The kids are most certainly not alright. And as many of America’s employers are now finding out, this means that many junior employees are not doing so well either. New research details how rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders are drastically rising among America’s youth. Identifying the causes of these troubling trends and acting quickly to reverse them should be a national priority, and fortunately, there are ways to work toward that goal.
Income inequality dominates our political and policy debates. Perhaps the latest example of this phenomenon is the extent to which proposals regarding how much the rich should be taxed have become ubiquitous in our discourse.
South Carolina and Connecticut are among two of the latest states that might soon allow kids more opportunities to step out on their own for some time at the park or a walk to school. Following the example of Utah, Lawmakers in South Carolina and Connecticut are two of the latest states to consider changes in state law to protect parents’ ability to allow their children a bit more independence, without worrying that such allowances will be seen as criminally “neglectful” by local authorities.
Given recent progress in the development of artificial intelligence, many policy conversations take for granted that such advancements will lead to mass technological unemployment and could even create a permanent underclass. Once these “facts” are established, a radical and sweeping policy solution typically follows, most often an argument for the necessity of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). But despite their growing popularity, such apocalyptic predictions about the role of AI in replacing human labor and the need for a UBI are greatly overblown. Although I’ve written on this topic previously (one article even garnering a response from Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang), the doomsayers’ case seems to be in need of a robust response.
Social media has pushed us to try to summarize everything we think and feel in less than 140 characters. In Stubborn Attachments Tyler Cowen accomplished a figurative tweet, answering some of the most complex questions of philosophy, politics, and economics in less than 140 pages.
Whether policymakers should even consider ideas for a UBI, given recent studies that suggest an expanded labor market from future AI and relatively strong current economic conditions, is still an open question.
