Harold Pollack

Norway doesn’t impose capital punishment. If it did, would I want to kill this man who murdered almost 100 people? I don’t know…. I have written many pieces, here and elsewhere, expressing a near-abolitionist perspective on capital punishment. I stand by that perspective. Capital punishment in the United States is imposed in an arbitrary, often […]

My University of Chicago SSA colleague Scott Allard has written a nice book called Out of Reach. It concerns the changing relationships between place and poverty, and the increasing suburbanization of poverty. He gave a nice interview on CSPAN Book TV. More here. This is a critical issues in areas such as, well, where I […]

In response to economic pain in the heartland, which candidate proposed: …support for a federal job training program, safeguards for collective bargaining, a higher minimum wage, and better protection for people who lost their jobs or could not afford adequate medical care.** Which candidate’s record included: EDUCATION…established a new university, 14 junior colleges, 15 trade […]

As I prepared to leave on holiday, the New York Times included a story by Robert Pear with the scary headline “U.S. plans stealth survey on access to doctors.” As Pear described, the National Opinion Research Center here at the University of Chicago had signed a $347,000 contract with the Department of Health and Human […]

I was eating dinner the other night, and the phone rang. It was an undergraduate classmate noting that I had yet to contribute to our class’s annual giving. She’s a nice person. I also have warm feelings towards Princeton, which opened valuable opportunities and treated me well. So I gave seventy-five bucks. I gave, not […]

Australian climate scientists rap–the clean version. You read me right: the clean version. Not super clean either. It’s not clear this would meet Tipper’s approval. But I bet Al likes it anyway. [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]

Today’s New England Journal of Medicine includes a nice audit study by Joanna Bisgaier and Karin Rhodes conducted here in Cook County. Between January and May 2010, research assistants called a stratified random sample outpatient medical specialty clinics. The calls followed a standard script. Each of these clinics received two phone calls, one month apart, […]

My essay on the vaccine-autism controversy came out today in Democracy. If you don’t read Democracy, you should. The list of luminaries on the masthead is quite impressive. I’m grateful to Michael Tomasky and Elbert Ventura for the opportunity to publish in such a terrific place, and for the careful editing. I’m quite concerned about […]

Paul Krugman notes in today’s Times that Medicare is cheaper than private insurance. He draws upon a nice column by Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll, which in turn draws on an impressive line of research by McWilliams, Meara, and colleagues to document that delaying Medicare eligibility is bad for health, and may increase costs, too. […]

Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein have pieces today on the financial industry’s opposition to new mortgage regulations, in particular, opposition to provisions that would require mortgage originators to retain five percent interest in loans in which (to roughly summarize) the borrower does not make a 20 percent down-payment, or loans which amount to more than […]