Some on the right say National Public Radio has been on fair-and-balanced behavior since the GOP made its semi-annual kabuki run at NPR’s funding. Funding still intact, of course. It’s a Republican ritual. The threat, not the cut. As for… Continue Reading
The late preeminent liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith once complained in The Affluent Society that where Democrats once stood for an issue of great importance in emphasizing production, they lost that issue by misunderstanding why production was important. For Galbraith,… Continue Reading
Despite modern liberalism’s sweeping scope, no one seems to know quite what it is. Liberalism appeared somewhere in the sixteenth century—“St. George, in the guise of Rationality,” as Kenneth Minogue puts it—to slay the dragons of despotic kingship and religious… Continue Reading
I’ve had this tab sitting open on my computer for the past two weeks with the intention of forking over the $5 and reading Steven Levitt’s 1995 paper, The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence From Prison… Continue Reading
Lots of people pounced on President Obama for his comment the other day suggesting ATMs kill jobs. Here’s the President: “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient… Continue Reading
I found this post from Adam Ozimek interesting, explaining why drastically increasing wages has consequences that are, even if unintended, not unpredictable. The response at Democracy in America complains that Mr. Ozimek’s post “doesn’t seem to be taking [the higher-wage… Continue Reading
The Public Religion Research Institute finds that most Americans are unable to comport capitalism with Christianity: Jamelle Bouie nods in agreement: As it happens, they are absolutely correct; the Gospels are incredibly short on issues we associate with modern "values… Continue Reading
In a previous post, I explained that one of the underlying sources of disagreement about basic economic policy is that first world economies are both theoretically and practically complex, and thus may be quite difficult to reconcile with one’s particular… Continue Reading
In a previous post drawing the distinction between procedural and substantive justice, I noted my objection to the idea that procedural fairness ought to be subverted in order to guarantee predetermined outcomes. However—and although I predicted that most Americans would… Continue Reading