People With Lots of Friends In High School Earn More Money

By Whet Moser

And the reverse is true, and the disparity is even greater—socially isolated high school students make less over the course of their lives than their peers, according to studies based on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, the nation's oldest long-term study of adolescents. Could smaller classes help? Read more

Illinois Taxes: The High, the Low, and the Unequal

By Whet Moser

Illinois has a rep as a high tax state, and by some measures it's true—a high nominal corporate income tax rate to go along with high property and sales taxes. Our income tax is low, but it's not low for everyone. Read more

Northwestern Economist: Don't Expect Any More Economic Growth In Your Lifetime

By Whet Moser

Northwestern's Robert Gordon presents an intentionally provocative argument: the 19th and 20th centuries got us used to wonderful but unsustainable rates of economic growth, so don't get used to it. And even if we do get the next new thing, economic inequality is a drag. Read more

How the AMA Scared Us Away From 'Socialized Medicine' and Prepared Us For Obamacare

By Whet Moser

In the 1950s, the American Medical Association—with the help of the first political PR firm—launched a full-on assault against Harry Truman's national health care plan, connecting it (and all sorts of other subsidies) to the specter of socialism. But it backed an approach not unlike the ACA. Read more

The Battle Over Bob Dold

By Whet Moser

Democrats have tried to pin Paul Ryan and Joe Walsh on the redistricted Republican freshman, perhaps the most vulnerable Republican House member not named Joe Walsh. But New York's mayor is riding to the rescue with his boutique PAC. Read more

Joe Walsh Thinks There's No Such Thing as a Medically Necessary Abortion. He's Not Alone.

By Whet Moser

Chicagoland's notorious rep caused a stir by saying, in his WTTW debate with Tammy Duckworth, that modern science has made it so that there's no exception for the life of the mother in the case of abortion. It's... complicated. Here's an introduction. Read more

Toni Preckwinkle Wants to Balance Cook County Budget on Things People Don't Like Other People Doing

By Whet Moser

Under Cook County's proposed new 2013 budget, cigarette taxes would go up, and guns and bullets would each get taxed. It's how cities and localities everywhere are responding to the recession and the housing crisis. Read more

Barack Obama, Red Lobster, and the Big Problem of Big Data

By Whet Moser

The Obama campaign knows who you are and what you like—and they're trying to figure out what that means now, and in the future. They're way ahead of journalists, and the public, on how voting is done in America. Read more

Subsidized Housing in Chicago Began With Frank Lloyd Wright

By Whet Moser

As Chicago's notorious high-rise projects come down, the current trend in public housing looks more like how it began: smaller, more modest in scale and scope, like Wright's plans for Francisco Terrace and the Waller Apartments, the latter of which still stand on Walnut Street. Read more

Prentice Hospital's Bad Vibrations and Northwestern's Bad Architectural Vibes

By Whet Moser

Northwestern's architectural record around the hotly debated Prentice Hospital is cause for concern when it comes to the future of the site, but when discussing the future use of architecture, engineering can't be ignored. Read more

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