The Pursuit of Happiness

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The Declaration of Independence states that our inalienable rights include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Life and liberty are easy to understand, but that last phrase is less intuitive. How can people have a right to strive for happiness?
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Uniting to Fight Poverty: A TED Talk

How do we solve problems like poverty with so much political polarization?

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Welcome to the Pursuit

To pursue our happiness, to achieve our liberty, and indeed to find fulfillment in our lives, we must start with a moral consensus, a fundamental truth around which we all revolve. Think of an atom. The outer field of electrons is full of chaotic activity. Electrons are rapidly orbiting and moving in a constant buzz. What contains that chaos and gives it structure? The fact that the whole chaotic cloud orbits one central nucleus.

Sports Industry: The Economic Spillover of LeBron James

America loves its sports teams. There’s nothing like a cross-division rivalry to get people worked up and trash talking. Teams bring a great deal of pride to cities, and that’s why the years never blunt the hurt of a team’s move. Cross-country movements of teams remain psychologically, if not economically, important to cities.

But individual athletes also have their impacts on a town. Some of it is cultural or behavioral. Star athletes can be propped up as hometown heroes, or if they misbehave, they can be shamed out of a city.

Trump Foreign Policy Turns Out to Be, Wait for It … Presidential

Who’d a thunk it? All the bloviating and hyperventilating and name-calling aside, turns out President Trump’s foreign policy actions in the first 100 days of his presidency (an entirely artificial edifice on which to judge a presidency) are pretty …...

Upward Mobility: New Routes in the Race For America’s Fastest Growing Cities

Wake up, America. We have a mobility problem. And we’re not talking about former First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign or the number of potholes on the highways to America’s fastest growing cities.

Getting Men Back to Work: A Little Public Shaming Doesn’t Hurt

Getting men back to work is not only critical for their own psyche, but also for their communities and the U.S. economy. In a long road map for reforms recently laid out by a group of policy experts, the authors cite a little public shaming, as well as a lively discussion of the dignity of hard work (as expertly expressed by Mike Rowe) as potential motivators to get men off the sidelines and back into the workforce.

What Cities Can Do to Make America Move Again

America has become a nation of homebodies. And it’s not doing the economy, or America’s urban centers, a lot of good.

The ‘Go West, young man!’ ethic knitted into America’s DNA has apparently been lost on the young people. In fact, the few people who are moving around the country are retirees, not the scrappy young upstarts looking for a great new opportunity.

How Innovation Can Defeat Homelessness

“I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.” ― Henry Ford Henry Ford is credited with making cars better than those who came before him, but he also found a way to make them cheaper. So perhaps you can appreciate...

Numbers Don’t Lie: How Paid Parental Leave Helps the Economy

Several companies in the UK and India now provide “pawternity leave.” That’s paid time off for employees when a new pet becomes part of the family. The new approach to family care begs the question: If puppy parents are reaping the benefits of paid parental leave, can’t the United States provide comparable benefits to ensure human babies receive the same support?

‘Choice Feminism’: Equal Opportunity and Gender Specialization

In fact, if we stopped to look at how millennial women — and men — now increasingly prefer traditional, female stay-at-home roles and male bread-winning roles, we might consider the principles of a certain kind of feminism that explains this recent shift.

It’s called “choice feminism,” and it is a term that has been adopted to describe the belief that women are free to choose the lifestyle they want, whether at home or in the workplace, without judgment.

The Dignity of Work — A UK Model for the US

Leave it to Bruce Springsteen to celebrate the value and dignity of work in one of his most patriotic songs, “American Land.” It’s not surprising that he is appreciated as one of America’s greatest musicians by people from all walks of life, from poor to rich and old to young.

But what happens to the foundation of his song lyrics, and the American Dream, when the “hard-working man” begins to disappear from the picture?

Teaching Doctors About Running A Business

The fields of science and medicine employ some of the most highly educated and hands-on professionals in the world. So you might scratch your head when hearing one expert call for training medical researchers on how to do their job more effectively. But the training isn’t more of the technical sciences; it’s an appreciation and understanding of business and entrepreneurship.