Of course this has been happening for years, but as you will see below the numbers have dramatically escalated during the early portion of 2019. Our landscape is already littered with countless numbers of hollowed out stores and abandoned malls, and it is about to get a whole lot worse. Retailers were hoping that a strong holiday season would turn things around, but that didn’t happen. In fact, we just learned that retail sales in the United States suffered “their biggest drop in more than nine years” during the month...

With a net worth of $97 billion, capitalism has been good to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and he thinks it's a good system. Still, "There's no free lunch here. You'd have to collect more money," Gates told CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday.That money should come from rich people in the form of higher taxes, he said. "As you go about doing this additional collection, of course you want to be progressive. You want the portion that comes from the top 1 percent or top 20 percent to be much higher," Gates said.

“If Millennials are different, it’s not because we’re more or less evolved than our parents or grandparents, it’s because they’ve changed the world in ways that have produced people like us.” That’s how Malcolm Harris, an editor at the online magazine the New Inquiry, begins his book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. It’s a smart, contrarian look at the social and economic problems plaguing millennials — defined as people born between 1980 and 2000.

U.S. personal income fell for the first time in more than three years in January as dividends and interest payments dropped, pointing to moderate growth in consumer spending after it fell by the most since 2009 in December.

For all the changes of the last fifty years, the conservative classics have held their place surprisingly well. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom are still featured on Breitbart’s online bookstore. Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners that “Milton Friedman should be the Bible for young people, or anybody, trying to understand capitalism and free markets.” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, celebrates Hayek and Friedman in his book, while Ben Shapiro holds up Friedman as a conservative icon in National Review.

Online shopping and the gig economy haven't just disrupted traditional brick-and-mortar business, they're disrupting the way U.S. job growth, wage data and inflation are tracked, asserts a new paper from the Dallas Federal Reserve. What it means: There has been an increase in the number of workers in the gig economy who are either working as contractors or are self-employed, but report themselves as employed. These workers often have less bargaining power and lower wages than full-time employees.

Americans are working harder these days, but it’s not paying off like it used to. In the first three months of 2019, employees got so much more work done that they smashed productivity forecasts. Labor productivity in the non-farm business sector (the biggest part of the US economy) grew 2.4 percent compared to the same period last year, according to new estimates from the US Department of Labor.

Although President Trump touts the current economy as an unprecedented success, the benefits are not being felt for most Americans. Most of the wealth lost during the 2007 to 2009 economic crisis has not recovered. Many pundits and analysts have been praising the current economy, even if they are against President Trump. The economy has repeatedly been called 'strong,' with fears of a recession diminishing. However, could it just be that our expectations have completely plummeted? By any estimate, the economy today is anemic, producing little benefits for the vast majority of Americans.

California legislators approved a landmark bill on Tuesday that requires companies like Uber and Lyft to treat contract workers as employees, a move that could reshape the gig economy and that adds fuel to a yearslong debate over whether the nature of work has become too insecure.

Income inequality last year reached its highest level in more than half a century, as a record-long economic expansion continued to disproportionately benefit some of the wealthiest Americans. A key measure of wealth distribution jumped to 0.485 in 2018, the Census Bureau said Thursday, its highest reading since the so-called Gini index was started in 1967. The gauge, which uses a scale of 0 to 1, stood at 0.482 a year earlier.

The benefits of walkable neighborhoods are many and varied. People who live in walkable neighborhoods are more active, healthier, have more time to spend with family and friends, and report higher levels of happiness and subjective well-being.

The share of wealth held by the Forbes 400 more than doubled from $1.27 trillion in 2009 to nearly $3 trillion this year. That marks a significant increase encouraged by a combination of sliding tax rates, stock market growth, and the economic recovery, according to Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

The United States Supreme Court will issue a ruling this year in a landmark case that will determine whether transgender people – individuals whose sex assigned at birth does not match their current innate sense of being male, female, both or neither – are protected by federal law from employment discrimination. At stake is whether transgender individuals can reasonably earn a living without fear of losing their jobs simply because they are transgender.

Can We Do It Ourselves focuses on economic philosophy with an emphasis on the concept of economic democracy. The film helps viewers understand the difference between a market economy in which consumer demand drives a company's supply of goods and services, and a capitalist economy in which private owners control production and hold a right to the profits. There is strong support for the potential promise of a democratic economic model in which workers have more of a say in business operations than either market or capitalist models.

A record 3.28 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week as the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the country. The Labor Department's report Thursday was one of the first official indicators of how many people have suddenly been forced out of work nationally.

The economic fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak has put the jobs of many American workers in jeopardy, but it has also put in doubt the economic fortunes of many of the business owners who employ them. More than four-in-ten U.S. businesses with paid employees – 2.4 million out of the 5.3 million examined – operate in higher-risk industries likely to be affected more deeply by the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of...

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.

More than 40 million Americans have filed for first-time unemployment benefits since the coronavirus pandemic forced the US economy to shut down in March. One in four American workers has filed for unemployment insurance.

I know, I know, you'd rather be born smart and rich (and charming, and with a lustrous head of hair, and a voice like Michael Bolton's). But if you had to choose? Chances are, your answer depends on whether you think the U.S. economy is a meritocracy—that intelligence and ambition are more important to lifelong success than the circumstances of your birth.

Mortgage applications around the country dropped 1.8 percent last week from a week earlier even though rates tumbled to a new low, a new national report from the Mortgage Bankers Association said Wednesday.