Author: Matt Bruenig

One of the meta-questions surrounding the oddly large volume of writing about transgender youth these days is the question of who makes decisions for children. Liberalism generally endorses the view that people should be able to make decisions for themselves. All of the expository devices of liberal philosophy take rational individuals as the fundamental unit… Continue reading Who Decides for Children?

Periodically, the Census puts out something it calls synthetic work-life earnings (SWLE) estimates. To derive these estimates, what you do is you find the current median income at age 25, age 26, age 27, age 28, and so on until age 64. Then you add all of those median incomes together. SWLE estimates are somewhat… Continue reading The Total Fertility Rate Is Kind of a Nonsense Statistic

Over at the Guardian, Martha Gill argues that a shortage of “Mr Rights” is why the birth rate has fallen so much in developed countries. Specifically, Gill states that “the dramatic rise in childless women – and their inability to find the right partner – is driving a good deal of the rich world’s birthrate… Continue reading Childlessness Did Not Cause Birth Rate Decline

In late 2021, I had solar panels installed onto the roof of my house. After some bureaucratic delays, the solar panels began producing electricity for me at the beginning of January 2022. I have been tracking the performance of the panels for the last year in order to assess what the financial impact of the… Continue reading Solar Panels Reduced My Electric Bill by $2,677 in 2022

A few days ago, Matt Yglesias tweeted the following comment about a New York Times piece on Joe Biden’s record on organized labor: What’s interesting to me about the tweet is not the underlying question of whether Joe Biden is good or bad on labor, but rather how it relates to some of the problems… Continue reading The Contradictions of Deliberative Democracy