Original Reporting

Despite a looming public health crisis, lawmakers have yet to seriously address the problem of physician supply. And because it takes a long time to train a doctor, the window to act is closing fast. More

As policy-makers grope for strategies to deliver broadly shared economic prosperity, calls for increased education are more insistent than ever. But a closer look at the actual experience of American workers suggests the message often implied by what might be called “the education answer” — that vast quantities of good-paying jobs are waiting to be created in new, scientific-sounding industries, and that a bachelor’s degree is the key to landing one of them — is woefully incomplete. More

The tendency of states to try to outbid their neighbors — with business incentives or lowered tax rates — has serious consequences. Practiced among Republican and Democratic governors alike, the dog-eat-dog approach has, according to much research, caused states to squeeze their own coffers and weaken environmental regulations, while lavishing subsidies both on firms that relocate anyway, and on those that might have stayed even without incentives. Are states failing to imagine another very basic possibility? What if, instead of persistently undercutting each other, they banded together in interstate agreements? What if they agreed on a common floor for environmental or business regulations? What if states agreed not to fish for jobs in their neighbor’s pond, or sought region-wide revenue increases that would eliminate the fear of being left behind or outgunned? More