Category: Uncategorized

While perusing welfare state websites today (one of my major hobbies), I happened up this lovely graphic from Switzerland. The title of the graphic is “Why Family Allowances?” The first panel shows two workers who are employed at the same factory and who receive the same wages. One of the workers goes home to a… Continue reading Swiss Welfare State Graphic

When explaining the design problems with the Supreme Court, people often point to the fact that the judges are unelected or the fact that they are appointed for life. While it is fair enough to dislike these design choices, it does not seem to me that either of them are fundamentally problematic in the sense… Continue reading The SCOTUS Design Is Gamed By Strategic Retirements

A couple of months ago, the NYT had a long piece about people waiting longer to have children. The age of first birth has been climbing steadily for decades and so there is nothing especially new in the piece. Nonetheless, because the topic pushes on certain sensitive cultural and family topics, it naturally generated a… Continue reading Delay and Grandparenthood

I have changed health insurance plans three times in the last 18 months. This was not because I wanted to, but because when people change jobs in America, they lose their insurance and have to sign up for new insurance. This involuntary insurance churn happens virtually non-stop to the half of Americans that use the… Continue reading Picking a Health Insurance Plan

The initial frenzy about critical race theory in schools seems to be giving way to a much more legible fight about what is taught in high school American history classes (Douthat, Snyder). This evolution makes sense as critical race theory — an area of legal and philosophical scholarship that excavates and then debates the relevance… Continue reading Why Care About History Class?