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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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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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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."
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.