This post was originally intended for the launch of the People’s Policy Project website. But as that is running behind schedule, I figure I will post it here.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
The discourse is full of argument but mostly devoid of argumentation theory. Most people read arguments impressionistically in much the same way that most people read novels, listen to music, or watch movies. There are people who have learned to technically dissect these forms and who, as a result, consume them much differently and can… Continue reading Dissecting My Recent Argument (Are Error Theories Offensive?)| mattbruenig.com
The discourse is full of argument but mostly devoid of argumentation theory. Most people read arguments impressionistically in much the same way that most people read novels, listen to music, or watch movies. There are people who have learned to technically dissect these forms and who, as a result, consume them much differently and can explain in great detail why a particular work is good or bad, but they are the distinct minority.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Month: August 2015| mattbruenig.com
The “Success Sequence” is explained most recently as follows:| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Societies have grappled with concerns over low or declining fertility since as far back as Ancient Rome. More recently, these concerns have been discussed most intensely in places like Japan, which has had sub-replacement fertility since the 1970s, South Korea, which has the lowest fertility in the world, and in parts of Europe where fertility has been declining since 2010.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Matt Yglesias has a piece at Slow Boring where he criticizes the idea that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted by Clinton, is a major driver of working class disaffection with the Democratic party. Chronology Yglesias’s first critique is about the chronology of it. NAFTA was enacted in the 1990s while this most… Continue reading Yglesias on the Politics of NAFTA| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
In 2021, I had solar panels installed on my roof. They began generating electricity in January of 2022. In early 2023, I wrote a piece detailing how the finances of all that worked based on the first year of solar production. This is a follow up to that piece but now with three years of data covering 2022, 2023, and 2024.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
For me, this election differed from the last two in that my particular policy interests — a universalist welfare state, mass unionization, and socialization of wealth — were absent. The Biden administration achieved nothing significant on these fronts. There was no primary campaign that featured a candidate championing these causes. Harris did not run on them.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Ten days ago, Kamala Harris released her Lowering Costs Agenda (LCA), a five-page list of various policy proposals that all ostensibly relate back to lowering prices.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Joe Biden put up an issues page on his campaign website late last month. I have been publicly wondering when, if ever, we would get some kind of formal policy platform from Biden, and so I am happy to see that now there is one. Unfortunately, Biden’s list of issues does not really contain much actual policy content.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
The prevailing consensus in the economics literature is that women suffer a significant earnings penalty after they have children. More precisely, women who have children end up with lower earnings than women who do not, holding all else equal.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Yale announced today that it will reinstate a requirement that applicants to the school submit scores from a standardized college admissions exam. Yale says that making these tests optional is harming low-income students whose scores could have helped them get in.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Brad Wilcox is an amusing situation where he’s trying to promote a new book he wrote about marriage right after Melissa Kearney released a basically identical book and exhausted all of the media attention available for such things. One of his book-promotion strategies appears to be picking on me every so often on Twitter, which… Continue reading Brad Wilcox’s Wife| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Over the past few months, various authors at various institutions — specifically Oscar Arce, Elke Hahn and Gerrit Koester at the ECB, Andrew Glover, José Mustre-del-Río and Alice von Ende-Becker at the Kansas City Federal Reserve, and Paul Donovan at UBS — have written pieces about the relationship between profits and the most recent bout of inflation. Advocates of what is often called the “greedflation” hypothesis of inflation have taken to pointing to these pieces as proof of that...| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Erik Loomis wrote about the Diane Ravitch v. Michelle Rhee stuff. I don’t care about the majority of the content of this conflict. More arts funding? Ok I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t particularly like arts classes. I liked gym class. How about more of that? I don’t know: leave it to some pedagogy experts or something to figure out.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
As regular readers know by now, I am fairly skeptical of the Education Reform Movement. I am not convinced that the reforms advocated by this well-funded movement will actually work because I suspect that the real problem is economic inequality, not bad schools or bad teachers. But even if one believed that the policies pushed by the reformers would be successful, a question then arises: successful at what?| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
Between June 2020 and and January 2022, used car prices, which had been stable or declining for 25 years, increased by nearly 60 percent. Since then, they have come down a bit, but remain quite elevated relative to June 2020.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com
In order to get more protein in my diet, I frequently consume Fairlife Nutrition Plan protein shakes. They have 150 calories, 30 grams of protein, and taste just like chocolate milk. It’s a great product, but, at the prices Fairlife charges for the shakes, demand regularly outstrips supply, making it quite difficult to actually find the product available for purchase.| Matt Bruenig Dot Com