The culture of Houston really shines through during events like Hurricane Harvey. Despite what the narrative spinners would have you believe, we are not rugged individualists; we are rugged communitarians... Narratives are not necessarily built on facts; they’re built on stories, pictures, graphics, and videos. Ideally, we want our narratives to be aligned with the [...]
The Competitive Governance Institute presents a video on the concept of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity describes the principle of making decisions and taking action at the lowest, smallest possible level of authority. It is the conservative principle that gives power back to local institutions and de-emphasizes the brute force of the national government. We’re now at a [...]
According to the Washington Post, Washington DC’s public school district is planning to close 15 under-enrolled traditional schools: “If we don’t become very serious about marketing and competing with charter schools," [DC Councilman David] Catania said, “traditional public schools, as we know them, will become a thing of the past.” Charter schools have grown quickly [...]
The human body needs some stressors, and everything organic and complex communicates with the environment via stressors.—Nassim Nicholas Taleb Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is back with a new book: Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder. He recently sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie for an interview. Taleb makes [...]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But what is “best” for some is “worst” for others, and vice-versa. Monday, President Obama was sworn in for his second term. This event was a “best” for his stalwart supporters, such as Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, and is a sign of a [...]
Faced with a complex, hard-to-solve problem, there is a natural human tendency to solve a much simpler, easier one instead. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, dubs this cognitive process “substitution.” We know our political system is broken. The signs are everywhere: knee-jerk partisanship, massive debts and unfunded liabilities, widespread [...]