poverty
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On wasted ingenuity.
Everyone strives, but we force some to waste their efforts reinventing the wheel – or the water heater, or the piano, or…
Albany, Attica, automation, Blood in the Water, capitalism, childhood trauma, criminal justice, Deirdre N McCloskey, Demetrius Cunningham, economics, Growth Not Forced Equality Saves the Poor, Heather Anne Thompson, imprisonment, injustice, jail, Learning to Hear on a Cardboard Piano, Lori Milks, New Yorker, one sheet per day, poverty, prison, prison writing, punishment, punitive justice
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On AIDS and drought in Malawi.
It’s hard to save the forests for some nebulous future when you might die of AIDS (or even rabies!) within the year.
a history of violence, AIDS, charcoal, climate change, deforestation, drought, health care, health insurance, HIV, HIV epidemic, illegal charcoal production, inequality, infectious disease, Malawi, medical care, Peace Corps, poverty, rabies, rabies vaccine, reparations, the historical roots of inequality, wealth begets wealth, zero-parent households
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On Edin & Shaefer’s ‘$2.00 a Day.’
You can’t learn what it takes to survive poverty when you think about people as numbers.
$2.00 a Day, budget, ethnography, Evicted, extreme poverty, food deserts, food insecurity, food stamps, H. Luke Shaefer, Hand to Mouth, high cost of rent in the United States, Kathyrn Edin, Linda Tirado, Living on Almost Nothing in America, Matthew Desmond, Paul Theroux, people want jobs, poverty, PTSD, sexual assault, SNAP, The Hypocrisy of Helping the Poor
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On my own attempt to understand what motivates people to join the terrorist organization Daesh.
Kent Russell’s essay on juggalos helped me think about Middle Eastern terrorism.
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On sex work, reparations, a global wealth tax, and the connection between the three.
Many people are upset that Amnesty International finally came out in favor of decriminalizing sex work. Not me. I think decriminalizing sex work is a step in the right direction. Sex workers’ lives are often miserable. Their underground status denies them police protection; instead, they are often actively abused by the police. The philosophical rationale for…
a good idea in theory, abuse of power, Amnesty International, amphetamines, arguments against legalizing drugs, Ayn Rand, Behind every great fortune there is a crime, black market heroin is unsafe, childhood nutrition, communism, cotton, creepy parallel between gene duplication and oppression, decriminalization, decriminalized prostitution, decriminalized sex work, economic reparations, empirical evidence, feminism, feminist, free school breakfasts, free school lunches, global wealth tax, guaranteed income, heroin, heroin overdoses, history of United States, how did the United States become a superpower, how high would the wealth tax need to be to guanantee everyone a subsistence income, how much money do people need to live, human dignity, human rights trading cards, immigration, immigration laws, income inequality, inequality, justice, land entitlement, legalized prostitution, legalized sex work, link between current wealth and slavery, Lydia Cacho, misogynistic culture, misogynists, misogyny, original sin, police abuse, poverty, Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function, price and demand, price equilibrium, prostitution, quality control, racist home loans, racist lending policy, reparations, school funding, selling organs, sex slavery, sex work, slavery, Slavery Inc, supply and demand, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, United States, violence in Mexico, War on Drugs, War on Drugs harms Mexico, wealth begets wealth, wealth inequality, wealth tax, welfare, where did United States wealth come from, which laws are fair, which laws are just, who should receive reparations, why are drugs illegal
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On growing up poor, and hamsters.
I recently read a cute article by Emily Underwood, “How to tell if your hamster is happy.” There is an easy answer, too. The hamsters in question are research animals, so the answer is, “No, they probably are not.” Of all the research animals I’ve interacted with, the only one that seemed happy was the narcoleptic…
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On identical twins & opportunity.
If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favor and look up Susan Dominus’s article on accidentally-swapped identical twins (who were then raised as two sets of fraternal twins) in the New York Times Magazine. It’s long, so it might take you a while. But your time will have been well spent. I was…
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On Linda Tirado’s Hand to Mouth (until devolving into senseless tangents about cash transfers as medicine, the U.S. criminal justice system, work as exercise, and flawed science).
As long as you think feeling angry is fun (does it say awful things about my personality that I do?), Linda Tirado’s Hand to Mouth is a fun little book. Unlike Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Tirado’s main focus isn’t analyzing why people are poor — she states, bluntly and in my opinion correctly, that the…
academic doublethink, academic science, Alia Crum, An Investigation of Exercise and the Placebo Effect, at-will employment, bizarre data interpretation, court fees, Dixie Stanforth, economic injustice, Ellen Langer, Emily Willingham, Evil Dave versus Regular Dave, Exercise and the Placebo Effect, flawed science, Hand to Mouth, hotel cleaning as exercise, John Oliver, Linda Tirado, low-wage work, Mindset matters, municipal fees, On the Run, overcriminalization, police abuses, poverty, psychology, replication crisis, scientific studies that can’t be replicated, speeding, The New Jim Crow, Tirado, traffic laws, Walter Scott, work as exercise, worker protections
Frank Brown Cloud 