Campaign finance reform zerglings
David Kaib has a great post on his blog covering the Gilens and Page article from April that concluded there was little connection between what the majority of people want and what economic elites...
View ArticleVisualizing running back success rates
The standard way of discussing running back success is citing yards per carry, which works fairly well for the most part but undersells certain aspects of a running back’s value. To get around this, we...
View ArticleMisinterpretations of Census data and poverty in the South
Let me start off by saying that I might be the US Census Bureau’s biggest cheerleader in Washington. I love their surveys, I love their longitudinal studies, and I wish they would get more funding from...
View ArticleRage against the dying of the light
The most radical statute enacted in the United States in the last century was H.R. 7260, passed by the 74th Congress and signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on August 14, 1935. The Social...
View ArticlePersonal Endowment Funds: a complement to UBI
In The Left Alternative, Unger suggests a nationalized personal endowment fund available to everyone at birth. The fund would be available to draw upon at various times (paying for school, a house,...
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How inequality is the vampire of our lives
On one hand, the ever-increasing lifespan of our species is perhaps the single greatest testament to the rapid advances and innovations of the last two centuries of human existence. On the other hand,...
View ArticleThe overpopulation fallacy
As I read the new Naomi Klein book on climate change (a topic I know woefully little about), it struck me that Klein dismisses the popular argument of overpopulation as part of the world’s climate...
View ArticleHold up! Marriage and fertility are still related
Robert VerBruggen has a thought-provoking post at RealClearPolicy today about the relationship between marriage and fertility internationally, or at least in large economies (it’s fairly rare to see...
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Loan defaults and gentrification in DC
Last Sunday, the Washington Post featured a cover story on loan default and delinquency for buildings with affordable housing units across the district. The typical delinquent loan — among a list of 43...
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Ranking and reviewing fantasy series
I’ve meant to write some recommendations on fantasy series for awhile and have finally gotten around to it. I’ve organized them into tiers. There are certainly a ton of fantasy series that fall into...
View ArticleAbout that demographic shift to a multiracial future…
The newest entrant in the cottage industry of books predicting our demographic future is Diversity Explosion by William Frey (no relation, I think, to Lord Walder Frey of The Twins). While I have yet...
View ArticleThe casino dilemma
Casinos are attractive as an economic development project because they have improved the economic situations of certain areas in the past – Las Vegas and Atlantic City are obvious, and many American...
View ArticleVisualizing Social Security’s role in lifting millions out of poverty
Social Security is by far the most effective antipoverty program in the history of the United States. In addition to keeping millions of seniors out of poverty, the program also helps children and...
View ArticleInventing race
I’ll just come out and say it: Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race is the best work of history and critical race theory I’ve ever read. It cleared up a great deal of fuzziness I had around...
View ArticleGrandma on the Barricades
Every day, headlines like “What to do when your financial adviser retires” or “How retiring abroad could affect your long-term-care insurance” grace the retirement planning pages of the New York Times....
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