Author Archives: Timothy B Lee

I try to avoid criticizing my commenters, but this anonymous comment so perfectly crystalizes the attitude I was criticizing in my last point that I can’t resist quoting it: For all the gassing on conservatives do about ‘family values’ and … Continue reading →

Over at Reason, there’s a debate about the future of libertarianism. Brink Lindsey argues that the American right has become increasingly inhospitable to libertarian ideas, and that it’s time for the dissolution of the historic “fusionist” alliance between conservatives and … Continue reading →

When I moved to the St. Louis area in 2005, I rented a townhouse in the inner-ring suburb of Richmond Heights. It was a quiet, safe, and pleasant neighborhood, but rather dull. The neighborhood was entirely residential and abutted a … Continue reading →

It’s not uncommon in economic policy debates to hear people rending their garments over the supposed decline of America’s “manufacturing base.” There has never been much factual basis for these concerns; our manufacturing output has been steadily rising for decades. … Continue reading →

Back in March, I listed the books that influenced me and commented that Jane Jacobs was the only one to have a significant impact on my everyday life. Jacobs was a profoundly important bottom-up thinker, and so I’m going to … Continue reading →

As the 1990s began, the Internet had a few hundred thousand hosts and was used by a narrow community of academics and computer nerds. By the end of the decade, there were tens of millions of hosts, and in 2005 … Continue reading →

Matt Yglesias points to this excellent Dana Milbank column pointing out that Arizona governor Jan Brewer has been running around telling whoppers about immigrants in her state, including rumors that undocumented immigrants have been beheading people in Arizona’s border towns. … Continue reading →

One of the reasons I’ve been belaboring the limitations of top-down management is that I’ve found this is a subject on which some libertarians get confused. Because political debates often pit governments against businesses, there’s a tendency for those of … Continue reading →

A while back I wrote about the trouble that can occur when the managers of large organizations overestimate the utility of large data sets and sophisticated statistical tools, with Robert McNamara’s problems in Vietnam as a poster child. In 2010 … Continue reading →

Will Wilkinson has had a big influence on my thinking about migration, nationalism, and related subjects, so I read his pro-immigrant case for ending birthright citizenship with interest. At the heart of his argument is a kind of “grand bargain”: … Continue reading →