Busy Bee’s is a popular destination for parents of young children in the Washington, D.C. area. Its two locations are especially packed on cold days thanks to its indoor playgrounds that include balloon pits, swinging chairs and slides. No doubt there are play concepts like Busy Bee’s all over the U.S., just as there are businesses similar to it throughout D.C.

Back in 2010, and amid a particularly difficult stretch for the economy, a conservative economist teamed up with lefty economist Dean Baker in support of what they referred to as “work sharing.” As the duo put it at the time, “Under a work-sharing program, firms are encouraged by government policy to spread a small amount of the pain across many workers. In a typical arrangement, a worker might see his weekly hours go down by 20%, and his salary go down by about 4%.”

Why are Cubans so poor? They’ve done very well in the U.S., where emigres from the perpetually recessed country have risen to the top in sports, business and politics. Yet in their own country Cubans are desperately impoverished.

Here’s a truly rhetorical question: who among us would reject higher compensation? Our work is our expression of our desire to get, and higher pay is the path to getting more in return for what we do each day.

December 31st will mark the final day of the National Football League’s (NFL) 2017 regular season. And while January 1st will be all about college football’s most prominent bowl games, readers can rest assured that news of head coaches being fired will soon re-enter the sports discussion. It always does.

On March 30, 1981, the Times of London published a letter signed by 364 prominent economists that predicted disaster for England under Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. Reality has a way of removing the clothes of the so-called experts in rather embarrassing fashion.

During speeches while President of the Cato Institute, John Allison would often say that there were “thousands of Googles” before Google. Allison’s point was that the company which has come to define search technology wasn’t the only Silicon Valley start-up to attain funding based on its idea for a search engine. Countless start-ups funded, countless failures, and lots of learning from those failures, led to Google.

When the 21st century began Apple was just a few years removed from near bankruptcy, Microsoft, after a few wasted years fighting off a Department of Justice eager to neuter it, was on the verge of a fifteen-year span during which its share price almost literally stood still, Google was a small private company reliant on word of mouth about its nascent search engine, Amazon was a peddler of books, CDs, VHS videos and DVDs (its shares were soon to plummet into the $1 range), and Facebook didn’t even exist. Founder Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school.

In The Moscow Scene, Geoffrey Bocca’s 1976 book about life in the Soviet Union, his description of a visit to a restaurant in the Soviet capital had to be re-read many times to be believed. By the 1970s restaurant waiters were viewed as the lowest of the low in this most dystopian of countries, and it showed. The waiter Bocca encountered brought new meaning to surly, the greasy, tattered menu he handed to him literally hadn’t changed in 25 years, and then the waiter proceeded to start an argument: Bocca wanted borscht and beef fillet, but was gruffly told he would be having caviar and Chicken Kiev instead.

Estimates vary about the cost and time required to rebuild Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. And the territory’s excessive debt burden will only make the recovery more complicated.