Author: Jim

“Social isolation is rising alongside romantic isolation, as the economic and cultural trajectories of men and women move in opposite directions,” @DKThomp writes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/america-marriage-decline/681518/?gift=yGKGqaI9BMfIDuch_TrGYdz2WmENaCyIFjSV51Ovqig&utm_source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social

Americans were once the most mobile people on the planet. Now they’re stuck in place. @YAppelbaum reports on why Americans stopped moving to new homes in new places—and why that’s a big problem:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/american-geographic-social-mobility/681439/?gift=yGKGqaI9BMfIDuch_TrGYbip2g73G0lTEBdPUwqspOQ&utm_source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social

These three principles—consistency, tolerance, and abundance—can help restore American mobility. Federal guidelines can make the environment more amenable, but the solutions by and large cannot come from central planning; states and cities and towns will need to reform their rules and processes to allow the housing supply to grow where people want to build. The goal of policy makers, in any case, shouldn’t be to move Americans to any particular place, or to any particular style of living. They should instead aim to make it easier for Americans to move wherever they would like—to make it equally easy to build wherever Americans’ hopes and desires alight.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s team yesterday took control of the Treasury’s payment system, thus essentially gaining access to the checkbook with which the United States handles about $6 trillion annually and to all the financial information of Americans and American businesses with it. Apparently, it did not stop there.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-2-2025?r=3azmy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false