Uncle Walt on Racial Inequality
That’s Inequality:
There’s one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of their under-5-year-olds are poor. There’s another segment of the black population that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.
Among whites, one population segment suffers a 6 […]
End The War Now
The people of the United States need to encourage their government to end the war in Iraq now. The cost of the war in Iraq now stands close to $465 billion. The population of Iraq numbers about 27.5 million. With a little long division we discover that for the same price we […]
Your house rocks
Russ Roberts has been digging through American Housing Survey data from old censuses.
He reports:
1. In 1970, 36% of the 67 million households in America had air conditioning, 11% had central air.
2. In 2005, 82% of the 15 million households with income below the poverty line had air conditioning, 52% had central air.
Whining is […]
Pope Center Conference
I have a habit of putting my foot in my mouth around Mike Munger.
I think he’s a great scholar, fun speaker, excellent blogger, and well, just a swell guy.
But I have the urge to say things that I mean as questions and the come out as statements.
That’s what happened today at the Pope Conference.
Maybe I […]
Bill Cosby FTR from Makin’ It Plain
Bill Cosby has a new book out with Dr. Alvin Poussaint of Harvard Medical School, Come On People: On The Path From Victims to Victors.
Anthony Bradley reviews it for Acton Institute Blog:
Cosby and Poussaint remind us that black America’s hope for escape from abysmal self-destruction is moral formation — not government programs or blaming white […]
Prosperity and the Christian Ethic
This is a long post, but it deals with many important areas of my thought.
Sam provokes this response with a question in an email:
“Tell me where you stand as both a Christian and a hyper-capitalist on those churches that preach wealth is proof of God’s grace, and that Christians can and should live the high […]
Mea Culpa
A letter to the Editor at the N&O:
I would like to issue a public apology to the following candidates running for Commissioner positions in the November 4th elections for Morrisville: Pete Martin, Michael Roberts, Linda Lyons, Heather Hudson, and Mark Stohlman. Last Monday night I harvested several of your campaign signs from along Morrisville Parkway […]
Christians and Public Schools
Robert Escamilla is going to be on Hannity and Colmes tomorrow night. I can’t imagine what he is going to say.
A short version of the story:
Escamilla was a teacher in Wake County Public Schools for several years. At a student’s recommendation he invited a persecuted Egyptian Coptic Christian to speak in his World Religions class.
The […]
Gini in a bottle:
MR has this point:
the (relatively) high level of the European Gini stems from higher levels of unemployment, whereas the relatively high level of the American Gini stems from the rich being very rich.
We hear a lot about inequality, but it makes a big difference whether the inequality is the result of the rich getting richer […]
Ideas should be free
At a certain point it will become more expensive to prevent counterfeiting of ideas than any profit garnered through protection. At that point ideas will become free.
This has important implications for patents, as well as the already obvious music and movie industries, and the more aware newspaper industry.
The WSJ is dead if they don’t […]