Erick Erickson and Women

Erick Erickson is editor-in-chief of Redstate.com, a conservative blogging website. The other day, Erickson went on FOX, where had a rather controversial reaction to the recent statistic that shows that 40% of mothers are now the highest earners in their respective households in the United States. He said this:

When you look at biology–when you look at the natural world–the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.

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Obama and Personal Responsibility

Last weekend Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at the historically all-black, all-male Morehouse College. Why we still have colleges that are segregated on race/gender lines is beyond me, but that’s not my topic today. My topic is what Obama said and the positive reaction it has gotten, despite the indisputable fact that if someone like Mitt Romney went to Morehouse College and gave the speech Obama gave, we would all be apoplectic.

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The Lottery and Reverse Redistribution

I recently read a Salon article by Natasha Lennard drawing attention to the statistical tendency for lottery tickets to be purchased in quite disproportionate numbers by the poorest in society. The article brings up several interesting statistics–households that earn $13,000 or less in the United States spend an average of 9% of their income on lottery tickets, people who feel poor buy twice as many lottery tickets as those who do not, and those earning less than $40,000 in South Carolina make up 54% of the state’s lottery players despite only constituting 28% of its total population. This brings forward to my mind the question of whether or not it is ethical to permit the poor to voluntarily give significant portions of their income to the government so that statistically negligible numbers of them might get extremely lucky and hit it rich.

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Critiquing Malthus and Overpopulation Theory

Recently I have seen a resurgence of Malthusian thinking. Thomas Malthus, the late 18th and early 19th century British economist, put forth An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued that the world was becoming overpopulated at an unsustainable rate. Malthus’ ideas have come in and out of fashion since the early 19th century. Having heard a few people recently make Malthusian arguments, I would like to put forth a few compelling reasons to continue to disbelieve them.

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