I recently heard someone compare the modern student experience in the United States to indentured service. This comparison seems hyperbolic on first analysis, but I want to take it seriously. To what extent, if any, is the process of taking out student loans or working unpaid internships similar to the experience of poor 18th century opportunity-seekers in the United States?
Continue reading “Do We Treat College Students like Indentured Servants?”
I’ve had a couple requests to do an examination of the Obamacare rollout. I haven’t commented to this point primarily because the returns are still early. There’s a lot of additional data that will come out in the coming months and a lot of unknowns–what will healthcare.gov look like a month from now, let alone by the end of March, the current sign-up deadline? Nevertheless, there are some useful things that can be said not merely about the rollout, but about the way in which the rollout is being covered in the popular press.
There’s a lot of talk lately by Summers, Krugman, and others that we may be in a period of secular stagnation, in which the rate at which the economy grows in the wealthiest countries falls substantially and permanently. Observing this, some are quick to point to demography as the cause. If populations are not growing as swiftly as they once did, it would indeed make sense that growth rates would fall. Under this thinking, slower growth isn’t a problem, because per capita growth is theoretically still strong–the economy is growing slower in aggregate, but it’s growing at the same speed relative to the size of the population. The trouble is that on further investigation, the demographic explanation does not sufficiently account for what’s going on. Not only are growth rates slowing, but per capita growth rates are slowing, and have been slowing for a while, beginning far before the recent economic crisis. This throws Kurzweil’s theory of accelerating returns into doubt, and undermines the central precept underlying our capitalist society–that the labors of this generation today are meant to make the next generation’s lives go better. If stagnation is the way of the future, it’s a much more serious problem than we presently recognize, one that ultimately threatens not merely our dreams of better lives for ourselves, but the very stability of our civilization.
Continue reading “Resisting Stagnation and the New Dark Age”
One of the biggest problems with our politics at present is the tendency for our politicians to be better glad-handers and fundraisers than they are statesmen. They know more about winning votes than they do about crafting good laws, and the former skill does not sufficiently track the latter. So what can we do to ensure our leaders have the knowledge and skills necessary to do their jobs well? I have offered a comprehensive solution in the past, one that requires a full reorientation of the structure of our political system, but today I’d like to consider something that, while more modest, would be much easier to do right away–certify our statesmen.
Today I ran across a bizarre, fascinating tidbit from Glenn Beck in which Beck attempts to use moral relativism to defend the Tea Party view that we need to return to the principles of America’s founders. This is an interesting formulation of the position because it is so very different from what we usually see–here we have a conservative invoking moral relativism–and for that reason, I want to analyze it today.
Continue reading “Glenn Beck’s Relativist Appeal to the Founders”
Benjamin Studebaker 