Government And Business

Birth Inequality?

Now I’ve heard everything. We read about income gaps, and wealth gaps, and racial gaps, and gender gaps. But now The Atlantic warns us about the ominously growing “unplanned birth” gap. Poorer women have always had more unplanned children than affluent women, but it turns out that the gap has been widening since the mid-1990s, leading the article’s author, Gillian White, to wonder if this is an outcome of economic inequality.
Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 39]: Steven Horwitz on Inequality, Mobility and Being Poor in America

The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Steven Horwitz, Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics and department chair at St. Lawrence University, on his new paper “Inequality, Mobility, and Being Poor in America.”
Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 38]: Phillip Magness on Thomas Piketty’s Empirical Claims

The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Phillip Magness, a policy historian and Academic Program Director at the Institute for Humane Studies, on the empirical problems with Thomas Piketty’s book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Government And Business

Sorry Obama, We Aren’t Family

“My fellow Americans,” Obama said at the close of last night’s State of the Union, “we too are a strong, tight-knit family,” It’s not unusual for politicians to invoke folksy metaphors of this kind, but in this case it just about sums up Obama’s worldview.
Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 37]: Daniel Mitchell on the OECD Inequality Study

The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Cato senior fellow Daniel J. Mitchell on the OECD’s recent study claiming that inequality harms economic growth, and that redistributive policies to fight inequality don’t.
Government And Business

Proof that Inequality Harms Economic Growth?

If you follow the inequality debate, then you’ve no doubt heard that the OECD has just released a report claiming to show that economic inequality lowers economic growth. I’ll have more to say about the study itself soon. But the most striking thing is the response to the report: namely, that its conclusions have been trumpeted uncritically by the media and by everyone who already believes inequality is a problem.

Further Reading

Ayn Rand | 1957
For the New Intellectual

The Moral Meaning of Capitalism

An industrialist who works for nothing but his own profit guiltlessly proclaims his refusal to be sacrificed for the “public good.”
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Ayn Rand | 1961
The Virtue of Selfishness

The Objectivist Ethics

What is morality? Why does man need it? — and how the answers to these questions give rise to an ethics of rational self-interest.
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