ago, the Facebook founder refinanced his loan on a $6 million Palo Alto mansion. He was worth $16 billion at the time, meaning he could have bought that house and a hundred more outright, no mortgage necessary. But First Republic Bank offered him an adjustable-rate loan with an initial interest rate of just 1.

The demographer Diana Greene Foster was in Orlando last month, preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade, when Politico published a leaked draft of a majority Supreme Court opinion striking down the landmark ruling. The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, would revoke the constitutional right to abortion and thus give states the ability to ban the medical procedure.

The demographer Diana Greene Foster was in Orlando last month, preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade, when Politico published a leaked draft of a majority Supreme Court opinion striking down the landmark ruling. The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, would revoke the constitutional right to abortion and thus give states the ability to ban the medical procedure.

This week, San Francisco voters recalled Chesa Boudin, the city’s district attorney and the face of the nationwide progressive-prosecutors movement. The election, widely described as a referendum on crime and disorder and a backlash against the Democratic Party’s leftmost edge, was a caustic local fight played out on a national stage. It was democracy at work, with the public ousting a leader they considered incompetent or unfitting.

Inflation is an everyone problem and unemployment is a some-people problem.Keep that fact in mind as good-to-great headline economic numbers keep rolling in and economic sentiment remains abysmal. This week, the Commerce Department reported that real GDP fell 0.4 percent in the first quarter of the year, largely because of fluctuations in inventory orders and international trade.