Wealth & Poverty Review

Homelessness in Seattle has reached a crisis point. Despite more than $1 billion in public and private spending across King County, more people live on the streets than ever before (a problem that will likely get worse, following the Supreme Court’s refusal to address the legality of public camping). But rather than focus on the causes of homelessness — addiction, mental illness, and social breakdown — progressives in local government have waged war against abstract forces of oppression. Last week, the leaders of the homelessness response in Seattle and King County hosted their annual conference under the theme of “Decolonizing Our Collective Work.” According to the organizers, the government’s primary responsibility in reducing homelessness is to “[interrogate] the current structures of power” and “examine the legacies Read More ›

Excerpt: Researchers Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy calculate the “Simon Abundance Index,” which takes into account both global population and the prices of 50 commodities important for human welfare — everything from sugar to salmon to iron ore to natural gas — expressed in terms of how long the average person in the world has to work to afford one unit of each. Every one of the 50 has become more affordable since 1980, even as global population has exploded, and most have become several times more affordable. The aggregate Abundance Index was set equal to 100 in 1980; by 2019 it had climbed to almost 620. Continue Reading …

Among the world’s most inspiring business voices is Ren Zhengfei, founder-philosopher of Huawei, the disruptive and now condemned Chinese telecom-equipment company. Vilified as a cat’s-paw of the Chinese government, Mr. Ren has decided to place his trust in America’s legal system and launch a court challenge to the U.S. government’s campaign against his company—and family. His daughter, Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, is fighting extradition to the U.S. from Canada on murky charges that she helped financial institutions violate American sanctions on Iran. She has been under house arrest in Vancouver, British Columbia, since December.

Discovery co-founder George Gilder sat down with Steve Forbes on Forbes’s podcast What’s Ahead. There are not many minds that have been able to predict what’s ahead quite like Gilder who has proven to be a true visionary in economics and tech. In this conversation with Forbes, Gilder discusses his new book Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, and unpacks what he calls the “cryptocosm”. Gilder discounts many of the pessimistic pundits and instead foresees a future rife with flourishing innovation. What’s more, the cryptocosm will put you in charge of your data!

Trade talks between the U.S. and China have hit an impasse, but there is surprising bipartisan support for the Trump administration to stay the course on what will be a long process to resolve the full range of trade problems specific to China. Success on this first round of trade negotiations in the form of ending the tariff penalties that are at the heart of a year-old trade war, with further reduction and even elimination of tariffs on as many categories as possible, should actually be attainable in the near term. Future rounds of trade talks to find remedies for China’s intellectual property and trademark theft, national security threats, and forced technology transfer from American companies doing business in China …