Tag: United States
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Explainer Journalism Needs Better Explanations
Corey Robin got some nice jabs in at the current class of younger non-academic pundits a while back: A lot of these pundits and reporters are younger, part of the Vox generation of journalism. Unlike the older generation of journalists, whose calling card was that they know how to pick up a phone and track down a…
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The Conservative War on Prisons, etc.
Via Metafilter’s kliuless (who definitely has a kliu): The Conservative War on Prisons: “Right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform. Is this how progress will happen in a hyper-polarized world?” Raise The Crime Rate: “Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that…
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The Season of Political Irrelevance
It is my considered opinion that the next three months will involve no serious deliberations regarding substantive public policy. Though readership and viewership for such matters will be at its highest, none of the things discussed will be discussed in a way that comports with public reason or with anything like the goal of exchanging…
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The Great Stagnation and the Possibilities of Redistribution
Tyler Cowen’s new e-pamphlet (The Great Stagnation) takes on the slowing gains to be had from social and technological progress and offers an interesting explanation of some of the trends that many people see as troubling: the flat arc of median incomes since 1973 and the apparently universal surprise that the last decade offered no…
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How Taxation Effects Income Share (Not Much)
Last week, Greg Mankiw posted this graph without comment: I thought there was something weird about the graph, and it’s been nagging at me. For one thing, it compares the bottom four quintiles to the top 5 percent of Americans. For another, it ignores non-federal taxation. (State and local taxes are more difficult to calculate,…
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Weekend Reading
Can Liberals Take Their Own Side in an Argument? (PDF) Robert Talisse takes on Robert Frost and Mozert v. Hawkins. Epistemic dependence is unavoidable because every individual has limited cognitive resources. However, this dependence in itself is not a bad thing; great stores of knowledge and information that could not be produced by a single…