Some thoughts on buying a house, white privilege and homewares for the apocalypse

In army of robots now scrub floors, grow microgreens and flip burgers. Due to advances in artificial intelligence, computers will supposedly take over much more of the service sector in the coming decade, including jobs in law, finance and medicine that require years of education and training.

Wage inequality is getting worse, according to new data from the Social Security Administration, which shows a steady trickle-up effect in worker income during every period for the last four decades. That’s happening as wages for the bottom 90% of earners are being “continuously redistributed upward” to the top 10% and often even further to the top 1% and 0.1%, reports the Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed the data. Since the year 1979, while wages for the bottom 90% saw a modest growth of 26%, wages for the top 10% grew between 51.8% to 75.1%.

Socialist-minded millennial heirs are trying to live their values by getting rid of their money.

No story excites children quite like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. First published in 1964 by English author, Roald Dahl, the story continues to capture imaginations. 1 The premise is simple, a usually unlucky boy is one of five winners of a worldwide competition. The prize is a once in a lifetime opportunity to tour a world famous chocolate factory. As an added bonus, the winning children are given a lifetime supply of sweet treats. There is scarcely a child who would not want that.

A Covid-19 vaccine will not result in an “instant stimulus” to the U.S. economy, which still needs greater fiscal support as its recovery loses momentum, an economist said on Wednesday. Markets globally rallied after Pfizer and BioNTech announced on Monday that their coronavirus vaccine was more than 90% effective in preventing the disease among those with no evidence of prior infection.

Sir David Attenborough says the excesses of western countries should "be curbed" to restore the natural world and we'll all be happier for it. The veteran broadcaster said that the standard of living in wealthy nations is going to have to take a pause. Nature would flourish once again he believes when "those that have a great deal, perhaps, have a little less".

Every few months, some group of socially conscious number crunchers will remind Americans that a tiny elite is binge-eating the nation’s economic pie while the rest of us plebeians fight over table scraps. Journalists will then aggregate eye-popping statistics and edifying charts, progressives will share these over social media, adorned with red-faced (and/or guillotine) emoji — and the moral arc of history will carry on bending toward neofeudalism.

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV.

We cannot much longer ignore the discomforting truth that the economies we’ve inherited from the twentieth century are poorly designed for the production of human beings. As digital technologies weave economic logic deeper into the temporal fabric of everyday life, we’re debasing economic society’s most complex, valuable, and neglected production: human consciousness.

"The cliff is totally visible in front of us": The future is grim if Congress doesn’t act on the economy. The country is ambling toward a cliff, putting millions of Americans’ lives and livelihoods in danger and all but ensuring prolonged economic distress nationwide. It didn’t have to be this way. Yet here we are, unable to shake out of it.

Is capitalism destroying the fabric of our society? Peter Joseph, the founder of the Zeitgeist Movement, argues that it is. His philosophy is at the center of Abolishing Capitalism, an Empire Files documentary hosted by acclaimed journalist Abby Martin.

Don’t be fooled by the unfounded, Malthusian belief that overpopulation is the roots of all evils when it comes to sustainability. Population growth is just one of many issues that we should keep an eye on – for sure – but it would be an unforgivable mistake – and a racist one – to give it our undivided attention.

The current consensus by scientists and public health experts is that the only way to end the coronavirus' devastating effects on America's citizens and its economy is to develop, produce at scale and widely distribute an effective vaccine against COVID-19 as quickly as possible. There are, of course, myriad scientific challenges inherent to that imperative, among them the virus' potential mutability, our lack of knowledge about whether antibodies provide protection against reinfection...

Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and other billionaires have figured out a pretty sweet deal, Anand Giridharadas says: They make gigantic piles of money, and have tricked politicians and the media into giving them an exceptionally loud voice in policy discussions. What’s their secret? Just give away a little bit of that money through philanthropic organizations that they control.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics April Jobs Day report provides new data on the speed with which the coronavirus recession is impacting the labor market.

The coronavirus crisis in the United States is only just beginning. But it's not too early for some Americans to flout social distancing and isolation guidelines and return to work, according to some executives. Dick Kovacevich, the former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo, told Bloomberg News that healthy workers under the age of 55 should return to work in April if the outbreak is controlled, saying that "some may even die" with his plan.

The U.S. government is enacting measures to save the airlines, Boeing, and similarly affected corporations. While we clearly insist that these companies must be saved, there may be ethical, economic, and structural problems associated with the details of the execution. As a matter of fact, if you study the history of bailouts, there will be.

The month of March has rolled in like a ferocious lion for bullish stock-market investors, leaving little but carnage in its aftermath, as uncertainties about the effects of the coronavirus outbreak abound. The decline for the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -4.54% has been simply gut-wrenching for the average investor, with the monthly plunge so far for the nearly 124-year-old, blue-chip gauge poised to represent its steepest since 1931 — a year that falls within the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in U.S. history.

The coronavirus shutdown of 2020 is perhaps the most remarkable interruption to ordinary life in modern history. It has been spoken about as a war. And one is reminded of the stories told of the interruption of normality in 1914 and 1939. But unlike a war, the present moment involves demobilisation not mobilisation. While the hospitals are on full alert, the majority of us are confined to quarters. We are deliberately inducing one of the most severe recessions ever seen. In so doing we are driving another nail into the coffin of one of the great platitudes of the late 20th century: it’s the economy stupid.