Table of contents for May 2020 in Reason

HERE ARE TWO stories about modern Americans’ economic lives. The first story is that the American Dream is dead. The cost of college is ballooning even as higher education becomes a prerequisite for an increasing proportion of white-collar jobs. Those jobs have become more important to the American middle class as manufacturing and many other forms of well-compensated blue-collar work disappear. The debt from obtaining this quasi-mandatory college education (especially at expensive, cutthroat elite schools where admission is statistically impossible) puts newly minted adults in a terrible position. They feel they cannot move forward with one of the major milestones of 20th century adulthood: homeownership. Nor can they afford to live in major cities with job growth, such as New York and San Francisco, where rents have been increasing and…

THERE’S NO DENYING that a big chunk of the economy feels pretty screwed up right now for millions of working-class and middleclass Americans. There’s a widespread sense that obtaining housing, education, and health care was once fairly easy and cheap but has now become mind-bogglingly complex and expensive. Addressing anxiety around the increasing elusiveness of these building blocks of an archetypical American life is at the heart of virtually all rhetoric in the 2020 election cycle, with everyone from democratic socialist presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders to nationalist conservative Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) hastening to offer funeral orations for the American Dream—while also promising to resurrect it. What follows is a forensic investigation into how the markets for health care, higher education, and residential housing got broken. The goal is not,…

IF THERE’S ONE thing that almost everyone in America can agree on, it’s that the health care system is broken. Nearly 18 percent of America’s economy is devoted to spending on health care, far more than the share in any comparable country. And although the U.S. medical system provides some of the best health care in the world, it does so only for those who can afford it. Moreover, fragmented service delivery undercuts overall quality. A decade after passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), health care spending is still eating up government and household budgets, nearly 28 million Americans remain uninsured, and costs continue bounding upward. It’s no wonder that health care was the top priority for voters in the 2018 elections or that debates over how to fix…

“What will Earth look like when Earth Day 60 rolls around in 2030? Here are my predictions: As the International Food Policy Research Institute projects, we will be able to feed the world’s additional numbers and to provide them with a better diet. Because they are ultimately political in nature, poverty and malnutrition will not be eliminated, but economic growth will make many people in the developing world much better off. Technological improvements in agriculture will mean less soil erosion, better management of freshwater supplies, and higher productivity crops. Life expectancy in the developing world will likely increase from 65 years to 73 years, and probably more; in the First World, it will rise to more than 80 years. Metals and mineral prices will be even lower than they are…

BALTIMORE COUNTY RESIDENTS have had their perceptions about recycling shattered. In early February, news broke that for the last seven years, the county has been trashing the glass it collects as part of the county recycling program. “There are numerous issues with glass recycling, including increased presence of shredded paper in recycling streams which contaminates materials and is difficult to separate from broken glass fragments, in addition to other limitations on providing quality material,” a county spokesperson told The Baltimore Sun. Glass recycling reportedly stopped in 2013, the same year the county opened a $23 million single-stream recycling facility, according to the Sun. Single-stream recycling refers to the practice of letting people put all their recyclables into one bin, then sorting it at processing facilities. It’s more convenient for consumers…

AMERICA’S SUCCESS IN delivering enviable living standards while protecting human rights has made it the moral gold standard of the world, inspiring global movements for social justice, freedom, and democracy. But the flip side is that when America departs from these principles, it hands a license to other countries to do the same. India is living proof. Even before President Donald Trump brought nativism front and center in U.S. politics, India was rummaging through American jurisprudence for intellectual ammo to justify similar policies. The world’s second-most-populous country experienced a massive influx of Bangladeshi refugees in 1971 when Pakistan declared war on Bangladesh to prevent it from seceding. Pakistan’s brutality triggered the single largest displacement of people in the second half of the 20th century, with 10 million Bangladeshis, predominantly Muslim,…

ON THE DAY he signed the Higher Education Act of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the law would “swing open a new door for the young people of America” and provide “a way to deeper personal fulfillment, greater personal productivity, and increased personal reward.” Johnson wanted Americans to know that his government would do whatever it could to help “every child born in these borders to receive all the education that he can take.” Signed at Southwest Texas State College, Johnson’s alma mater, the Higher Education Act authorized federal scholarships and federally funded part-time jobs for students who could get into college but couldn’t pay for it. But the real catalyst for increasing college enrollment was a provision that allowed the government to directly lend students money for…

THE UNITED STATES has a long and distinguished history of freaking out about powerful rival nations. When countries even begin to approach the United States in economic might, the political reaction often borders on the hysterical. At the height of the Cold War, high rates of Soviet gross domestic product (GDP) growth caused policy makers to fret that the USSR’s centrally planned economy would outperform American capitalism. Members of Congress reacted with their usual aplomb, tolerating the rise of McCarthyism and the blacklisting of suspected communists in the arts. Sputnik triggered a similar panic about whether the United States was losing the space race to a communist foe. A few decades later, the Japanese were the source of anxiety. After four decades of rapid growth, they seemed poised to overtake…

Curb Your Enthusiasm is back, and so is society’s ultimate norm enforcer. The show’s 10th season follows Seinfeld co-creator Larry David as he navigates the irritations and annoyances of everyday life via a fictionalized version of himself. As in seasons past, much of the show’s comedy comes from David and his unfortunate interlocutors arguing about what the appropriate standard of behavior is in a given situation: When is it OK to ask someone’s weight? Should a pregnant woman jog? Can the same dish be used to feed humans and dogs? This intense focus on seemingly minor everyday questions of propriety makes the show as insightful as it is funny. David, like the rest of us, has to interact with a world full of people who are often selfish or annoying…

IN THE AMERICAN Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It), Michael Strain takes a deep dive into the state of the American economy. Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, doesn’t gloss over the country’s problems, particularly low workforce participation for young men without high school diplomas. But he marshals a trove of data to argue both that the economy is broadly healthy and that it’s benefiting nearly everyone—including the lower-income households who need it most. In February, before the market was disrupted by COVID-19, Features Editor Peter Suderman spoke with Strain about his book, economic pessimism, and why left and right alike have been getting this issue wrong. Q: How do you define the American dream? A: It means different things for different people in different times.…

REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS, on the whole, no longer care about debt or deficits—at least not in any substantive sense. That’s a problem for a number of reasons, not least that it increases the risk of a debt crisis in the future. Those same Republicans spent the better part of Barack Obama’s presidency complaining bitterly about the trillion-dollar budget gaps the country ran during his first term, and President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to eliminate all federal debt. But since Trump’s election, deficits have increased even faster than expected, and the total federal debt has risen accordingly. That, in turn, is likely to have long-term consequences for both the economy and for the broader politics of debt and deficits. You can see the nation’s trajectory spelled out in…

FLORIDA HAS HAD more exonerations of death row inmates than any other state in the country—roughly one for every three executions the state has carried out. A track record like that would normally lead to a certain amount of circumspection, but not on Florida’s highest court. In a major decision issued in January, the state Supreme Court reversed a 2016 ruling and declared that split juries can recommend death sentences. In its majority opinion, the court ruled that it “got it wrong” when it decided that the state’s previous death penalty scheme, which allowed death sentences to be imposed by the recommendation of nonunanimous juries, violated the Florida constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. “Lest there be any doubt, we hold that our state constitution’s prohibition on cruel and…

PETE BUTTIGIEG, THE former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who briefly looked like a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination before dropping out on March 1, loves imagining his war-veteran self on a debate stage with the Vietnam-dodging Donald Trump. He is also fond of asserting that “few—if any—single policy solutions carry the promise of democratic renewal more than national service.” What Buttigieg and other fans of the perennially elusive goal of national service fail to grasp is that the real-world anecdote always undermines the campaign-season fantasy. Using the blunt force of government to forge national unity will forever disappoint as long as individuals have the ability to wiggle out of conformity. Nodding to the political realities of the day, Mayor Pete stresses that his plan is “strictly optional.”…

ABOUT 20 MILLION Americans turned out for the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Lectures and rallies took place at more than 2,000 college campuses, 10,000 elementary and high schools, and thousands of other places across the country. Forty-two states adopted resolutions endorsing Earth Day, and Congress recessed so that legislators could participate in the activities in their districts. It is sometimes described as, up to that time, the largest public demonstration in history. The lectures and literature surrounding the event featured lots of dismal predictions about the future. One such compendium of doom was The Environmental Handbook, whose cover noted that it had been “prepared for the first national environmental teach-in.” Commissioned by the group Friends of the Earth, the book preached the perils of rising population and…

THE CONSTITUTION IS traditionally seen as the culmination of the American Revolution. But in the fifth and final volume of Conceived in Liberty, the libertarian firebrand Murray Rothbard portrays it as a reactionary counterrevolution against the Revolution’s radical principles, orchestrated by a powerful array of monied interests who hoped a more centralized government would reproduce many hierarchical and mercantilist features of the 18th century British state. The first volume of Conceived in Liberty was published in 1975, launching a lengthy history of America from the founding of the colonies to the adoption of the Constitution. Three more volumes came out in due course, but the fifth, which promised to explore the period from the end of the American Revolution to the Constitution’s ratification, never appeared. Rumors circulated that Arlington House,…

Fairly early in Just Mercy, an employee of the Monroeville, Alabama, district attorney’s office encourages a young lawyer played by Michael B. Jordan to visit the nearby To Kill a Mockingbird museum. It’s housed in the courthouse where Harper Lee’s father worked, the assistant explains; you can see the place where Atticus Finch once stood. The sly joke, of course, is that Finch is a fictional character. Not so with this movie’s protagonist. Bryan Stevenson really is a Harvard Law graduate who moved to the Deep South in 1989 to represent impoverished death row inmates. He really did found a practice called the Equal Justice Initiative, which has won relief for hundreds of wrongly convicted and unfairly sentenced prisoners—beginning with Walter McMillian, played by Jamie Foxx, an innocent black man…

In Bladen County, North Carolina, the chair of the Board of Elections threatened to have anyone who recites the Pledge of Allegiance at a board meeting arrested. The Arizona Department of Education inadvertently released the names, email addresses, and other personal information of nearly 7,000 parents whose children take part in a school voucher program. The release included the disabilities listed for children with special needs. Philadelphia police officer Keith White claimed that someone he arrested on drug charges in 2018 attacked him, causing bleeding and damage to his teeth. The arrestee was charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, and reckless endangerment. Surveillance video later showed that the defendant did not in fact resist arrest, and that White sustained his injuries when he tripped and fell. When her 5-year-old daughter…