DAKOTA DIGITAL REVIEW ………Competition for the increasing limited supply of those with skills is driving up wages, which is an obvious benefit for the employee, but is also inflationary for the employer’s product or service. And it doesn’t increase the supply until more people are attracted to those trades, and then not until they’re trained.
WALL STREET JOURNAL ……… Among the pandemic’s many disruptions, in early 2021 auto makers cut production because of a shortage of semiconductors. Car manufacturers today already spend more money on silicon than on steel, and that goes double for the makers of electric vehicles (EVs). The mainstream arrival of EVs owes as much to silicon…
NATIONAL REVIEW ………… How long can Russia afford to wage a ground war in Europe? One might be reasonably skeptical of answers coming from those who didn’t see any prospect for Russia to invade Ukraine.
CITY JOURNAL ……… When Congress passed the CHIPS Act, a bill seeking to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, the Washington Post trumpeted it as “a new era of industrial policy.” One might also call it a version of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”—a foray into state-directed market policy.
WALL STREET JOURNAL ……… I was primed to be excited about “Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy” by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake. The book’s core claim is that “the economy is partway through a fundamental change from one that is largely material to one that is based on ideas, knowledge, and…
CITY JOURNAL ………. If we needed just one example of the labyrinthine nature of global oil markets, it would be the fact that even as President Biden was visiting Saudi Arabia to cajole the kingdom to increase oil production, the Saudis were buying oil from Russia. Those purchases, at the embargo discount, allow the Saudis…
