My Right to Die

More Americans are supporting the right of the terminally ill to end their own lives on their own terms, and more states are considering legalizing physician-assisted suicide. For Kevin Drum, this is personal.

Author: Kevin Drum
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jan 11, 2016
Length: 17 minutes (4,346 words)

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us?

The world is getting automated more quickly than we think—and when the robots take over it will throw our capital-labor balance out of whack and decimate the middle class:

“Until a decade ago, the share of total national income going to workers was pretty stable at around 70 percent, while the share going to capital—mainly corporate profits and returns on financial investments—made up the other 30 percent. More recently, though, those shares have started to change. Slowly but steadily, labor’s share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.”

Author: Kevin Drum
Source: Mother Jones
Published: May 14, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,423 words)

America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead

Why are violent crime rates still dropping, even during the recession? The latest evidence suggests lead—in the air, in our gasoline, in our paint—was responsible for the rise in crime in the 1960s & ’70s, and the drop in the 1990s:

“And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to ‘fill ‘er up with ethyl,’ they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.

“It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of…nothing. Nevin’s paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it’s easy to see why—Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What’s more, a single correlation between two curves isn’t all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the ’80s and ’90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.”

Author: Kevin Drum
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jan 3, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,326 words)