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Category Archives: Economic issues

Envying the U.K.’s public transportation

Paddington Station, London. Just look how clean it is. I added up the number of hours of travel required to get from Acorn Abbey in the Blue Ridge foothills of North America to Stornaway on the isle of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. It comes to about 28 hours. Of those hours, 25 […]

Why do we know so little about socialism?

John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, by William A. Edmundson. Cambridge University Press, 2017. 212 pages. I am going to propose an answer to the question that I raise in the headline: The reason we know so little about socialism is that, for two generations, since the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the Overton window […]

The inequalities of banking

Increasingly, liberals are noticing that it’s very expensive to be poor. It may seem strange to those of us for whom bank accounts are an ordinary fact of life. But many people cannot afford bank accounts. Consequently poor people pay more for just about everything. Often when I go to the post office, I see […]

The yield curve and the coming Trump recession

A Facebook meme One of the first rules of managing your money is never to give, or to accept, advice about money. I’m not giving any advice in this post. But I am suggesting that now is a good time to take a good hard look — according to one’s own lights — at the […]

The global rot of billionaires

The list of things that make American deplorables so deplorable is very long — racism, vile religion, anti-intellectualism, appalling ignorance, love of propaganda, and tolerance for violence, to name a few. But one of the worst vices — taught by their sorry politics as well as their sorry religion — is the glorification of the […]

Apple Pay? Yes, you should …

When I first heard about Apple Pay a few years ago, I assumed that it was nothing more than a play by Apple to insert itself into the lucrative credit card transaction business and extract a cut. To some degree, that’s true. But, as far as I can tell, Apple gets only a meager 0.15 […]

Environmental justice: The people fight back

Al Gore This is a rather long photo essay. I hope you’ll bear with me. People sometimes ask me why I choose to live in a rural and seemingly backward place like Stokes County, North Carolina, after 18 years in an urbane place like San Francisco. Stokes is a poor county in the foothills of […]

Old Scotland and the modern world

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The true story of how Western Europe’s poorest nation created our world and everything in it. By Arthur Herman. Random House, 2001. 472 pages. The title and subtitle of this book contain quite a lot of hyperbole. Of course the Scots didn’t create the modern world and everything […]

Oh no. More low-end grocery stores.

I went into a Lidl store for the first time yesterday. I had no idea what it is, any more than I knew what an Aldi store is the first (and last) time I went into one. I was shocked that this is the way the grocery business is going — extremely wide aisles, not […]

Even crummy tips aren’t safe from Republican taking

We recently learned that Trump’s labor department wants to change the rules so that restaurant tips would belong to restaurant owners rather than servers. Here’s a link to a story in the Guardian, “Restaurants have no right to take employees’ tips.” The cruelty of this is just business as usual for the Republican Party. And […]