May 24, 2023
Don’t Be So Shocked That People Still Want Marriage and Children
Four writers at Curbed, the millennial-run, New York-centric real estate site, undertook an ambitious project. To put a price tag on living in New York, they asked young people to describe their ideal life and then tried to calculate how much it would cost. “We decided to put a price tag on the dream lives of a wide…
May 23, 2023
Will Biden Cross a Line on Poverty?
A new report from the National Academy of Sciences seeks to redefine poverty. The NAS presents the effort as a matter of science: “An accurate measure of poverty is necessary to fully understand how the economy is performing across all segments of the population and to assess the effects of government policies on communities and families.” But…
May 23, 2023
An Unexpected Role for AI in the Workplace
WHEN MICHAEL POLANYI, the underappreciated twentieth-century physicist, philosopher, and economist, is remembered nowadays, it is most often for having observed that much of human knowledge, in both practical and abstract matters, is “tacit” rather than explicit. Most of what we know is not written or verbalized anywhere, yet it nonetheless exists as a foundation for our consciously…
May 23, 2023
Public Housing Should Have Work Rules, Too
Thanks to the debt-ceiling showdown, Republicans appear to have a fighting chance to add a work requirement for those receiving SNAP (food stamp) and Medicaid benefits. They should also turn their attention to another major federal program that fosters dependency and discourages work: housing assistance. Local experiments across the country suggest that requiring those in…
May 23, 2023
Biden Courts Another Mortgage Crisis
The Biden administration is making moves that could imperil the safety of the housing finance system. Recent mortgage pricing changes, which have generally decreased fees for borrowers with lower credit scores and increased fees for those with higher scores, have rightly garnered public outcry, but they are the tip of the iceberg. The administration’s other…
May 19, 2023
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: America Today
With the expiration of the Covid-era rule justifying the expulsion of illegal border-crossers on public health grounds, the Biden Administration, to the dismay of progressives, has gone Trumpish. Absent “Title 42,” Citizen and Immigration Services will now “presume individuals who entered the United States unlawfully are ineligible for asylum.” This turnabout brings us back to…
May 17, 2023
The Wrong Immigration at the Wrong Time
The ending of Title 42, has again moved immigration to center stage. With foreign-born as a share of the U.S. population at historic levels, matching the early twentieth century, there is intense conflict over desired policies. Supporters of continued expansive southern border immigration argue that their numbers are crucial to counter the labor shortages that have contributed…
May 12, 2023
Follow the Money as Hochul Floats Tobacco Ban While Pushing Legal Marijuana
Governor Hochul has floated the idea of banning all sales of tobacco products in New York State, even as she urges New Yorkers to purchase and partake of now-legal cannabis. It’s not easy to see these as consistent views — both, after all, have been shown to be products hazardous to your health. Yet a…
May 10, 2023
AI Tutoring Has a Lot to Offer. But so Does Human Mentoring.
In education policy circles, there’s a lot of enthusiasm regarding the promise of AI-enabled tutoring. After all, a huge stumbling block for tutoring has been the limited number of affordable, reliable, and skilled tutors. That’s why ubiquitous AI could be such a game-changer. But there’s reason to fear that the excitement of AI-enabled tutoring will distract us…
May 8, 2023
An Inspiration to Freethinkers
Some of us still subscribe to the view that we didn’t leave the Democratic Party; it left us. For such apostates and freethinkers, Fred Siegel was an inspiration and a role model (though I never asked him directly about his party affiliation). His writing was the product of careful observation by one of the best-read people in…