Bruce Sacerdote‘s NBER Working Paper, “Fifty Years of Growth in American Consumption, Income, and Wages” provides a nice update on the measurement of CPI Bias. The punchline should be obvious, but it’s great to hear such an eminent economist say it: “Meaningful growth in consumption for below median income families has occurred even in a prolonged period of increasing income inequality, increasing consumption inequality and a decreasing share of national income accruing to labor.”
Tag: prison
Universal Basic Income is a Totalitarian State’s Dream Scheme
Andrew Yang’s small but solid polling in the Democratic Party’s 2020 nomination race shows that “Universal Basic Income” has gone from a fringe idea to an idea with a foothold in the popular consciousness.
Michael Drejka is a Political Prisoner
Just over a year ago, Michael Drejka fatally shot Markeis McGlockton in a Clearwater, Florida convenience store parking lot. On August 23, a jury found Drejka guilty of manslaughter. Drejka should never have been charged with a crime.
Sneering at “Conspiracy Theories” is a Lazy Substitute for Seeking the Truth
After three years of continuously beating the drum for its own now-discredited conspiracy theory — that the President of the United States conspired with Vladimir Putin’s regime to rig the 2016 presidential election — the Times doesn’t have much standing to whine about, or sneer at, “conspiracy theories and hyperpartisanship.”
Questioning the Back-To-School Default
Back-to-school time is upon us. My Instagram feed is starting to fill with first-day photos as a new school year begins this week in some parts of the country. For those of us who homeschool, we often get asked, “So, why did you decide to homeschool?” We respond with various personal and educational reasons, including the top motivator for homeschoolers on national surveys: “concern about the school environment.” What always strikes me, though, is that parents who send their kids to school never get asked this question. When was the last time someone asked a parent, “So, why did you decide to send your child to school?”
The Anti-Gun Bigots’ Silly Strawman
Anti-gun bigots have a “new” favorite strawman. They demand to know why the right to own and carry weapons (they’ll sometimes mischaracterize this as “Second Amendment rights”) is more important than the right to not be murdered. The dishonesty– or ignorance– displayed by such a question is absolutely stunning.
Human Sacrifice: A Grand Old American Political Tradition
Whether you support the death penalty or not — I don’t because I prefer limited government and the power to kill disarmed prisoners in cold blood and with premeditation is by definition unlimited government — it’s worthwhile to ask: Why? More to the point, why now? Politics, that’s why.
The Bayesian Prisoners’ Dilemma
One of the smartest people I know routinely sends me pro-“social justice” links on Twitter. As a result, I think even less of the movement than I previously did. If even he fails to defend his view effectively, the view is probably truly devoid of merit.
Homeschooling, Ideology, and The “Culture War”
Yes, some people use home education to teach their kids harmful lies while insulating them from competing ideas (truth, reality, and ethics). That’s bad. They should not do this to vulnerable children. Yet, government schools do the exact same thing— even teaching some of the same harmful lies the worst of the homeschoolers are teaching.
Locked Up: How the Modern Prison-Industrial Complex Puts So Many Americans in Jail
For American society as a whole, the prison-industrial complex has created a perverse incentive structure. Bad laws drive out respect for good laws because there are just so many laws (not to mention rules, regulations, and other prohibitions used by federal prosecutors to pin crimes on just about anyone). How did we get here?