Dollars & Sense

California Governor Jerry Brown was an eloquent early spokesperson for the urgent necessity of responding to climate change during his first two terms in office from 1975 to 1983, for which he was widely ridiculed. But it was during his third and fourth terms in office from 2011 to 2019 that he secured his legacy as one of the most important U.S. politicians to...

On Friday, May 8, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the official unemployment rate for April was 4.3%. By conventional standards, that is close to full employment. It is hard to believe that an economy that has been hammered by high tariffs and hyper-inflation in gas prices is in good shape. But other indicators are also positive. We are not in a recession.&n...

Eighty years ago, an organization named CARE—which stands for Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere—responded to worldwide hunger in the aftermath of World War II by sending millions of packages of food. This post comme...

Why did President Donald Trump initiate his war of choice with Iran? And just how much damage will the war and its aftermath inflict on the global economy? Those are hard questions to answer. The first one is beyond my pay grade—perhaps beyond anyone’s. So let me turn to the second.

There is no one-to-one correlation between what we do and what it means to us or to others. Many of the workers who gave interviews to Studs Terkel for his classic 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do said that their experience on the job would be different if the work were respected and if they, as the people...