Search
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.
Read Less
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.
2 min
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 […]
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?