Author: Benjamin Studebaker

Welfare and Wage Slavery

Recently, Barack Obama was accused of “gutting welfare reform” in some of Mitt Romney’s ads of which the following is an example:

This has been widely recognised as a distortion; PolitiFact calls it a “pants on fire” lie. In reality, Obama is allowing state governments to waive certain parts of the welfare reform’s performance measures in favour of alternatives, provided that there is evidence that the state is achieving the principle aim of the reforms–putting people on welfare to work.

That’s all widely known at this point. What I’d like to talk about today is why we really would be better off if Obama had in fact gutted American welfare reform. It’s a bold claim, and not a very politically popular one in the times in which we live, but hear me out. I propose that a welfare system with no demand or encouragement to reenter the workforce is in fact better for the capitalist system.

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Bill Nye the Anti-Creationism Guy

A few days ago, before it went viral, I happened upon this video from Bill Nye (of Bill Nye the Science Guy) commenting on creationism:

 

The video certainly struck me as interesting, but not particularly controversial. Big Think, the YouTube channel that put out the video, frequently posts intellectually engaging videos that encourage viewers to reassess their ideas or consider new ones, and videos like this one are what I’ve come to expect from them as a subscriber. However, a few days later I discovered that it had attained over a million views, and as I check today the count is over three million. I’d like to discuss Nye’s comments and why they seem to have struck a nerve, for good or for bad, with so many people.

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Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech Analysed

Paul Ryan’s convention speech went over pretty well on the right in the United States. Jim Geraghty of the National Review had this to say about it:

 This speech, and his warmth and sense of connection when delivering it, almost unnerved me. I started worrying that I was seeing what I wanted to see, that I was hyping a pretty good speech delivered pretty well in my own mind. Except my Twitter feed was exploding. The delegates were going nuts. And it just seemed to be getting better and better as it went on. Conversational, direct, funny, detailed . . . this was Reaganesque, guys. I was a kid when Reagan was president, so I got lulled into a false sense of what American presidents were — I thought they were all that good. This felt like that.

You can read his full post here. Perhaps this was indeed the case for Mr. Geraghty. I myself was struck by the sheer number of untrue, openly fallacious claims in it, and today I would like to highlight them.

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The Demise of the Scientific Breakthrough?

Yesterday, I ran across a new paper from economist Robert Gordon that suggests that long-term innovation and technological development may be slowing, at least in the case of breakthrough technologies. I found Gordon’s paper interesting, and would like to use today’s post to discuss it and its possible future implications.

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