The Federal Reserve released another report on household debt in the past week or so. The report’s detailing of student debt trends has received considerable attention, including from the New York Times. Since our society loves to tell this hilarious story about our institutions of higher education being factories [...]

Matt Yglesias had a post about left economic mistakes a few days ago. I responded in turn, focusing only on how it is completely legitimate to be worried about productivity-enhancing layoffs that happen within a social structure that does little to ensure those laid off continue to do well. I argued [...]

Matt Yglesias has a post today explaining that the only way to increase someone’s real income is by decreasing someone else’s real income. He rightly points out that some on the left are confused about this. They tend to think about jacking up wages only in terms of the workers who got a [...]

Suppose that the following things are basically true:

Good jobs go to those who have the most credentials, be that degrees, experience, or otherwise. The supply of good jobs in our economy is scarce and basically not growing. The number of people amassing credentials to compete for those jobs is growing.

If these are true, [...]

I am tired of seeing a certain argument against the minimum wage that makes absolutely no sense. According to this argument — which Christina Romer is now guilty of making — we should not increase the minimum wage because increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit is an even better way to improve the [...]

If you don’t want to wade through all of the articles about a possible minimum wage increase, here is the primary argument in favor of such an increase. A modest minimum wage increase at this moment:

will increase the wages of low-income workers, will not cause employers to lay off workers, will make [...]

As I’ve mentioned before, I think the best way to tackle inequality and poverty is directly through cash programs. I am not opposed to programs that try to manipulate market wages in some way, unions and minimum wages for instance. But strategies focused on market wages are very messy and almost certainly inadequate [...]

There are good arguments for directly subsidizing public transit. Here I analyze whether directly subsidizing public transit is a good thing to do for distributive reasons.

The best way to go about this is with an example. Suppose we have a public transit system that is entirely financed by fares. Someone proposes that we drop [...]

I think running a campaign against the Keystone pipeline is a good thing. It is a tangible project that climate activists can use to bring attention to the the issue of climate change, attention badly needed. That is, Keystone has great propaganda potential, and I use propaganda non-pejoratively here. To win the long game, it [...]

Freddie’s going after the identitarians again. At the root of his complaint here is the slipperiness of identitarian deference. Roughly, identitarian deference is the idea that privileged individuals should defer to the opinions and views of oppressed individuals, especially on topics relevant to those individuals’ oppression. It sounds straightforward, but can [...]