At Deseret, I'm making the case for a baby bonus as fair and flexible help for parents and children. A “baby bonus” is an effective way to provide support to more families with fewer complications. Every family has unique needs, and flexible assistance can help parents serve the best interests of their children in their… Read More
Tag: Deseret
Colleges Must Offer Formation, Not Amenities
Colleges donors are starting public fights with college administrators. At Deseret, I argue that's a good thing. Colleges should be contested spaces—they need to offer values-informed formation, not a generic education. It will be tempting for schools to keep spending on extraneous amenities to capture students, especially if they see them primarily as customers, not… Read More
Putting a Price on “Unpaid Work”
At Deseret, I responded to Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek's After Work: The Fight for Free Time, and its thought-provoking ideas about how to value "unpaid work." Labor-saving innovations don’t make as much sense when the work process is valuable, not just the output. When work is evaluated for the formation it gives us, it’s… Read More
Why Government Can’t Talk to Citizens
Whose to blame when government services don't work? I got to review an excellent book on the last mile of policy for Deseret. Social studies students learn how a bill becomes a law, but Jennifer Pahlka would argue that you can’t stop the story at the president’s signature. The administrative infrastructure and vendor contracts that… Read More
Hiding from Need at the Border and in the Womb
When we face a need that asks a lot of us, it's tempting to try to make the needy person invisible. At Deseret, I'm talking about how both parties try to avoid acknowledging the humanity and reality of the one in need—Democrats averting their eyes from the child in the womb, Republicans from the refugee… Read More
Greedy Jobs and Genericized Jobs
I got to write about Nobellist Claudia Goldin's Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity for Deseret. The whole book is fascinating, but what I wanted to focus on were the factors that made a certain kind of work a "greedy job" (long hours, pay scales quickly with intensity) or a "genericized job" (more… Read More
Cramming Child Care into CHIPS
At Deseret, I make the case against the child care benefit in the fine print of CHIPS, which would make child care a work-administered benefit at some semiconductor plants. Making child care a work-linked benefit means repeating all the problems of the employer-linked insurance and retirement plans, and adding a more serious problem. Child care… Read More
Embracing Amateurism in the Face of AI
As Chat-GPT and other machine learning models make it easier to generate text and art, I wrote in praise of doing something yourself, even if you do it badly, in Deseret. When you choose to be bad at something, you get to experience the joy of being an amateur in the classical sense. Today, “amateur”… Read More
The Race to the Bottom in Sports Gambling
At Deseret, I'm writing on the particular perversity of legalized sports gambling. States touting possible revenue from taxes aim to profit from the degradation of their citizens. It’s as though a state instituted a tax on adultery, and then began promoting websites like AshleyMadison and held press conferences with prostitution rings. By advertising invitations to… Read More
The Cost of Evading Moral Argument
At Deseret, I'm writing about the hamstrung compromises we get when people disagree on moral grounds but fight on practical grounds. I'm writing specifically on the death penalty, but it's only one, particularly painful example, of how America sometimes makes a controversial policy legal but impossible. For years, the moral issue of the death penalty… Read More