Issue 29: Left Behind
Featuring...
How the Other Half Lives
In 1890, Danish-American social reformer Jacob Riis published the incredibly influential How the Other Half Lives, a piece of photojournalism which documented the abhorrent living conditions present in New York City slums at the time. A slew of other authors soon followed suit penning their own exposés on America’s social ills, and before long an entirely new style of journalist was born: the “muckraker.” Muckrakers all across the United States contributed to what eventually became the American Progressive Era, a time in which unprecedented economic and health regulations as well as sweeping social and labour reforms were passed confirming the impressive influence of these activists-turned-journalists. In this section, our correspondents have decided to take up Riis’ muckraking mantle, writing our own detailed accounts of injustice and inequality in the UK and around the world.
F'ed Up
What’s the worst mistake you’ve made? Ask a person on the street and they’d fall silent. “It’s none of your business.” But in their silence they’d survey their life. They’d follow with their mind’s nose a stink of shame, tracing its swelling aroma back through months, maybe years, all down to a singular moment: an epicentre of only one thought, one choice, that changed everything to come — for the worse. Ask the United States government? Man, everything reeks. Who knows where the stench began? Today, Jerome Powell blames the pandemic. Last year, Biden accused Putin’s war. Twenty years ago, George Bush threw the entire country of Iraq under the bus. And yet, none of them want to admit that just like any of us, they smell the guilt every day. None of them want to admit that they f’ed up.
> After the Fall: 20 Years Since Iraq
> Is the Fed Really to Blame for the Failure to Curb High Inflation in the US?
Sidelined
Sidelined
> What a Sunday League Pitch Can Tell You about Today’s Football Transfer Market
> Load Management: The NBA’s Rest Problem
> Stealing The Show? The Market for Resale Concert Tickets
> Like a Broken Record: The Commercialisation of Modern Music
Profits have never been higher for elite entertainers. Football squads, basketball teams and pop stars just keep winning. But fans keep losing—and market forces continue to put the consumer last. Perhaps this is by design. If decision makers are driven by rationality rather than malice, then frustrated fans are just an externality to constrain. Taylor Swift acolytes certainly disagree. But in the next section, our correspondents make the economic case for side-lining consumers across sport, music and popular culture.
Why would you willingly give up the comfort of a velvety smooth flight aboard a Concorde? Why would you willingly structure a national healthcare system around burdensome public ownership rather than the pristine efficiency of market competition? Sometimes, economic decisions are made not to serve those who can most afford their benefits, but to favour those who can barely afford them at all. Sometimes, we make decisions with a very simple goal in mind: to get the best bang for our buck. In this section, our correspondents explore low-cost flights, the NHS, and a standalone piece on marriage culture, searching to answer a simple question: who gets the bang, and who gets the buck
Bang for Your Buck
Wonky Policy
Law is an architectural marvel. It is a fortress to the building of which every human has brought a brick; some reckon that entry past its tall iron gates is our reward for birth, others point out that the price of exit is death itself. And yet lawmakers seem a mess. The gossiping gaggle of politicians that swarms our parliaments makes a thousand mistakes every day. Just one misplaced brick, one sloppy trowel of mortar, and every next layer above gets shakier and shakier. The fortress grows unsteady, its towering walls begin to tremble as its inhabitants grow ever more tense, waiting, watching, wondering: what will bring it crashing down on their heads, ending all order whatsoever? A protest? A pandemic? Simply a change in the climate? A citizen of the fortress may not know how to do the lawmaker’s job, but it doesn’t take a bricklayer to tell when a building has been built wonky.