Assorted Links Friday

Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming.

Emerging from the great stagnation:

Since the early 1970s, Americans have seen disappointing levels of economic growth, productivity growth, and apparently technological progress, at least compared to the immediate postwar decades. However, there seem to be new reasons for optimism. As the COVID-19 pandemic begins to recede, short-term economic projections are extremely optimistic, and 2020 was an impressive year for technological progress featuring rapid vaccine innovation, the use of AI for discovering new antibiotics, positive developments regarding nuclear fusion, and a new age of human spaceflight for the United States. So is the great stagnation really over? And if so, what does that mean?

March was the hottest month in housing history.

Five charts that show how dramatically the pandemic affected our spending.

Around 4 million adults aren’t looking for jobs, not because they’re scarce but because of worries about catching the coronavirus.