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When I wrote the Family Fun Pack 3 years ago, I was interested in not just proposing a suite of child benefits for the US, but also in writing a paper that was based in a certain kind of universalist welfare state theory that you rarely see in think tank papers. The norm for think… Continue reading The Argument in the Family Fun Pack

Inflation is up and there is a debate about why this is. One explanation is that consumer demand increased a lot because people are using their pandemic transfer payments and pandemic savings to buy goods and services. Producers have responded to this demand in part by ramping up production, e.g. by adding 5.8 million jobs… Continue reading The Inflation Question

I entered Boston University Law School in the Fall of 2011. Like most law schools during the heyday of blogging, BU’s prospective students website featured a handful of blogs that were written by current students. To get a blog on the site, you had to be selected among various applicants, and, if you were selected,… Continue reading Carmen Ortiz Has Blood On Her Hands

Comparing incomes across countries poses certain difficulties: incomes are paid in different currencies, products have different prices, tax levels are different, and benefit levels are different. Many years ago, economists came up with a decent-enough way to cut through most of these problems: figure out the prices in local currency amounts for a given consumption… Continue reading How To Compare Incomes Across Countries

Someone sent me this piece today from Charlotte Bancroft at The Bellows. The piece is titled “The Consumerist Mediocrities of Millennial Socialism” and then subtitled “Karl Marx opposed the wonkish, empirical nature of bourgeois socialism. So why do so many Millennial socialists celebrate it?” The title is whatever. The subtitle is utterly baffling. Karl Marx… Continue reading Marx Was an Obsessive Wonk