Category: Economics
“You have got to feed the biology of the soil.”
I have long been interested in the work of the Land Institute and their perennial crops, so I appreciated this story about how people are trying to use them: “Mainstream agriculture, they just don’t get it,” says Jerry Doan, standing...
whither conservatism?
While there’s a lot more that could be said and a lot of things that could be said differently (as I hope to in a forthcoming essay for Mere-O), I appreciated this assessment from Timothy Shenk at Dissent of where things are...
$2.1 trillion in dirty money annually
I felt like this interview itself was a little short and didn’t quite get to the point, but I am very interested in the degree to which the international finance industry might be reformed to help make corruption and crime...
employee stock ownership plans
I really appreciated Rachel Cohen’s discussion of what an employee stock ownership plan is and why there’s enthusiasm for them: Unlike conservatives, who have defended employee ownership on the grounds that it’s most certainly not socialism — indeed, it turns laborers into capitalists —...
makes you wanna holler
This report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (an organization doing more than any other, I think, to highlight where and how people can be working for the localism we like to talk about) highlights how dollar stores deliver low-quality goods...
Sabbath and soil
Years ago, when I first studied Isaiah 58, I found its call to honor the Sabbath mingled with the call to do away with violence and injustice odd. I suppose that I had grown up thinking of Sabbath-keeping as a...
“Uncontrolled liberalism, in other words, prepares the grounds for its own demise.”
There are some very sharp insights in this interview with Pankaj Mishra in the LA Review of Books: “Liberal modernity,” you’ve argued, “has prepared the ground for its destruction” by unleashing forces that are “uncontrollable.” Have these forces contributed to...
“economics of meaning”
Shadi Hamid has a very interesting essay in American Affairs Journal about the possibilities of left populism and the “economics of meaning”: It might be tempting to say that Left populists simply need a “hero”; the Left, unlike the Right,...
what Amazon got out of the HQ2 search
Amazon got more than just some tax breaks in its HQ2 search: But arguably even more concerning than deepening regional inequality and the possibility of Bezos becoming the landlord of the nation’s capital is the fact that few cities will...
migration and American identity
Luma Simms has two very interesting pieces interacting with Reihan Salam’s new book Melting Pot or Civil War? One is at Public Discourse and the other is at Law and Liberty: From the first piece: Immigration, work migration, the flight...