Economics

The Fiscal Character of the Midwest The Midwest is America’s fiscal middle ground—neither the high-tax, high-service model of the Northeast nor the low-tax competition model of the South. But within that broad characterization lies enormous variation, from Illinois’s catastrophic pension crisis to Indiana’s reputation for conservative fiscal management to Minnesota’s Scandinavian-inflected public sector tradition. The Census Bureau divides the Midwest into the East North Central and West North Central divisions, though the more meaningful distinction for fiscal purposes is between the industrial Great Lakes states and the agricultural Plains states. ...

The Fiscal Character of the Northeast The Northeast—New England plus the Middle Atlantic states—is America’s oldest industrial and commercial core. Its fiscal profile reflects that history: high taxes, high services, dense and aging infrastructure, and long-standing commitments to public institutions that are expensive to maintain and politically difficult to reduce. The region encompasses two distinct sub-regions with meaningfully different characters. New England Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont share geography but diverge sharply on fiscal philosophy. ...

Introduction Most personal finance advice is technically correct and psychologically useless. Spend less than you earn. Invest early and consistently. Don’t time the market. These are right, but they don’t address the harder problem: humans are bad at long-term thinking by default, and investing is almost entirely a long-term game. The skill worth building isn’t picking stocks—it’s training your own cognition to make better decisions across long time horizons. Key Points Why standard personal finance advice fails to change behavior The psychological obstacles to long-term thinking: hyperbolic discounting, loss aversion, availability bias How to build the habit of thinking in decades rather than quarters The investing principles that actually hold up once you account for human psychology Connecting personal finance decisions to broader life goals rather than treating them in isolation Conclusion The goal of personal finance isn’t to optimize a spreadsheet—it’s to give your future self more options. Getting there requires building a cognitive skill: the ability to treat future outcomes as real and worth protecting. That skill, once built, turns out to be useful far beyond money.

Introduction Scott Galloway’s provocation—that “follow your passion” is terrible career advice, and you should instead follow the money—is a useful corrective to a lot of fuzzy thinking. But like most contrarian takes, it overcorrects. The real framework is more nuanced: passion, skill, and economic demand interact, and the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. This post uses Galloway’s argument as a jumping-off point for thinking clearly about how to build a career worth having. ...

Introduction Nordstrom built a reputation on a simple idea: give employees the authority to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. The famous employee handbook was one rule: use good judgment. This is either a profound insight into organizational culture or a naive fantasy, depending on what you believe about how people behave at work. This post takes the Nordstrom model seriously as a lens for thinking about service, culture, and what organizations actually incentivize. ...

Introduction The FIRE movement—Financial Independence, Retire Early—is built on a compelling premise: aggressively save and invest, minimize expenses, and buy back your time. For people whose mental health makes traditional employment exhausting or unsustainable, the appeal is obvious. But the relationship between financial independence and mental health is more complicated than the FIRE community often acknowledges. This post explores both the promise and the limits. Key Points What the FIRE framework actually offers people dealing with mental illness The ways financial stress compounds anxiety and depression Where FIRE’s assumptions break down for people with health-related income instability The psychological relationship with money, security, and future orientation Building financial resilience without making it another source of anxiety Conclusion Financial independence is a legitimate goal and a genuine buffer against certain kinds of suffering. But it’s not a cure for mental illness, and the intense optimization mindset of FIRE can become its own trap. The aim is enough security to give yourself options—not a new obsession to replace the old ones.

Introduction The debate between big and small government often misses the more important question: capable versus incapable government. A state that lacks the capacity to implement its own policies—regardless of their ideological orientation—produces bad outcomes. State capacity is the unsexy prerequisite to everything else in governance. Key Points Defining state capacity: what it is and why it gets overlooked The relationship between bureaucratic quality and policy outcomes How different governance philosophies handle the capacity question Historical examples of high and low capacity states The American case: capacity gaps and their downstream effects Conclusion Before debating what government should do, it’s worth asking whether it can do it. Capacity is the foundation. Without it, governing philosophies are just theory.

What This Series Is About State governments occupy a fascinating and underappreciated position in American governance. Unlike the federal government, they cannot print money, must generally balance their budgets, compete with neighboring states for residents and businesses, and face hard tradeoffs with finite resources. That combination of constraints makes state finance one of the most instructive places to study how political priorities translate into actual policy. This series examines each of the fifty states—organized by region—through the lens of public finance. The goal is not a dry recitation of budget numbers but an attempt to understand what each state’s fiscal choices reveal about its political economy, its history, and its relationship with the people it governs. ...

Introduction This post will delve into the relationship between monetary discount rates and depression. Key Points Explain monetary discount rates and their significance. Discuss how depression can affect decision-making and discount rates. Explore potential solutions or interventions. Conclusion Wrap up the discussion and highlight the importance of understanding this relationship.