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It’s not surprising that Geoff Shullenberger doesn’t know very much about me. After all, I only learned of his existence late last month when I tweeted an excerpt of an article in Compact Magazine. In the piece, someone named Zach Mottl argued that MAGA policy should be focused on the “America First” principles of “protecting… Continue reading The Midwit Theory of Geoff Shullenberger

In high school and college, I became very interested in economic philosophy, specifically theories of distributive justice that seek to establish criteria for determining whether a particular distribution of resources within a society is just. When I started this website in 2011, I wrote a lot about these topics, including these two pieces about desert… Continue reading Desert and Capitalism Again

The discourse is full of argument but mostly devoid of argumentation theory. Most people read arguments impressionistically in much the same way that most people read novels, listen to music, or watch movies. There are people who have learned to technically dissect these forms and who, as a result, consume them much differently and can… Continue reading Dissecting My Recent Argument (Are Error Theories Offensive?)

Societies have grappled with concerns over low or declining fertility since as far back as Ancient Rome. More recently, these concerns have been discussed most intensely in places like Japan, which has had sub-replacement fertility since the 1970s, South Korea, which has the lowest fertility in the world, and in parts of Europe where fertility… Continue reading The Fertility Question

Matt Yglesias has a piece at Slow Boring where he criticizes the idea that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted by Clinton, is a major driver of working class disaffection with the Democratic party. Chronology Yglesias’s first critique is about the chronology of it. NAFTA was enacted in the 1990s while this most… Continue reading Yglesias on the Politics of NAFTA