Culture and Society

“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…

Thomas Jefferson, right? It depends. At the time of the adoption of the Declaration of Indpendence by the 2nd Continental Congress in 1776, Jefferson was not recognized as the author. As Matthew Wills notes in his thought-provoking text “[t]he document was drafted by a committee made up of John Adams,…

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…

As most readers are probably aware, an attorney has threatened legal action against some of the journalists and online commenters who vilified a group of Covington High School students after a misleadingly edited video was planted on Twitter by an unidentified troll. In a recent blogpost, Eugene Volokh…

JLF Senior Fellow Joe Coletti offers a thoughtful commentary on the controversy over the Gillette ad and the behavior of men in our society. Context is important. The latest Gillette ad touches some political buttons at a time when everything is viewed as the next potential battle…