Anna Gat is an amazing writer whose substack, Eleven Sentence Essays, I read regularly. What she does with the English language is a joy to behold and certain phrases of hers have remained with me since I first encountered them (“We read the Braille of others until we see” and “There’s a deep gap between what you don’t know how to say and what you won’t,” come to mind).
This week she published Essay 52 On Why I'm Quitting Alcohol and it went viral. Tyler Cowen and others recommended it and twitter had a big discussion about her points.
I like my drink but she makes some good points. See what you think … and subscribe to her newsletter if you want a gut punch on the reg.
“You’ll find that education’s about the only thing lying around loose in the world, and that it’s about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he’s willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screwdriver lost.”
— John Graham
I’m working hard to build an inheritance for my kids. I want desperately to leave enough capital to support my kids so that work is a choice, not an obligation. I want to increase their ability to do what they like to do and eliminate their need to have to do.
And of course, everyone is against me on it. Friends tell me that it will ruin them as people and contributing members of society. The government can’t wait to tax them into poverty for the hell of it. Inflation wants to gobble up what those who came before produced. My own shortcomings might make it probable that they never have what I wish for them.
Interestingly, we are told that regressive taxes like taxes on inheritance serve to even the playing field and decrease the difference between the haves and have-lesses. This week though, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper that concludes: “Our findings suggest that inheritance taxes may do little to mitigate the extreme wealth inequality in society.”
“The power broker in your life is the voice that no one ever hears.”
— Jim Loehr
Liverpool University Press is delighted to announce the launch of a brand new open access journal, The Journal of Beatles Studies which will be published twice a year, and peer reviewed. Cass Sunstein from Harvard Law has an article in the inaugural issue.
I was once told that you were either a Beatles man or an Elvis man, but I now know that to be untrue. I’ve been both at various times in my life but I have way more of the lads in my iTunes than the King.
United Healthcare Group is the largest health insurance company in the country. In 2022, it took in $275B and made $28B in profits. The company insured 45 million lives worldwide.