The United States has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world, NPR reports. Some of these deaths are due to poor maternal health, but a big part of the problem is high rates of intervention. For starters, let’s look at how a typical American woman gives birth.
Poverty is a big deal – it affects about 41 million people in the United States every year – yet the federal government spends a huge amount of money to end poverty. How can this be? And how do we even measure poverty in the first place? This week on Words and Numbers, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan answer these questions and delve into what can be done to help the poor.
Talented people logically want to express those talents in the marketplace. The good news is that they're getting that chance. Thanks to a surge of investor interest in Silicon Valley, companies like Google are, according to Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times, "funding the biggest, most world-changing things. They are spending on ideas that, years from now, we may come to see as having altered life for much of the planet."
Should anyone be forced to accept representation from a private entity against his or her will? In the US, if a union gets at least 50 percent plus one of the workers in an enterprise to vote in favor of the union’s representation, then all workers must be represented by the union – even those who abstained and who voted against being represented by the union.
Economist Mariana Mazzucato recently tweeted a complaint about the inefficiency of the Home Office. We've all come to expect government inefficiency, but the funny part is that she thinks government is responsible for innovation. Yes, that's right, the same government that took four months to notice a typo on her visa application, she argues, is the one which made the iPhone possible. Let's take a look at government's contribution to innovation.
In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission passed a set of Internet privacy and net neutrality rules. The rules were then eliminated by Congress two months ago before they ever went into effect. Net neutrality ideologues are lamenting this new action, saying access to the Internet is a right and should be treated as a public utility. But what would that mean?
