The original extraction
In 1879, Henry George published Progress and Poverty and asked a question mainstream economics has spent 145 years not answering: why does poverty persist alongside growth? His answer was land....
The slow way
Look, I know what Sweden sounds like at this point. I know we cite it constantly. But here is why we keep going back: in 1951, Sweden’s top marginal rate was 58 percent, union membership stood at 70 percent, and the Gini coefficient was among the lowest in the...
The shaking off of burdens
In 594 BCE, Athens was tearing itself apart. Debt had turned free farmers into serfs. The city elected Solon as archon with extraordinary powers and he did something no ruling class has voluntarily repeated at scale since: he canceled the debts....
The teenagers who scored well
Bhutan, 1972. The fourth king declared Gross National Happiness more important than Gross National Product. 33 indicators. Nine domains. A survey so detailed it took five hours.
Bhutan, 2014. WHO report: highest youth suicide rate in South Asia....
Fifty-eight cents per cubic meter
In 2015, Sorek desalination plant opened south of Tel Aviv. 624,000 cubic meters of drinking water per day from the Mediterranean, at 58 cents per cubic meter — half the cost of a decade earlier....
The bazaar where the merchandise is the law
Imagine signing a legal code the way you sign a terms of service. Scroll past the tort reform clause. Check the box on property rights. Opt out of capital gains tax. Click "I agree."
This sounds like science fiction....
The number
One thousand dollars a month. 258 million American adults. $3.1 trillion a year.
The entire federal discretionary budget in 2024 was $1.7 trillion. Total mandatory spending — Social Security, Medicare, everything — was $3.9 trillion....
Twenty-seven years of data
In 1997, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians opened a casino and began distributing profits to every enrolled member. $4,000 to $6,000 a year. No strings. No means test.
Twenty-seven years later: labor force participation did not decline....
The experiments that keep succeeding
Finland tried it. 2,000 people, two years. Participants were happier, less stressed, slightly more likely to find work. Parliament did not extend the program.
Stockton tried it. 125 residents, $500 a month....
The business card
On the day I got out, a woman handed me a business card. I was nineteen. I had been trafficked since fourteen. I did not own a phone. I did not have an address. I had not been to school in five years.
I did not know what a business card was for.
She was kind....
The pipeline
In 2016, a researcher documented the recruitment pathway for Cambodian men enslaved on Thai fishing vessels. A broker visited a village where average household income was $420 a year. He offered $300 a month — nine times the local wage. The men accepted....
Neither schedule F nor status quo
Look, I have worked in government for fourteen years and I have seen both failure modes from the inside. I have watched a career official slow-walk a lawful directive because she disagreed with the policy....
The tenure gap
Average tenure of a senior FDA regulator: 22 years. Average tenure of the political appointee nominally in charge: 18 months. Those two numbers explain more about American governance than either the phrase "deep state" or the phrase "public service" ever will....
Already dead but nobody filed the paperwork
In 2017, a cardiologist in Minneapolis retired at sixty-two with $4.2 million in savings and a paid-off house. Within eighteen months: depression, thirty pounds gained, drinking at lunch....
The Luddites were not wrong
On March 11, 1811, textile workers in Nottinghamshire smashed the stocking frames taking their jobs. The name became a slur. What gets left out: hand-loom weavers went from decent living in 1800 to destitution by 1830. A generation was destroyed....
What a place owes
My grandmother came to this country in 1951. Took the bus to a garment factory every morning for twenty-three years. Learned English watching soap operas. She would have had very little patience for anyone who told her borders were illegitimate....
The compound interest problem
Take $24,000 and $188,000. Go back to 1960. Apply the S&P 500’s historical average return to both figures. Compound for sixty-five years. You land within striking distance of the current gap.
We are economists....
Four times the national average
That is the rate at which Nigerian Americans hold postgraduate degrees. Ghanaian, Kenyan, Ethiopian Americans all exceed the native-born rate. They are Black. Subject to the same profiling. Not exempt from American racism....
The arithmetic
Combined student debt: $87,000. Median rent for a two-bedroom: $1,850. Childcare: $12,000 to $22,000 a year. One earns $48,000, the other $55,000. After taxes, debt service, rent, and insurance, they have roughly $1,400 a month for everything else....
The altitude principle
In 1931, Pope Pius XI articulated what Catholic political philosophy had been circling for centuries: it is a grave evil to assign to a higher association what lesser organizations can do. Not decentralization — subsidiarity....