Tag: government policy
Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest Country
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One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot
When Milton Friedman Ran the Show
Well before Milton Friedman died in 2006 at 94, he was the rare economist who had become a household name. A longtime professor at the University of Chicago, he had been writing a column for Newsweek for a decade when he won the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics. Then, in 1980, his PBS series, Free to Choose—a didactic, yet not at all dry, paean to the free market—made the diminutive, bald economist something of a star.
The weirdness
15 Readers on How They’re Cutting Costs
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked readers for their best tips on cutting costs in times of economic strain—and, looking back on their lives, what they might consider to have been their most wasteful spending.
Denise leads us off this week as
Big Tech Founders Are America’s False Idols
My first job out of UCLA was in the analyst program at Morgan Stanley, in the 1980s. Like most of my analyst class, I had no idea what investment banking was—only that we were at the helm of the capitalist bobsled and could make a lot of money. We paid scant consideration to the wider role finance played in society. We were charged with birthing the apex predator of the capitalist species, the public company. Our economic mission, we
Courts Should Be More Skeptical About Religious Beliefs
It was no surprise back in March when the Supreme Court ruled that Texas had to oblige a death-row inmate’s wish for the company of a pastor who would pray with him and touch him as the lethal cocktail dripped into his veins. Such execution-chamber companionship was “part of my faith,” the inmate claimed, and if anything could penetrate the Court’s wall of indifference toward the death penalty, it figured to be religion. The vote was 8–1.
But there