What happens when you mix politics, bathrooms, and sexuality? Let the joking begin. A politician walks into a transgender bar. [Fill in the blank here.] Afterwards, he tries to explain: “I really only wanted to use the bathroom.” Ha ha. But the serious business is the busybody politicians in North Carolina and Tennessee who have […]
Whose Bathroom Is It, Anyway? [Good Life series] Read More »
I ran out of money in my final semester of graduate school. My first teaching job awaited me in the fall semester, but I had no income for the three summer months before then. So I gave up my apartment and moved into a shared house with seven other guys. It was a huge old
Blamestorming and Environmental Problems (Part II) [Good Life series] Read More »
German authorities will allow the republication of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, after decades of censorship. Decent people can argue that the book is too dangerous to be published. But the fact is that Mein Kampf is too dangerous not to be published. The great fear is that Hitler’s ideas are not dead and that his
Is Republishing Hitler’s Mein Kampf the Correct Decision? [Good Life series] Read More »
Intelligence is a human being’s most important asset. One sign of this is the amount of time we spend educating our young. For some species, such as squirrels and hawks, the learning necessary to become a full adult is acquired in a matter of months. For more intelligent species, such as chimpanzees and elephants, it
On Intelligence, Freedom, and Who Knows What’s Best for You [Good Life series] Read More »
You’ve likely heard the Bad News: we are supposed to be running out of resources. As a result you are sometimes asked: will you continue use up resources selfishly — or are you willing to make sacrifices? Possibly you individually are a person of selfless virtue, but how likely is it that most other people
Do we really live in a world of scarce resources? No. [Good Life series] Read More »
A scenario beloved of ethicists, public policy experts, and management consultants asks you to imagine yourself on a lifeboat. Built into such scenarios are powerful assumptions with life-or-death consequences, so as we work through the lifeboat scenario try to make those assumptions explicit. Here we go: You were flying over the Pacific, but bad weather
You’ve heard the claim: “Deregulation caused the crisis.” In the years leading up to 2008, the story goes, bad economists convinced bad politicians to deregulate the money/banking/finance sector of the economy, and bad capitalists then enjoyed an orgy of greed that caused the system to go haywire. Nobel-Prize-winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have signed
Blamestorming and “Deregulation caused the financial crisis” [Good Life series] Read More »
Another election looms, and the question on everyone’s mind is: Will the big donors get their money’s worth? Cynicism about money in politics is a healthy response to our long history of cronyism. When $700 billion in bailout funds were distributed during the 2008 crisis, politically-connected financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs received the lion’s
Does Money Buy Elections? When Billionaires Court Voters [Good Life series] Read More »