Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Think college is expensive? Try sending your kid to full-time day care or preschool. In nearly half the country, it’s now more expensive to educate a 4-year-old in preschool than an 18-year-old in college, a finding that illustrates the rising burden many families face affording care for children. The annual cost of care for a…
A sign alerts trail walkers in Fairfax County’s Roundtree Park to the remains of a bridge that washed out near Holmes Run. With a mounting backlog of deferred maintenance, there are no immediate plans to fix it. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post) For decades, Fairfax County has been a national model for suburban living, a place…
“I feel as though I have died and gone to heaven,” said Britain’s skills minister in a recent speech, as he prepares to preside over the fastest rise in the minimum wage in the country’s history. The new policy, which starts on Friday, will see the wages for low-paid workers rise four times faster than…
Uber drivers aren’t the only “gig” workers rattling the U.S. economy. Older workers, especially women, increasingly are filling in as contractors across a range of traditional industries, from highway inspectors to health aides. As companies look to shed noncore tasks and government budgets come under strain, an expanding share of the workforce has come untethered…
Most twenty-somethings will never belong to a union — and may never know anyone who does. But many are in need of a job (unemployment for those under 25 is 18%), and many more are sitting on student loans, which total more than $1 trillion nationally. And now, plenty are favoring a presidential candidate who…
VOTERS’ anger over inequality is one explanation for the rise of politicians as varied as Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Marine Le Pen. This anger also makes it very difficult for the free-market right to realise one of its key aims: the shrinking of the state. In Britain a plan to reduce spending on benefits…
Airbnb, once a saviour from overpriced hotels, has become the new overpriced hotels since becoming the short-term accommodation staple. But with the rise of community living and workcations, an alternative might be to just sleep where you cowork. That’s the idea behind PodShare, a coworking space with beds, which has three locations in Los Angeles….
I don’t know who @KStreetHipster is, but over the weekend she unleashed a Twitter rant that does an amazing job of highlighting the central economic paradox of the times we live in. There’s a lot along these lines on her feed, which I just started following and would recommend. But these are the key points….
But Mr. Chyn argues that this experiment substantially understates the importance of neighborhoods. The problem, he says, isn’t in comparing those who win the lottery with those who lose. Rather, he argues that both the treatment and control groups had already partly inoculated their children against the effects of bad neighborhoods. Only a quarter of…
The National Review, a conservative magazine for the Republican elite, recently unleashed an attack on the “white working class”, who they see as the core of Trump’s support. The first essay, Father Führer, was written by the National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who used his past reporting from places such as Appalachia and the Rust Belt…