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
Tag: Deseret
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
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
The Invisible Infrastructure of Immigration
After Florida governor Ron DeSantis flew migrants to Martha's Vineyard, I wrote about how non-profits cover the gaps of our broken immigration system for Deseret. This is the pattern; the official system is broken, and charitable organizations and activists keep a broken system from being even worse than it is.It’s organizations and individuals who put… Read More
Life Costs More Than Death
In the aftermath of Dobbs, I wrote for Deseret on what comes next for the pro-life movement. The Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization limits the danger to children in the womb, but the justices cannot confer dignity, safety or hope by fiat. That’s the continued work required of the anti-abortion… Read More
The Long Wait for Weddings
As America geared up for a wedding boom in the summer of 2022, I wrote about the obstacles that disrupt weddings and other communal rites of passage in non-covid times. No matter how stripped down the ceremony, people need to be able to plan travel. The people we love are too scattered for spontaneity. We… Read More
Family Policy Can’t Be Gender Neutral
For Mother's Day, I wrote for Deseret on why gender neutral family policy tends to shortchange mothers. In an uneventful pregnancy, a mother will still have a harder timechan than her partner as she navigates fatigue, nausea and pain. Drawing attention to these difficulties can feel like letting other women down — if women carry… Read More