With Hurricane Isaac bearing down on the gulf coast, news outlets are interviewing non-evacuating residents in the path of the storm. Residents do not evacuate for a diversity of reasons, but one prominent reason is that many do not have the means: not enough money and nowhere else to go. We’ve seen this phenomenon before… Continue reading Hurricane evacuations and the capability approach
Author: Matt Bruenig
Corporations are primarily intellectual property rentiers
Gavin Mueller has a great article in the summer issue of Jacobin Magazine about piracy, and at one point drops this jaw-dropping statistic: “Intellectual property makes up 80 percent of the net worth of US corporations and 60 percent of their exports.” I ran the statistic down and found that it apparently originated from an… Continue reading Corporations are primarily intellectual property rentiers
The never-ending libertarian quest to appear clever
I have been following an amusing back-and-forth between Bryan Caplan (I, II, III) and Matt Yglesias about Bastiat’s That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen. Initially, Caplan points out that individuals often support left-leaning economic policies for wrong reasons, and that he likes Bastiat because his tidy little stories (e.g. the parable… Continue reading The never-ending libertarian quest to appear clever
The obscene suffering of black youth
I write often about poverty, inequality, and other kinds of suffering in the United States. I usually write in general terms about the country as a whole, but it deserves mentioning that this sort of suffering is not at all evenly distributed throughout the population. Some racial groups face much higher levels of economic and… Continue reading The obscene suffering of black youth
A defect of Randian and Nietzschean conservatism
With Paul Ryan’s comical devotion to Ayn Rand in the news again, perhaps it would be worthwhile to discuss Randian and Nietzsche conservatism. I bring Nietzsche in because Ayn Rand was not an original thinker: she just clumsily channeled Nietzschean ideas and put them into long, boring novels. The jumping off point for this brand… Continue reading A defect of Randian and Nietzschean conservatism