A homeless woman was struggling to walk along the sidewalk. “Do need a ride?” She hesitated. After a moment, she agreed. She knew the way and would tell me how to get there. We drove in awkward silence. I offered to buy her McDonalds, and she ordered $25 of food from the drive-thru. Fair enough, she actually ate it all. Her turn-by-turn instructions were decisive, but I started to doubt her orientation.

Matthew 6:19-24 frames life as a constrained maximization problem involving God and money. Which will be your constraint, and which will you maximize? No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. What does this mean? Jesus frames life as service to either God or money.

What is Marriage? Marriage is a formal means of combining two people’s finances and legal responsibilities, with built-in barriers to exiting that relationship. It is a service offered by the government and religious institutions to allow people to make binding commitments to each other that help to build trust. People make binding commitments that they cannot back out of to increase their credibility in many settings. It’s a general-purpose way to build trust.

I am stuck on a contradiction. Jesus said that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” Yet, our churches are becoming elite spaces. Church attendance is correlated with being wealthier. Attendance has held steady for those with college degrees but dropped sharply for those who have not.

A Personal Parenting Tech Manifesto My first daughter is in 3rd grade, and her friends are starting to get cell phones. She joined a text thread with a few school friends, using my wife’s phone. I see cringy misunderstandings, and they have started comparing their drawings. She’s drawing clothing fashion designs — never an interest before. She wants her own bedroom and is carrying her headphones everywhere. I feel threatened.

I’m alarmed to realize I’ve joined the FIRE movement. That’s “Financial Independence, Retired Early.” FIRE is an Internet community of people plotting how to escape the Rat Race while they’re still young. It had a real moment during the Pandemic, and my impression is there’s a lot of overlap with the CrossFit people. Mentions of 'FIRE movement' from Google Trends. FIRE had a moment during the pandemic. hug I’m not actually racing to retire; instead, I’m racing to get to the retirement job/Walmart greeter phase of my career faster.

How do you tear down an oppressive system? Creatively. Another name for innovation is creative destruction. By pioneering a better way, innovators can undermine what existed before. Peeling apart the concepts of policy innovation (trying something new) and program evaluation (rigorous tests of what works) helps us see how they operate differently and serve different purposes. Policy innovators try something new, while program evaluators legitimize existing practices. For anybody with extreme views of a public service—like abolishing child protective services—the goal should be to create such compelling alternatives that program evaluators cannot ignore them.

When the US gives money to another country, there’s often a string attached—it can only be used to buy from America. Similarly, federal contracts commonly include a “buy American” clause. This way, the money serves a double purpose of helping the recipient and supporting American industry. A polar opposite story is the growth of Walmart in the 1980s and 1990s. Groups of local merchants would often organize to try and prevent Walmart from moving into a town and destroying them all.

“Moderation in everything” is a central guiding truth in life. Your first bite of a big meal is tastier than your last bite. This concept is called the law of diminishing marginal utility because it’s so often true. “The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.” –Malcolm Forbes Real world studies back up the idea that each additional bit of consumption adds less to your happiness. The richer people are, the more extra money is required to make them happier.

Activities can be thought of as habit forming—even addictive—when their value today becomes greater the more one has done them in the past. Many of our behaviors exhibit this sort of momentum, including good ones like hand washing and bad ones like substance abuse. Habits tie our past, current, and future selves together. When designing a nurturing environment for families, habits cannot be ignored. The baggage that people bring with them to a community will influence how each person acts there.

Keep reading for a very wonky look at how a hybrid world threatens relationship building and what to do about it. This post needs work still, but it’s a start. Decisions are made at the margin. That is, conditional on circumstances. When conditions change, marginal costs can be altered dramatically. I’ll pay more for a cup of water when lost in the desert than at home. I don’t plan to visit the Louvre tonight, but I might if I were already in Paris.

I live a hybrid life, my attention alternating between physical reality and the virtual world. My brain integrates both experiences, but an observer only understands the physical half. In my kids’ and wife’s eyes, I’m switched on or off, accessible or buried in my tech. I have no plans to quit the internet. In fact, I’ll probably use it more and more as the virtual world grows and improves every day.

The Internet is the most destructive force of our time. That’s because inventions that create the most…also destroy the most, if you listen to Schumpeter’s theory of Creative Destruction. To see what is being destroyed, look toward what the Internet provides. It delivers information. For communication, entertainment, learning, or anything else. Any institution in our society that provides information is at risk of being edged out. That’s the postal service, newspapers, Blockbuster Video, libraries, schools…and church.

Church is a community of people practicing Christianity together.1 In community, there exists an idea of thick vs thin. A thicker community is one that is more connected; its members interact more frequently and share more important ties in their lives. One can imagine a church community as a ball or a planet, ranging from the “thickest” most involved members at the dense core to occasional visitors in the outer atmosphere.

Any organization draws a particular crowd. Companies that want strivers demand long hours. Restaurants that want a fancy atmosphere might require men to wear a jacket. Churches that want young parishioners hire young staff and trendy musicians. A few ugly examples: Environments with high-trust access to children draw abusers. Churches that offer comfortable services and demand nothing attract and encourage shallow Christians. Markets for goods whose quality is hard to inspect—like snake oil and education—draw fraudsters.

I’ve opted for focus on the bottom 50% of wage earners as a useful rule of thumb. Free-market capitalism serves the majority well but leaves many people on the sidelines. The task for any capitalist with empathy is to intervene in the economy with a light touch. Help the poor without ruining the game for everybody. It’s an old, centrist approach in American politics: Pro-growth Progressivism from one direction, Compassionate Conservatism on the other side.

In education, “peer effects” refer to the ways that classmates affect each other’s education. Keeping other important factors like teacher quality and classroom size constant, the level and behavior of classmates clearly influence a child’s learning. There are many studies showing that peer effects are real and how they operate. They mainly affirm the common sense saying that “iron sharpens iron.” Parents are aware of educational peer effects, and it drives what schools they choose.

If you’re looking for ways to cope with being broke and raising children, living together with more people is a time-tested method. Household sizes have been falling since America’s founding as we got richer. Rich European countries with old populations have the smallest households, while poorer countries with many children have the largest households, according to Wikipedia. It costs around $18,000 per year to raise a child with a middle-class lifestyle in the US.

Poverty is a chicken-or-egg problem. When is the best stage in the human lifecycle at which to intervene to break cycles of poverty? Is it better to help adults or children? In Inequality in America, James Heckman convincingly argues that programs should be squarely focused on wellbeing of young children aged 0-5. If early childhood is the most impactful period of development—where poverty programs have the highest ROI—and funding is limited, nearly all poverty assistance funding should be directed to early childhood programs.

SZA - 20 Something Framing early adulthood There’s a typical arc in an adult’s earnings over their lifetime. We start out broke at age 18, before our earnings gradually increase until late career. It’s a normal process. When we conceptualize poverty, people typically think about lifetime earnings, although government policy only accounts for current earnings. People with low lifetime earnings normally have flatter earnings profiles. They never gain much education, and their earnings don’t increase much as they age.

One of the hardest ideas to wrestle with is that there are 8 billion other people living in this world with the same depth of experience as me. They each have the same depth of feeling as me. Each person experiences quiet thoughts and has clever inside jokes with their friends. I have no insight into their lives. I don’t know them. I don’t control them. I am insignificant. There’s a self-aggrandizing power trip in planning to change the world.

Growing up, Dad liked to listen to radio programs from an organization called Focus on the Family. It’s a Christian media group centered on the premise of “helping families thrive.” I always loved that goal. Anyone with a family knows how hard family life can be! Unfortunately, Focus on the Family preaches a narrow vision of how family should look. Their focus is promoting the health of traditional married couples with children.

(This article was originally posted on the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families’ blog in April 2016, where I interned. Their blog has since disappeared so I’m re-posting here. It was originally titled “Looking at Tax Time for Near Poor Hispanic Families”.) Mariela, a hypothetical single mom with two kids, just filed her 2015 federal taxes. Her adjusted gross income (AGI) this year was $25,000. She’s receiving a tax return of just over $4,000 thanks, largely, to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

When you buy or rent a home, you’re choosing more than the home. You get proximity to shops and parks, access to schools, and public services like police and fire protection. Perhaps most importantly, you choose your neighbors. Our neighbors can affect us in many ways. Neighbors determine local crime, whether grocery stores invest in the area, and how our kids’ peers behave. Economists call these externalities - side effects on us that our neighbors didn’t intend and don’t think much about.

Somebody asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” To that, Jesus replied with the parable of the Good Samaritan, who helped a wounded man he found on the side of the road. Many of us are one step ahead of Jesus. We have moved to safe neighborhoods where junkies don’t mug poor strangers for us to find. We use “walkability scores” in our GPS directions to help us avoid those lonely, dangerous sidewalks.

Jim, one of my childhood mentors, was a copy machine repairman. I don’t know his full story, but I know he got shot in the Vietnam War. Every Sunday, he carried a tote filled with candy to our church and distributed his loot liberally if we kids could recite Bible verses. He was a hero. Jim started repairing Xerox machines in the 1970s or 1980s when they were high-value machines, mechanically complicated, and easily broken.

I’m finishing the book “The Son Also Rises” by Gregory Clark. It’s a dicey book, but the proponderance of evidence the author presents is indisputable, and the conclusions are incredibly important for people focused on the long-term flourishing of families. The author traces the persistence of elite surnames across hundreds of years, meticulously and in many contexts. Typical estimates of intergenerational correlation of status markers like education or wealth vary by country – usually in the range of 0.