There is probably no issue more requiring resolution in California than poor housing affordability. It is a threat to the preservation of the middle-class and the competitiveness of the state.  read more »

California Governor Newsom became further convinced that voters continue to support his bizarre energy policies when they defeated the 2021 California gubernatorial recall election on September 14, 2021, thus keeping the incumbent elected for the term January 2019 to January 2023.  read more »

There’s a museum dedicated to Esperanto in Vienna—an archive and testament to one of the more ambitious movements to enter the world’s consciousness in recent centuries.  read more »

Together with the USA and China, Europe is one of the three leading global economies. Yet, while Europe has a significantly larger population than the US, it is behind in economic production, and even more so in terms of highly successful entrepreneurship.  read more »

In 1976, my ethnically diverse, working-class county where blue-collar union households worked in factories and refineries, owned homes and sent their kids to college, agreed to string a 6-mile long fire hose across the Richmond Bridge to supply water to California's wealthiest and whitest county.  read more »

This midterm year, in which many states have to choose between non-entities and the certifiably insane, Ohio is blessed by a real political dogfight. The Senate battle between representative Tim Ryan and Hillbilly Elegy author, JD Vance, is becoming one for the ages.  read more »

One of the principal justifications of public subsidies for transit has been to provide mobility for those with low incomes. There continues to be a presumption that low-income workers rely principally on transit for getting to work.  read more »

In the past, ruling classes sought to protect the system that secured their coveted positions. But sometimes, as in the era before the French or Russian Revolutions, some in the ruling circles stopped believing in their religion, their traditions, and their state, only to be exiled, executed, or turned into what the Soviets called “former persons.”  read more »

Welcome to my weekly digest. For new subscribers, this contains a roundup of my recent writings and podcasts, as well as links to the best articles from around the web this week. First, a study on what women and men want in the dating market.

Corinne Low, an economics professor at the Wharton School, put out a tweet thread highlighting findings from two of her studies that will be published soon in academic journals. She links to online versions of the full studies.  read more »

Here’s part 5, the last entry of my “Tottering Chicago?” series. In case you didn’t know or had forgotten, this series was prompted after reading William Voegeli’s That Tottering Town  read more »