The Inequality That Matters

Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.

Published: Dec 14, 2010
Length: 23 minutes (5,972 words)

Autism as Academic Paradigm

The unacceptable ways we sometimes talk and think about the autism spectrum.

Published: Jul 13, 2009
Length: 11 minutes (2,782 words)