Forum for Innovation

“A funny thing is happening to the United States housing market. It is getting better at an accelerating rate. And therein could lie hope for a surprisingly strong economy this year.”

Do job placement programs work? A recent study casts doubt on their effectiveness, according to Dylan Matthews.

Davos, where the world’s elites and a bevy of snarky journalists gather, is at it again with this year’s World Economic Forum summit on “resilient dynamism.” John Cassidy ponders Davos’ status as a “positional good,” valuable because others value it, and John McDermott invites his readers round to his house for “Dalston Davos.”

One of the best résumés ever.

Tyler Cowen asks three questions for thinking deep about how change occurs and echoes across time:

• What could a very clever person in 1500 (not a monarch) have done if they wanted to make the future better and help people living today?
• Which avoidable/contingent event in history did the greatest harm? (e.g., the burning of the library of Alexandria)
•  If you wanted to push history in a positive direction, which contingent event from the past would be best to be a participant in, and what could you have done? (e.g., support Deng Xiaoping inside the Chinese Communist Party in the ‘70s)

Past Forum Fellow Mark Perry deconstructs what he sees as “the myth of America’s stagnating middle class.” Other writers response to the provocation, wondering what counts as the “basic goods” that find more affordable today as well as which income group is seeing the most gains.