California Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, has introduced a bill that could significantly ease the state’s urban housing crisis.Wiener’s bill would essentially prohibit cities from acting like suburbs, forcing them to allow builders to line their wide boulevards with medium-rise apartment buildings. SB 827 would forbid cities from imposing controls such as density and parking requirements on new residential construction within 805 meters of a major transit station or 400 meters from

Viewpoints Jan. 30, 2018

If you want to gauge how Chinese consumers are reshaping the world, look at how many of them are leaving China.　For vacation, that is. Outbound Chinese tourism has enjoyed explosive growth over the past decade and there’s plenty more where that came from: only 5 percent of the Middle Kingdom’s citizens hold a passport, compared with 40 percent in the US. That’s a lot of ground to make up and suggests this boom has some staying power.　Investors would do well to focus on the beneficiaries, and not

Viewpoints Jan. 30, 2018

The washing machine is the unsung hero of the feminist revolution. There’s a lively argument that the washing machine is actually what enabled the average woman to work outside the home. When finally adopted, it certainly liberated women from the brutal labor involved in doing laundry with lye and a washboard. (Now we complain about the comparative delights of folding the stuff!)These days, according to the US census, more than 85 percent of American households have a washing machine. Almost all

Viewpoints Jan. 29, 2018

For the first time in a year, significant new information has emerged linking the 2016 US Democratic National Committee security breach to Russia. A newspaper in the Netherlands reports that US authorities received evidence of the hack from the Dutch intelligence service, which had penetrated the Russian hackers. The report partly explains the US intelligence community‘s certainty about what happened to the DNC and its reluctance to tell the public more. But it also raises new questions.The stor

Viewpoints Jan. 29, 2018

Donald Trump’s administration last week announced new tariffs on solar panels and washing machines. It has hinted at more to come. The rationale for these measures is that they’ll reduce American trade deficits -- in particular, the widening deficit with China -- and thus benefit the US economy. Rather than take Washington’s assumptions at face value, however, we must consider how protectionism affects capital flows.　Policymakers largely ignore the indirect impact of trade intervention on capita

Viewpoints Jan. 29, 2018

When I was growing up, the idea of re-engineering human DNA was a staple of science fiction. Now, it’s a reality. Adult gene therapy -- editing the genome of a person -- is expected to soon be a treatment option for a number of otherwise intractable diseases. Meanwhile, scientists have successfully edited the DNA of human embryos, raising the possibility that parents might be able to modify their children’s genomes to save them from inherited diseases.　Much of the change from science fiction to

Viewpoints Jan. 28, 2018

The liberal world order, insofar as it still exists, is about rules and conditionality: If you stay on the righteous path, you’ll get help. On Tuesday, former US Vice President Joe Biden explained how this worked for Ukraine while he was the Obama administration’s point man on the rebellious post-Soviet nation. The reminiscences should serve as a cautionary tale for International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, who met Wednesday with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Davos to discus

Viewpoints Jan. 28, 2018

The choreography could not have been better this week. The leaders of the eurozone’s three largest economies took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos one after the other to deliver the same message. In the era of Donald Trump’s “America First,” the leaders of Italy, Germany and France all spoke up to oppose protectionism and embrace multilateralism.Cooperation will start at home, they pledged: the euro area will strive to forge closer ties starting this year. As French President Emman

Viewpoints Jan. 28, 2018

Rent control is one of the first policies that students traditionally learn about in undergraduate economics classes. The idea is to get young people thinking about how policies intended to help the poor can backfire and hurt them instead. According to the basic theory of supply and demand, rent control causes housing shortages that reduce the number of low-income people who can live in a city. Even worse, rent control will tend to raise demand for housing -- and therefore, rents -- in other are

Viewpoints Jan. 22, 2018

Last Sunday’s sinking of an Iranian oil tanker 180 miles off the coast of Shanghai certainly looks like an environmental disaster. Depending on how many of the ship’s 1 million barrels of condensate were released into the ocean and not burned off, the accident could end up being one of the biggest oil spills in half a century. The irony? Even that wouldn’t represent the biggest disaster to befall the area.　The fact is, thanks to massive overfishing in China’s territorial waters, there isn’t much

Viewpoints Jan. 21, 2018

The many critics of Freedom House can finally gloat: The think tank has turned its well-calibrated guns on the US in its 2018 report on “Freedom in the World”:　“The past year brought further, faster erosion of America’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory, damaging its international credibility as a champion of good governance and human rights.”　America’s “core institutions,” the think tank continues, “were attacked by an administration that rejects established norms of eth

Viewpoints Jan. 21, 2018

Can an international deal ever really be final? President Donald Trump seems to think the answer is no, given his penchant for withdrawing from agreements made under President Barack Obama -- the Paris climate change accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade and (maybe) the Iranian nuclear deal.　But what about international agreements that actually declare themselves to be irreversible? That’s the case with the 2015 Japan-South Korea deal that was aimed at ending once and for all the confl

Viewpoints Jan. 19, 2018