social policy
Does universal basic income actually work?: Mutual aid
Thirty days March 15, 2020. The federal government told everyone to stay home. The check didn’t arrive until April 15. In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson organized food distribution to 10,000 families in two weeks.... Does universal basic income actually work?: Work-identity defenders
The parking lot at 5 a.m. March 6, 2019. Last Chevrolet Cruze off the line at Lordstown Assembly. Workers honked horns in the parking lot like a funeral with confetti. The plant had operated fifty-three years. At peak, 10,000 across three shifts. By noon the lot was empty.... Why is family structure weakening?: Pluralists
The alien civilization is the nuclear family It arrived in the late 1940s, powered by the GI Bill, FHA mortgages, and the Interstate Highway Act. Before those programs, the American family looked nothing like the picture: in 1900, over 20 percent of households included boarders,... Is tradition a resource, a trap, or something else?: Progressives
The grandmother’s hands On a September morning in 1994, a nine-year-old girl in rural Yunnan had her feet bound by her grandmother. The grandmother soaked strips of cloth in warm water, folded the girl’s four smaller toes under each foot, and wrapped them so tightly the bones... If everyone got a basic income, would they flourish or check out?: Conditional pragmatists
The number $1,000 a month. 258 million adults. $3.1 trillion a year. The entire federal discretionary budget in 2024 was $1.7 trillion. We have run this seventeen ways. The number does not become smaller. It becomes differently large. We are the spreadsheet people.... If everyone got a basic income, would they flourish or check out?: Work-identity defenders
The alarm clock The last Cruze rolled off the Lordstown line on March 6, 2019. Workers honked horns and set off fireworks like it was a funeral with confetti. The plant had operated fifty-three years. At peak, 10,000 across three shifts. What happened next was not unemployment.... If everyone got a basic income, would they flourish or check out?: The Story
The transmission A woman in Stockton, California, used her first $500 guaranteed income payment to fix her Honda Civic’s transmission. The car got her to a nursing assistant certification program she had been deferring for two years.... What is justice for?: The Story
The forgiveness next door In 2018, Oshea Israel knocked on Mary Johnson’s door in Minneapolis. Twenty years earlier he had shot her only son Laramiun in the head at a party. He was sixteen. Israel served seventeen years.... Mechanism Design for Harm Reduction. I’ve just posted a new paper on SSRN:
Mechanism Design for Harm Reduction: Game Theory and Social Choice for Carceral MOUD and Recovery Institutions
👉 Read it here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6173484
The core question: Why do our institutions so often default to punitive, carceral responses to addiction, even when harm reduction and MOUD improve health and reduce mortality?
Using tools from mechanism design and social choice, the paper argues that the “bad” equilibria we see in overdose and addiction policy are not random failures. They emerge from incentive structures that reward visible punishment, central control, and risk‑avoidant bureaucracy over decentralized, evidence‑based care.
A few themes that may interest folks in economics, public policy, and health:
How carceral logics get embedded in funding rules, compliance regimes, and performance metrics.
Why local actors can be systematically steered away from harm reduction, even when they know it works.
What institutional reforms could realign incentives toward treatment, recovery, and community‑based support.
If you work in health policy, criminal justice, behavioral health, or are simply interested in how mechanism design can illuminate real‑world institutional failures, I’d welcome your feedback, questions, and critiques.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6173484I have vague memories of some economists looking at "the best way to deal with homelessness is to give people houses" and "the best way to deal with poverty is to give people cash", and the real world trials of those ideas seeming to back them.... Reproductive rights
I have a really hard time understanding why folks support stripping reproductive rights before we’ve tackled better support for children and families in the US....