Daniel Altman
Chief Economist, Big Think
Daniel Altman is Big Think's Chief Economist and an adjunct faculty member at New York University's Stern School of Business. Daniel wrote economic commentary for The Economist, The New York Times, and The International Herald Tribune before founding North Yard Economics, a non-profit consulting firm serving developing countries, in 2008. In between, he served as an economic advisor in the British government and wrote four books, most recently Outrageous Fortunes: The Twelve Surprising Trends That Will Reshape the Global Economy.
The tax on corporate profits is a terrible tax. Economists to this day don’t know who pays it. And that means that we really don’t know who’s bearing the burden.
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The United States still has problems to resolve, but it is on a stronger economic footing than before the crisis.
There really is a chance that some of the great scientific innovations that tech evangelists have been talking about will come true. But we can't count on them.
While there is a chance that many of the scientific innovations that have been forecast will come true, even within our lifetime, we still can’t count on them. We have […]
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If your house got blown away by a hurricane, you’d probably want to build a stronger house next time, right? The same should be true for financial markets. The government […]
Last week, David Leonhardt of The New York Times offered his latest take on why poor but smart kids have trouble getting into top colleges. In the past, he wrote […]
Daniel Altman explores the economic ideas behind Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to limit the sale of large sugary beverages.
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It’s been a few months since I wrote an op-ed in The New York Times to propose a wealth tax as a way to stem the harmful rise of inequality in […]
If the Fed still has room to juice the economy without threatening price stability, why doesn’t it?
Before the end of the Second World War, officials from the Allied nations met up at a resort town in New Hampshire to create a new economic order for the […]
Perhaps if the penalties for reneging hurt the politicians themselves – not the American people – then they would comply more readily.
Once again, the Wall Street Journal has published its annual ranking of economic forecasters. Using methods developed with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the newspaper calculated which forecasters made […]
The majority of academic economists actually agree on plenty of topics of huge importance to the public and private sectors.
What’s the Big Idea? Ten years after Goldman Sachs dubbed the countries Brazil, Russia, India and China BRICs, what does this term still mean? How have these economies changed? Are […]
It’s been more than ten years since the folks at Goldman Sachs dubbed Brazil, Russia, India, and China the BRIC countries, and lately other countries have been trying to glom […]
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Does the rise of the robots doom us all to unemployment? The answer is most certainly no. Provocative claims that the United States has reached “peak jobs” and will soon […]
Who could have saved us from the global financial crisis? In a word, women. The release of the Federal Reserve’s transcripts of policymaking meetings up to 2007 has shed new […]
"China has allowed the Yuan to appreciate in value against the dollar and Euro and other major currencies," Daniel Altman says, "and now there are very few analysts who would say that it's artificially depressed."
The old conventional wisdom was the China was manipulating its currency, causing a significant drag on the global economy. That isn’t true anymore.
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While the Congress debates sequestration and other ways of trimming spending in specific departments and agencies, it should not miss the tremendous opportunity now presented by the financial markets.
Perhaps when mass killings really start to hurt the majority of the population, then we’ll take stronger action against them. But for now, we like them too much.
It’s been a difficult year for economists, who’ve had to endure a combination of criticism when they apparently had the wrong ideas and being ignored when perhaps they had the right ones.
How much would you pay to prevent the death of a child, or anyone else, from gun violence?
As we think about how we're going to eventually close a big debt gap, Daniel Altman says we need to think beyond two-year election cycles.
Big Think’s chief economist Daniel Altman favors a “gradual solution” to fixing the U.S. debt. Tightening our belt, Altman says, “doesn’t make sense if you can borrow at low interest […]
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The debate over the fiscal cliff has spawned a multitude of suggestions for reforming the tax system, including my own. One possible reason for the wide range of proposals, even from mainstream economists, is that the recommendations of standard economic theory may be very different from what the American economy actually needs today. Here are two views of taxation, from the theoretical and realistic standpoints – can you find a happy medium between them?
I’ve received dozens of emails since my New York Times op-ed proposing a wealth tax came out on Monday. My goal with the piece was primarily to refocus the inequality […]
Friends, a new world is waiting for all of us. It is a world without want, where every need is satisfied by boundless resources. It is a world of friendship, […]
Companies are always trying to develop products that make our lives better, but these days some of the most advanced technologies are being aimed at a category that used to […]
Dear Readers, I made a mistake. In the article below, I said it would take some very high rates of growth to close the $7 trillion gap in Mitt Romney’s […]