Joseph Coletti

“Hierarchy is not imposed, it is natural,” Duke professor Adrian Bejan told J. Peder Zane in a recent interview. “Equality, however, is artificial, because it violates the law of evolution in nature.” Bejan comes to this conclusion because “physics and economics are two sides of the same coin,” and…

Paul Romer won the Nobel prize in economics for showing how innovation creates economic growth. A new working paper from Raj Chetty and his colleagues presents a model of how much innovation results from tax cuts. Their model suggests tax changes “have no impact on the decisions of star inventors,…

Donald Trump elicited the same kind of hopeful expectation among his voters in 2016 that Barack Obama did among his voters in 2008 and 2012. In his forthcoming book, Alienated America, Tim Carney takes another look at who those Trump voters were and finds that many of them identified…

“Economic growth, while necessary, is insufficient to address many of the challenges of our 21st-century economy,” Abby McCloskey writes in National Affairs. She offers some policy suggestions to improve connections in community, make work pay, and reform entitlements to improve government finances. I don’t endorse all of them, but…

In his influential book, Coming Apart, Charles Murray made a compelling case for the cultural differences between affluent (white) Americans and working class (white) Americans. Among the differences were marriage and divorce rates. Wealthier whites marry and divorce at the same rates as in the past. Poorer whites marry…

Despite dire predictions of steep drops in charitable giving because of federal tax reform, the left-of-center Inside Philanthropy found giving flat or higher in an informal survey of United Ways and other nonprofits. Fewer people may take a tax deduction for their contributions to churches and charitable causes, but…

North Carolina’s Department of Revenue (NCDOR) recently claimed the ability to force out-of-state companies to collect sales taxes and set its own rules on how to do that based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. (Wayfair) this past June. Now NCDOR is…

Families have found nontraditional ways to meet a basic need with less regulation and lower costs. The headline warns “experts are concerned,” but the families are generally happy with their experience. This time, experts are not wringing their hands about “unaccountable” charter schools,  but about health care sharing ministries. The…