Ezra Klein

Why a Middle-Class Lifestyle Remains Out of Reach for So Many

June’s just-released inflation data is startling. At 9.1 percent, it’s the highest year-on-year rate we’ve seen since 1981. Maybe it’s the highest we will see. Oil and other commodity prices are falling, real wage growth has turned negative and retail inventories are thickening. None of that is…

TikTok May Be More Dangerous Than It Looks

At the core of the frenzied interest in Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is an intuition that I think is right: The major social media platforms are, in some hard-to-define way, essential to modern life. Call them town squares. Call them infrastructure. They exist in some nether region between…

This Presidency Isn’t Turning Out as Planned

Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president. His Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, was Obama’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve. The director of Biden’s National Economic Council, Brian Deese, was deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council. His chief of staff, Ron Klain, was his chief of…

Texas Is a Rich State in a Rich Country, and Look What Happened

A few months back, because I really know how to live, I spent a night reading “The Green Swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change.” The report, released in January 2020 by the Bank for International Settlements, argued that central banks, concerned as they are with…