Paul Crider is a husband and father living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He daylights as a semiconductor engineer but otherwise likes to spend his time reading and writing.
In 2021 the libertarian representative Justin Amash “reclaim[ed] the word ‘liberal’ for classical liberalism” in a tweet. This wasn’t the first reclamation. George Mason University economist Daniel Klein assembled a “statement of no surrender on the word ‘liberal’” with several hundred signatories, drawing a line in the sand
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. – Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog Ayn Rand was a brilliant, inventive thinker whose contributions go largely unsung outside libertarian circles. Rand developed a secular eudaimonist ethics decades before the 20th century revival of virtue ethics ignited. She pioneered
Liberalism at Large is an intellectual biography of The Economist with a special emphasis on how the ideology of the 175+ year old liberal newspaper has evolved—and failed to evolve—with the times. Alexander Zevin argues that this history provides a special insight into liberalism itself, as The Economist
As histories of liberalism go, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea is a remarkable achievement, a history of liberalism over the past two centuries not only as theorized by philosophers and economists, but as practiced by politicians and activists. It’s also a real pleasure to read, with vivid prose.
The poor labourer who has the soil and the seasons to struggle with, and who, while he affords the materials for supplying the luxury of all the other members of the common wealth, and bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society, seems himself to
I want to see The Economist do well. With a few gap years, I’ve subscribed to The Economist for well over a decade—ever since I could enjoy the still-expensive student price in grad school. I place a high value on having an old, venerable institution with deep journalistic
After a Democratic primary contest suffused with racial justice themes and a summer of Black Lives Matter uprisings, it is once again time for Democrats to convince themselves that they mustn’t talk too much about race, lest they spook the white moderates. The latest splash has been made by
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own
The murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has once again brought the issue of systemic racism, police violence, and criminal justice reform to the forefront of the American national conversation, in print and in the streets. As part of that conversation, Liberal Currents solicited
“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto Liberals everywhere should cheer the opening essay in
As one of the most progressive candidates in the 2020 field—even to the left of Bernie Sanders on some tellings—it may seem ridiculous on its face to make a “neoliberal” case for Senator Elizabeth Warren. And “left-neoliberal” will strike many readers as an oxymoron. I hope to explain
Philosophers who study justice theorize how societies can treat their members fairly and increase everyone’s well-being. One of the most famous frameworks for approaching these questions, the capabilities approach, was developed primarily by philosopher Martha Nussbaum and philosopher-economist Amartya Sen. Some philosophers have argued that there is, ultimately, only