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Obion County, Tennessee is a rural patch with eight towns in it, each of which has a fire department supported by local taxes. If you live in one of these towns, and your house catches fire, your neighbors put out the fire through the agency of the fire department. Some people prefer to live out [...]
Archive for the ‘Policy briefs’ Category
August 24th, 2010
The greatest generation was pretty great, but my post on intergenerational transfers may have given them a little too much credit relative to voters of the last three decades or so. My colleague Bob Reich points in an email to …one big reason why middle-class Californians began thinking more about themselves than posterity starting in [...]
August 23rd, 2010
Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public university in the world. Meet your classmates, the best group of partners you can find anywhere. The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you, over twenty years in the best [...]
August 9th, 2010
Jimmy Carter: the founder of Reaganism.
August 7th, 2010
My colleague Chris Edley is out in front of the push to get Berkeley in the on-line education business . Kevin Carey and Matt Yglesias discuss whether the new product should start upscale, like the Tesla sports car as a pilot product , or downmarket, like a knockoff LV bag that holds just as much [...]
July 6th, 2010
Category: 2010 Democratic Agenda, Health Care, Macroeconomic Policy, Policy briefs, Public management, The Dysfunctional Senate
There’s an easy way to improve health care, improve the national economy, help out the states, and tell Mitch McConnell to stuff it. What could be bad?
April 25th, 2010
Category: History, Policy briefs
Willard Wirtz represents one of the great what-ifs of American social policy history.
January 19th, 2010
I’m not sure what Andy is disagreeing with me about; while the good news from Chiaromonte is nice to hear, it isn’t overwhelming (60% of families with cars and telephones, in the early 90s?). But the important thing is that the crushing poverty, stasis, and fatalism that bound the community until so recently was only [...]
