Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.
October 28, 2020
While the world wrestles with a deadly pandemic and how to confront climate change, there’s another, long-term global challenge that no one really knows how to deal with: population aging. As the human race transitions from a burgeoning, exploding species …
October 13, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has crushed the economy, sent joblessness soaring, and killed over a million people worldwide. But there are a few ways in which the pandemic may prompt society to improve, and one is remote work. Though it was …
April 24, 2020
One of the most vexing questions in life is: Should you trust the experts? The fundamental conundrum is that sometimes the experts make big mistakes — think of medieval doctors who killed their patients by bleeding them. But without expertise …
December 27, 2019
In recent years, much of the commentary about climate change has gone from sternly serious to wildly despairing. A new report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the effects of climate change are accelerating and …
January 25, 2019
Traditionally, Americans could look forward to a comfortable retirement. After four decades in an office or a factory, sometime in their 60s they would lay down their burdens and enjoy a final couple of decades with time to relax, spend …
July 6, 2018
Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and one of the pioneers of the world wide web, once declared: “The spread of computers and the internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are …
May 4, 2018
A friend of mine who is a bit of a climate-change skeptic once challenged me with this question: If climate change is such a pressing danger, why haven’t coastal real estate prices crashed? It’s a fair question. If financial markets …
April 29, 2016
In his 2007 book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” finance writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb attempted to educate the public about the danger of rare, unusual events. This is obviously important in the world of finance — …