RSS Parrot

The Fertility Question

https://mattbruenig.com/2025/04/13/the-fertility-question/

Published: April 13, 2025 21:45

Societies have grappled with concerns over low or declining fertility since as far back as Ancient Rome. More recently, these concerns have been discussed most intensely in places like Japan, which has had sub-replacement fertility since the 1970s, South…

Yglesias on the Politics of NAFTA

https://mattbruenig.com/2025/03/11/yglesias-on-the-politics-of-nafta/

Published: March 11, 2025 11:51

Matt Yglesias has a piece at Slow Boring where he criticizes the idea that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted by Clinton, is a major driver of working class disaffection with the Democratic party. Chronology Yglesias’s first critique…

Three Years of Solar Panels Reduced My Electricity Bill $8,935

https://mattbruenig.com/2025/03/06/three-years-of-solar-panels-reduced-my-electricity-bill-8935/

Published: March 6, 2025 12:48

In 2021, I had solar panels installed on my roof. They began generating electricity in January of 2022. In early 2023, I wrote a piece detailing how the finances of all that worked based on the first year of solar production. This is a follow up to that…

Election Musings

https://mattbruenig.com/2024/11/07/election-musings/

Published: November 7, 2024 15:09

For me, this election differed from the last two in that my particular policy interests — a universalist welfare state, mass unionization, and socialization of wealth — were absent. The Biden administration achieved nothing significant on these fronts.…

The Stupid Price Gouging Discourse

https://mattbruenig.com/2024/08/24/the-stupid-price-gouging-discourse/

Published: August 25, 2024 00:57

Ten days ago, Kamala Harris released her Lowering Costs Agenda (LCA), a five-page list of various policy proposals that all ostensibly relate back to lowering prices. The LCA contains the following text about grocery costs: Lowering Grocery Costs Vice…

The Joe Biden Policy Platform

https://mattbruenig.com/2024/07/06/the-joe-biden-policy-platform/

Published: July 6, 2024 21:59

Joe Biden put up an issues page on his campaign website late last month. I have been publicly wondering when, if ever, we would get some kind of formal policy platform from Biden, and so I am happy to see that now there is one. Unfortunately, Biden’s list…

Does The Child Earnings Penalty Actually Exist?

https://mattbruenig.com/2024/05/17/does-the-child-earnings-penalty-actually-exist/

Published: May 17, 2024 16:51

The prevailing consensus in the economics literature is that women suffer a significant earnings penalty after they have children. More precisely, women who have children end up with lower earnings than women who do not, holding all else equal. Recent…

A Personal Case for College Admissions Exams

https://mattbruenig.com/2024/02/22/a-personal-case-for-college-admissions-exams/

Published: February 22, 2024 16:52

Yale announced today that it will reinstate a requirement that applicants to the school submit scores from a standardized college admissions exam. Yale says that making these tests optional is harming low-income students whose scores could have helped them…

Brad Wilcox’s Wife

https://mattbruenig.com/2024/02/21/brad-wilcoxs-wife/

Published: February 21, 2024 15:59

Brad Wilcox is an amusing situation where he’s trying to promote a new book he wrote about marriage right after Melissa Kearney released a basically identical book and exhausted all of the media attention available for such things. One of his…

An Interest in Being Unique

https://mattbruenig.com/2024/02/20/an-interest-in-being-unique/

Published: February 20, 2024 14:39

Matt Yglesias has a piece at Slow Boring about the attitudinal differences between socialists and anarchists. In his telling, socialists are focused on building alternative non-capitalist institutions, which often includes boring, technical administrative…