Contrary to popular belief, however, market failure theory is also a reproach to every existing government. How so? Because market failure theory recommends specific government policies – and actually-existing governments rarely adopt anything like them.
Tag: health
School Security Is Now a $3 Billion Dollar Annual Industry
US taxpayers spend nearly $700 billion each year on K-12 public schooling, and that eye-popping sum shows no sign of slowing. In fact, as more non-academic programs are adopted in schools across the country, the price tag for mass schooling continues to swell even as achievement lags.
On Co-Sleeping
We are co-sleepers and room-sharers in my family. We started our family bedroom in early 2013, before my youngest was born, and several years before we started renting our house out on Airbnb (2016) and doing some light traveling. This arrangement is how humans slept for the entire history of our species (and before, of course) up until 200 years ago.
New Year: The Beautiful Minimalism of a Blank Slate
Let’s imagine this new year as a blank slate. It’s like an empty house: what would we like to put in it? This is a kind of minimalism. We can start afresh, tossing out everything and only placing in this empty house what we find most important, and nothing more.
Ego Dropping: The Magic of Breaking Free from Self-Concern
What happens once you drop the ego and drop into a wide open, gentle, loving awareness? Magic. You don’t have to run to comfort and away from discomfort, you don’t have to protect your self-image from others, you don’t have to defend yourself or worry about failure or being judged.
Training in Uncertainty
I’ve been training in uncertainty for a few years now. I realized that the people I coach and teach are just like me: we feel shaky, scared, anxious, uncomfortable when we are faced with massive uncertainty, when the ground is pulled out from under our feet.
Organize Social Media Around Your Quests, Not Yourself
Social media is so often full of stress, trolls, self-aggrandizement, and comparison. If you’re the kind of person who reads this blog, you probably agree. Maybe like me you’ve mostly let your social media accounts lie, or killed your newsfeed, or something of the sort. I’m still a big believer in what social media can be at its best. And I’ve seen a few shining exceptions of online communities that – gasp – are healthy and positive places.
How to Get Good at Dealing With Massive Change
We all go through times of massive change: a divorce, death in the family, change of job (or loss of job), moving to a new home or city, turbulence in your relationships, political chaos, and all kinds of uncertainties and demands on your time and attention. It can be overwhelming and distressing. But what if we could get good at dealing with all kinds of changes? It would open us up in times of change, so that these times can be times of deepening, growth, and even joy.
Gratis is Not Great
Almost every psychologically normal human is delighted to here about products everyone can enjoy free of charge. “The schools are free!” “Health care is free!” “Lunch is free!” According to basic welfare economics, however, gratis goods are almost automatically inefficient. Unless the marginal social cost of the product miraculously happens to be zero, setting a price of zero leads to socially wasteful behavior.
Without Profit, There Would Be No Investment
Among the numerous fallacies embraced by socialism, one of the most notable is completely ignoring the value of investment and risk. Socialists love to talk about the value of “labor” and how profit is made on the backs of “labor,” but they ignore the fundamentals of human nature and of how the market actually works.