How to Manufacture Poverty
Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham explained how to earn a billion dollars. Here is the opposite recipe, the one a rich country runs on itself by refusing to look at the math.
What “Only 5 Percent” Really Means
“Only 5 percent” sounds like a small slice of a paycheck. Proposition 40 would take 5 percent of a fortune. Here is that bill in the units most of us use, what it would be paid with, and what it can and can’t fix.
What a Fair Race Looks Like
At the first USAFacts debate, the moderator said kids born rich mostly stay there. The slide’s own numbers said the opposite. Six in ten children born into the top fifth fall out of it, and the pattern is close to what a fair race produces when runners start at different places on the track.
They Can’t Both Be Right
The system says a bachelor’s degree means $1.2 million more in median lifetime earnings. A New York Times essay says business school, one of the biggest parts of higher education, should be abolished. They can’t both be right. They can both be wrong, in the same way: each reads research from too high up, and the student at the margin stands to pay for a finding about someone else.
Ask the Failures
In 1982, In Search of Excellence studied only what it called America’s best-run companies. When an analyst checked the worst, the winners’ record proved no guide to what came next. The $1.2 million college pitch makes the same mistake. It leaves out the students who enrolled, borrowed and left without a degree. Did anyone check the failures?
California’s Tax Paradox
California’s taxes look nearly flat. Look inside the total and you find a steeply progressive income tax offset by a sales tax and a rent estimate that fall hardest on the poor. That changes one argument around the 2026 billionaire tax.