Michael Estrin

owever, the U.S. population is sicker in ways that may increase the intensity of care required. OECD data indicate higher U.S. rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, and a larger share of the population with multiple chronic conditions. Recent research has explored the extent to which the U.S. spends relatively less on prevention and public... See more

The day a boy walks into school, he’s behind half the class. With brains that mature later than girls’, boys almost immediately fall behind girls in school. We should “redshirt” them, just as we hold back college athletes for a year so they can develop further. This proposal comes from Richard Reeves, who wrote last year’s landmark book Of Boys and... See more

One last point. In the late 1990s the U.S. economy was growing quite rapidly, around 4 percent a year, and the tech boom was only one factor in that growth. These days underlying growth is only around 2 percent a year, partly because of slow growth in the working-age population, partly because overall productivity growth is slower. And so far this... See more

As Nathan Tankus explains, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the part of the Treasury Department that handles payments for the federal government, is supposed to be technocratic and focused purely on making sure the money goes where it is supposed to. Nonetheless, because it acts as an intermediary between the government and the rest of the... See more

Yet America’s fiscal position is far more constrained today than ever before. The U.S. government is now in violation of Ferguson’s Law and is likely to move further beyond its crucial limit in the coming decades.

Furthermore, recovery from the burst tech bubble depended to a large extent on the creation of another bubble, this time in housing

The NS experience is powerful when it is fully immersive. The evidence suggests, in fact, that on average , stay-out unit conscripts do not experience significant changes to their attitudes toward intra- and inter-ethnic interactions. While further research is necessary to determine the precise time frame and conditions necessary for NS to produce... See more

The federal payments system has been a panopticon for decades, waiting for someone with political ambitions to break down the bureaucratic firewalls protecting it, and open it up. Apparently, that has now happened. If the system transforms into a tool to arbitrarily block payments to entities whom Musk or Trump doesn’t like, which Musk has claimed... See more