What Is the Welfare State?
A thorough guide to the welfare state — its Bismarckian origins, Esping-Andersen's three worlds typology, the Beveridge Report, Nordic...
September 2025
February 2025
What Causes the Housing Crisis?
Housing costs have outrun incomes for decades. The cause is not mysterious: zoning restrictions, NIMBYism, and political economy that...
How Taxes Work: A Complete Guide to Income, Capital Gains, and Deductions
How taxes work explained: progressive income taxes, capital gains, corporate tax incidence, wealth taxes, the Laffer curve, and why billionaires...
January 2025
System Justification Theory: Why the Disadvantaged Defend Harmful Systems
Women rate male job candidates more favorably than identical female candidates. Working-class voters oppose redistribution more strongly than the...
September 2024
Why the Rich Get Richer: Cumulative Advantage and Capital Returns
Thomas Piketty's r>g thesis, Robert Merton's Matthew effect, Raj Chetty's mobility data, and the Gini coefficient's trajectory explain why wealth...
August 2024
Why Inequality Grows: The Economics of Wealth Concentration
Why does inequality grow? Understand Piketty's r > g thesis, the mechanisms of wealth concentration, what the research shows about inequality's...
What Is Social Mobility?
The United States has lower social mobility than most rich democracies. This is a detailed account of what the research shows: how mobility is...
April 2024
What Is Slavery and Its Legacy
A comprehensive examination of chattel slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, Reconstruction's failure, and the measurable economic, health, and...
What Is Race? Social Construction and the Science of Human Variation
Race is one of the most consequential categories in human societies, yet its biological basis is contested and its definitions vary across...
What Is Capitalism: The Economic System That Remade the World
What is capitalism? From Adam Smith and Marx to Piketty and Varieties of Capitalism — a thorough exploration of how capitalism emerged, how it...
March 2024
How Poverty Traps Work: The Economics of Being Stuck
How do poverty traps work? Explore the cognitive bandwidth research, S-curve growth models, microfinance evidence, the graduation approach, and...
Why Inequality Is Growing: The Economics and Politics of the Widening Gap
Global wealth and income inequality is measurably rising. Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Raj Chetty, and others explain the structural forces...
What Is Climate Justice?
Climate justice examines who causes climate change, who suffers from it, and what is owed across nations and generations.
February 2024
What Is Social Class?
Social class shapes life chances, identity, and behavior in ways most people never consciously examine.
August 2023
What Is Globalization
Globalization delivered the fastest poverty reduction in history and generated the political backlash reshaping the world.
January 2023
What Is the Matthew Effect: How Success Breeds Success
The Matthew Effect describes how early advantages compound over time. Learn Merton's sociology concept, cumulative advantage in academia and tech,...
May 2022
What Is Labor Economics?
Labor economics studies how wages are determined, why workers get paid what they do, and how labor markets function.