Essays by J. Scott Lander

Macroeconomic theory and economic policy are two wildly complicated fields of study, the latter even more compounded by its nasty habit of being written in confounding legalese. Most people hardly look into economics any further than how it most directly affects their personal finances, although everyone has an opinion on how taxes are collected and subsequently spent. But a basic understanding of how macroeconomic policy works is of the utmost importance when it comes to electing representatives who shape our socio-economic environment; the job of a governing body is to help guide how a market's causes, effects, and fluctuations affect its participants and the citizenry as a whole. While nuance may increase when going from fundamental theory to specific legislation, the approach to economic policy stems from really only two philosophies. The first believes that corporations and the wealthy are responsible for spurring economic growth through job creation and capital investmen...

Life isn't fair and it's not a perfect world. We have all known this to be true for about as long as we've understood pretty much anything. We've all experienced unfairness and had to accept it as a fact of life; we've all witnessed some grave injustices, at least second-hand. Each of us could write a long list of imperfections about this world and the society we've grown up in, and we all have opinions about how things could be better. If we allowed our wildest imaginations to conjure up a vision of utopia, what would it look like? Artists and philosophers and politicians have mused about this since the dawn of time; some have posed practical improvements, others more fantastical. One of the more inspiring visions was borne from the mind of a man named Gene Roddenberry. He dreamt of a future human civilization when we'd would go where no man had gone before; exploring the unending vastness of the cosmos—encountering new worlds and new civilizations...