Both sides of the same-sex marriage debate trade rather heavily in logical fallacies. Yes, I said both sides. Of particular curiosity is that they often appeal to the same informal fallacies to argue opposite sides of the argument. It’s quite odd. Don’t believe me? Here’s a sampling. Appeal to Nature For same-sex marriage: Animals exhibit […]
Continue reading →An article in the National Journal explores why many young feminists aren’t gushing over Hillary Clinton and her 2016 presidential bid. The main problem boils down to the fairly contemporary concept of intersectionality: As the feminism of [Betty] Friedan and second-wave stalwarts like Gloria Steinem moved into the mainstream, some began to criticize it as […]
Continue reading →Recently Bill Gates questioned the supply-side, tax-cut economic theory by bringing up that the American period with the highest GDP growth in recent memory, the 60s, also had one of the highest marginal tax rates in recent memory, at 90% (for most of the decade anyway). He was careful not to say that the high […]
Continue reading →If the box office and television are any indicator, America is obsessed with superheroes. Nearly every new batch of movies has at least one superhero movie, and superhero television shows seem to roll out every week. Judging from how much money these movies and shows generate, superheroes are our generation’s favorite thing. But why? According […]
Continue reading →At least a million people want a woman on the twenty dollar bill. And the majority of those people have chosen abolitionist Harriet Tubman: The Women on 20s campaign has declared that America needs the face of a woman on its currency and that woman should be abolitionist Harriet Tubman. The campaign petitioned the federal government this week after […]
Continue reading →Yesterday, I wrote an article about a deceptive shift of language from “income inequality” to “income inequity.” In it, I quoted Barack Obama, who recently claimed that hedge fund investors were the “nation’s lottery winners.” I think his dismissive assessment deserves another look, since it represents the attitude so many Americans have toward the wealthy. […]
Continue reading →I have been noticing a trend in recent discussions of income inequality. Commentators have started replacing income inequality with income inequity. At first, I thought this subtle shift was a result of ignorance. In our word-impoverished culture, the right words get swapped for incorrect similar-sounding ones all the time (e.g., “disinterested” for “uninterested”). But as […]
Continue reading →Do you want actual racial equality? Do you desire actual racial harmony? I have news for you: you’re in the minority. It seems even the most ardent champions fighting against racism are often avowed racists. Case in point: Dr. Saida Grundy, a black professor set to start teaching at Boston University on July 1. She […]
Continue reading →An interesting program called the Moving to Opportunity Experiment explored what happens when you move poor families in impoverished neighborhoods to more affluent neighborhoods. A little more than twenty years later, Harvard analysts looked in on the children of the MTO experiment. The results were quite fascinating: The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected […]
Continue reading →The Social Security Administration has been releasing heavily biased and overly optimistic numbers for about fifteen years, according to a new report by Harvard and Dartmouth: According to the report, the SSA’s actuarial projections in the 1980s underestimated revenues and overestimated costs by $27 billion; in the 1990s, that figure was $200 billion. Now, in […]
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