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Netflix is currently streaming The Last Blockbuster, a movie about the rise and fall of the monopoly video rental giant. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the movie, including a former executive explaining that the company did not really get caught flat-footed by services like Netflix but was instead just financially mismanaged to the… Continue reading The Communal Feeling of Monopoly

Over at Twitter, Matt Yglesias shared my last post alongside the observation that it is weird that one of the biggest proponents of the welfare state in the policy game is “officially a socialist for Twitter feud purposes.” In the spirit of bringing the old blogging back, I figured I’d use it as a peg… Continue reading Socialism and the Welfare State

In beginner socialist circles, you see a strangely large amount of discussion about the difference between private property and personal property. This seems to be in significant part because certain kinds of people are partial to rhetoric like “abolish private property,” which they then need to walk back because that’s not actually what they want… Continue reading The Private Property and Personal Property Distinction

The discourse is ablaze with commentary about the CDC’s recommendation to temporarily halt the use of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. The reason for the recommendation is that six women developed a rare blood-clotting disease shortly after receiving the vaccine. The recommendation does not apply to the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, which use a different mechanism to… Continue reading Contracting Covid Is Like Getting an 84% Efficacy Vaccine

This post was originally intended for the launch of the People’s Policy Project website. But as that is running behind schedule, I figure I will post it here. The Success Sequence is back! The ad-hoc anti-poverty process first endorsed by Isabell Sawhill and Ron Haskins at the Brookings Institute has been picked up by Brad… Continue reading The Success Sequence Is About Cultural Beefs Not Poverty