Author: David Cloutier

I think, in my 13 years of primary and secondary education, I never once even imagined being threatened by a school shooter. It wasn’t that Chicago was some kind of nonviolent place during my childhood years of the 1980’s (quite the opposite), or even that my schools (or at least my K-8 school) were particularly sheltered. It just wasn’t something you imagined happening. Indeed, there WERE images of real violence in schools at the time – but these were associated with inner-city Chicago schools, and everyone acknowledged the same thing: what was happening there was not normal. A common...

Economic inequality is a stubborn problem. In a recent interview, economist Angus Deaton offers some very insightful comments about the complexity of the problem. Deaton, who is pro-globalization, but whose work with Anne Case documented the rising mortality rates among working-class middle-aged people, presents a model for the kind of engagement we really need in order to address economic problems in their complexity. As the blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago writes: …[Deaton] suggested in a recent piece for Project Syndicate, it’s possible that the term “inequality” itself might be ill-fitting. A better term might be...