SUNDER THE SKY

Few candidates spell out their policy proposals in as much detail as Hillary Clinton, but there’s still room to wonder about how a President Clinton would set her agenda for 2017 and beyond. One clue comes in the naming of Heather Boushey to be chief economist of her transition team, giving Boushey an inside track for a major political appointment . She is currently the executive director and chief economist of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and recently published “Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict.” That book is one good source for which ideas might rise in a Clinton administration. The central insight is that American institutions do not support a proper balance between work and family life, and that the burdens fall disproportionately upon women. The proposed remedies are an extensive set of government interventions, including paid sick leave , paid parental leave, subsidized child care and better care for the elderly to relieve care burdens on gr

Neuroticism - the tendency to experience negative emotions like anger, fear, and sadness - is a pillar of the Five Factor Model of personality.  Human beings routinely attribute their emotions to external circumstances.  For proximate causes, they're often right.  The underlying reality, though, is that some people - the highly neurotic - naturally focus on negativity.  Which brings me to one of my pet theories: neurotic politics.  Quick version: When neurotics turn to politics, they find an infinite series of reasons to feel bad, which helps them stay one step ahead of the realization that their fundamental problem is inside their own heads and can be fixed by no one but themselves.  In light of my pet theory, I was struck by this passage in War and Peace : "This is what they have done with Russia!  This is what they have done with me!" thought Rostopchin, an irrepressible rage welling up in his soul against the someone to whom what was happening might be attribute

Who will build the roads if not the government? As it turns out, even criminals will, if they need to. The public- and profit-minded entrepreneurs of the black market in Belarussia have taken it upon themselves to improve business by upgrading their transportation routes. Smugglers  adopted a gravel road from Minsk to Moscow, raised the road, widened it, and added more turning points to increase access for their heavy goods trucks ( fruit weighs a lot ). The secret project was quickly rewarded with heightened traffic and an eventual government takeover, complete with customs. If black market businesses can successfully build up a road under the table, imagine what "legitimate" entrepreneurs would build out in the open. The Moscow Times has the full story: " Smugglers have transformed the gravel track in the Smolensk region in order to help their heavy goods vehicles traveling on the route, said Alexander Laznenko from the Smolensk region border agency. The crimin

In his classic 1841 book on financial bubbles, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , Charles Mackay observed, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Mackay covered religious and political delusions, too. “We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple," he recounts, "and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity.” Venezuela is sowing its harvest of “groans and tears." Due to the breakdown of civil society in the country, even war-plagued Syrians feel more safe in their homes than do Venezuelans. Venezuelans are so hungry that they cried at the sight of food in Columbia. Recently the hungry broke into a zoo to

“ You didn’t win that ” might as well be the U.S. government’s official congratulatory platitude to American Olympians who succeed in Rio this summer. This year, the IRS will impose a nearly 40% “victory” tax on athletes who take home gold, silver, and bronze medals for the United States. American Olympians earn $25,000 for gold medals, $15,000 for silver, and $10,000 for bronze, paid for by the U.S. Olympic Committee . But according to the non-profit advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform, “a gold medalist from Team USA could end up facing a tax bill of $9,900 per gold medal, $5,940 per silver medal, and $3,960 per bronze medal.” Though “these are the maximum possible tax amounts, and vary widely based on an individual’s tax circumstances and available deductions,” even the potential amounts of money owed are staggering. His gold medals for that year alone — if taxed at up to $8,750, the 35% rate — may have earned the government $70,000. Michael Phelps' Victory Tax Micha

The cultural fascination with the idea of an “intelligence quotient” or IQ seems to be experiencing a resurgence. Relentless testing is a feature of schooling and school admissions, and tests are used for a variety of occupational screenings. The practice reflects an intuition we all have: some bulbs are brighter than others. Surely there is nothing wrong with knowing, measuring, and acting on that information, however difficult it might be to assess. Where matters become elusive is in codifying those skills, reducing them all to a single quantitative number, aggregating them based on other demographic traits, assessing the variability of the results, comparing the results across large population groups, determining the variety of causal factors – genetic, environmental, sheer personal determination – that make up what we call intelligence, and cobbling together a plan for what to do with the results. The search for some measurable standard of intelligence has a deep history that i

Amnesty International has finally had enough of the goings-on in Venezuela. With a population starving, the government issued a forced-labor edict. Amnesty said: “Trying to tackle Venezuela's severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to fix a broken leg with a band aid.” Maybe you notice a pattern here. Wherever socialism is tried, people suffer. Actually it’s more like fixing a broken leg with a bullet to the head. Forced labor is indeed a human-rights abuse. Maybe you notice a pattern here. Wherever socialism is tried, people suffer. Each case is different because no tyrannical regime behaves exactly like any other. But the root of the problem is the refusal to allow people to own, accumulate, trade, and associate. Surely that is the core of the problem in Venezuela. Here We Go Again No, say the socialists. “The problems plaguing the Venezuelan economy are not due to some inherent fault in socialism.” Socialism seems to be the most persi

I'm going to keep this review free of spoilers and get right to the point. I'm really sorry to have to say this. I know that expectations for this film were high. But, don't see this movie... and truly... you should give up on the DC Cinematic Universe altogether, at this point. I have. I'm not sure how Suicide Squad was released as if it were a "completed" movie. It's an absolute mess from the jump. It seems, at first blush, as if WB is attempting to distinguish themselves from Marvel in terms of style and tone. But, then we get an 80s pop-song every five minutes, in a ham-fisted attempt to mimick the stylistic element that Guardians of the Galaxy employed so effortlessly. Warner Brothers' executives seem to keep making bad decision after bad decision. These are many and varied, but they essentially all stem from the same core-mistake. This mistake is the root of all the other problems arising in these films; they hire directors who have