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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.
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Unlike the hard sciences, macroeconomics has no airtight laws (with the possible exception of the law of supply and demand).
The presence of a pre-analysis plan can strongly affect the perception and production of statistical results.
The “intent to treat” format does not alleviate selection problems within the “intent to treat” group.
Daniel Altman offered predictions for what the global economy would look like 10, 20, 40 years down the road. How did he do with these predictions and what does it mean for economic opportunity around the world?
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I made predictions for what the global economy would look like in the very long term, maybe 10, 20, 40 years down the road. We are seeing some of these […]
Today’s Medicaid could affect a small number of poor people within two years. Truly finding out how Medicaid might change their lives would take much longer. Moreover, Medicaid would change with time, too – and almost certainly for the better.
If you want to find out what the real final word is from the best thinking in economics, you finally have a place to go.
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Today there is a multiplicity of outlets now through which you can get supposed economic research and access to new economic ideas.
Bitcoin is just the first virtual currency to make it big – and you can bet it won’t be the last.
Big Think chief Economist Daniel Altman has a suggestion to end this long national nightmare: get rid of the corporate income tax.
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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.
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.
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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 […]
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 […]
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Daniel Altman explores the economic ideas behind Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to limit the sale of large sugary beverages.
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 […]