The Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t been good for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The virus “seriously affected” one-fifth of the projects in the China-centered infrastructure drive, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Djibouti, Laos, Maldives, Pakistan, and Zambia, among others, have asked China to renegotiate or forgive Belt and Road loans. Kyrgyzstan and Sri Lanka have already extracted concessions. But Belt and Road isn’t going away. China is making more rigorous lending decisions...

SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email The New York Times seems a bit conflicted about student loans. On Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story called “WAIT. I’ve got 80 grand in debt” featuring young people who don’t have the financial resources to strike out on their own. Inside, writer Adam Davidson wrote that “Nearly 45 percent of 25-year-olds … have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000.” The vividly told story continues in the vein of such documentaries...

SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email Photograph by Jeff Badger/Alamy It’s not surprising to find disconnected youth in impoverished metro areas such as Detroit. What is surprising is that the metro area with the highest share of disconnected youth in the U.S. is barely a metro area at all—it’s the “Inland Empire,” a vast area of urban sprawl with no central city that lies east of Los Angeles and Orange County. So reports Measure of America today in the second national study of...

SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email This chart helps explain why the U.S. housing market is looking a bit soft after strong growth in 2012 and 2013. It shows that the number of employed people aged 25 to 34—prime candidates for buying houses—is lower now than it was in the 1980s. It’s hard to expect much of a lift for housing amid a dearth of fresh, real demand—not just demand from investors and speculators. Demographics is hardly the only factor. Higher mortgage rates pose a strong...

SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email Photograph by Paramount via Everett Collection In a TED Talk last year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology research scientist Skylar Tibbits vigorously shook a flask full of small plastic objects, causing them to link with each other into the shape of a deadly polio virus. Tibbits, a TED fellow, laid out a vision in which objects could self-assemble and then change their shape on command or in response to stimuli such as heat and pressure. In other...