economy

Divestment is becoming an increasingly salient issue both at Swarthmore and at colleges and universities around the country. The movement, which aims to compel colleges and universities to stop investing in companies that produce fossil fuels, has grown rapidly over the last few months. Early in December, the New York Times published an article detailing [...]

For a professor at Swarthmore, receiving tenure is a lengthy and complicated task. First, it involves teaching and researching in a tenure track position for what is typically a six-year period. After that, candidates undergo a lengthy review process. A dossier of the candidate is prepared, which includes everything from letters by students who had [...]

Despite the recession and economic downturn, Swarthmore students have continued to secure post-graduate employment in impressive numbers. This steady trend owes itself primarily to diversity in fields of study and to a strong institutional relationship with alumni of varied career paths.Career Services conducts a survey after graduation each year asking new alumni to describe their [...]

To do the same thing over and over again and expect different results is the definition of insanity. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb by trying the same design 2,000 times. Nor should the Federal Reserve expect the outcome of their third round of “quantitative easing,” better known as printing money to buy Treasury [...]

Depending on your political beat, Congressman Paul Ryan is either a neatly-combed, responsible Midwesterner with some budgetary bravery, or an entitlement-slashing, Ayn Rand-worshiping fiend disguised as a harmless congressional geek. Jekyll and Hyde have apparently arrived on the House floor. I, for one, back the Ryan Budget because it attempts to simplify our tax code, [...]

Staff Editorial Isolating the multitude of inequalities that are inherent to our contemporary social structures is a reasonably effortless task. From health care to environmental policy, our notions of justice and liberty for all in a society are counteracted and replaced with institutional unfairness time and time again. But perhaps the most palpable embodiment of [...]

Puerto Rico rarely makes it onto the news in the United States, but with the Republican primary there this past Sunday, the island territory found itself in the spotlight; so was its governor, Luis Fortuño. Elected to the governorship as part of the New Progressive party (the island’s equivalent to the Republican party) in 2008, [...]

On March 10, China’s General Administration of Customs reported that its February monthly trade deficit had reached $31.5 billion, its weakest performance in more than two decades. Chinese imports surged by a faster-than-expected rate of 39.6 percent compared to February last year, while exports climbed at a slower-than-expected rate of 18.4 percent. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the [...]

Three years ago this month, President Obama announced that he would halve the deficit by the end of his first term. Judging by Obama’s latest attempt at a budget, he has decided to disregard any deficit reduction. On Monday, Obama released his fiscal-year 2013 budget, a political document straight from his reelection campaign headquarters in [...]

Paul Krugman (Nobel Prize in Economics recipient, Princeton professor and Keynesian guru of the New York Times Editorial page) recently opined, “In a better world — specifically, a world with a better policy elite — a good jobs report would be a cause for alloyed celebration.” Now, I have numerous quibbles with Krugman, namely his [...]