Jane the Actuary’s (not so) greatest hits, part the third

Last updated on: January 1, 2016 at 9:43 pm by Jane the Actuary

Jane the Actuary’s (not so) greatest hits, part the third 2016-01-01T21:43:59-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Continuing my look back at the various things I’ve written:

25. February 10, 2015, “Thinking about Obama’s denial of Radical Islamism, and his “anti-Crusades” speech“, on his Prayer Breakfast comments, plus “Obama seems to think that ISIS is a new incarnation of the People’s Temple. Is he right?” from February 19th, and “Does it matter whether Obama is a Christian?” from February 25th, all connected to the question of what, and who, defines what a religion is.

26. February 25, 2015, “On the Pullman National Monument,” a bit of a gripe that we’re diluting the “national park” brand. Note that February 27th was my first day as an “official” Patheos blogger. As a follow-up, I later wrote “Is the Pullman National Monument whitewashing history?” about the turnover of the neighborhood.

27. March 2, 2015, “New study: Single upper class women are 4 times as likely to abort,” my re-interpretation of a Brookings study that’s used to argue that poor women have insufficient access to abortion.

28. March 17, 2015, “Is Islamic State’s destruction shocking and radical? The Saudis say “meh”” — shortly after ISIS destroyed key ancient sites, I observed that this is nothing different than what the Saudis have been doing, with historical sites connected to their own religion.

29. March 22 – 23, 2015, “Are Catholic schools worth it? Or should we throw in the towel?” and “Are Catholic schools worth it? Part two: dynamic scoring,” the title of which should be self-explanatory.

30. April 8, 2015, “The Jane Plan for Old Age Provision,” which proposes a flat Dutch-style benefit and universal, pooled top-up accounts.

31. April 13 and 15, 2015, “When did the idea of the “working poor” become a bad thing?” and ““The [working] poor you will always have with you”: more on minimum and “living” wages” on the fact that proponents of a high minimum wage are losing sight of the fact that welfare benefits for the working poor were originally meant to promote work over welfare dependency with gradual phase-outs. Also, May 31, “Minimum wage and the dignity of work.”

32. May 16, 2015, “Were the seeds of Detroit’s downfall built into its very rise?” the core idea of which is that Detroit’s sudden prosperity with the auto industry boom produced a much lower density than older cities, which meant that it suffered much more from its crash than it otherwise would have.

33. May 30, 2015, “On Detroit, Jeb Bush is a little bit right. . .” — Hamtramck’s appeal to immigrants meant its population dropped less than Detroit’s, but it’s still pretty dang poor.

34. September 30, 2015 (yes, skipping the whole summer, when nothing really jumped out at me), “Is there a “retirement crisis”?” and a related post on retirement, “The Three Stages of Retirement (warning! wholly anecdotal!)”

35. October 15, 2015, “What if diamond-mining disappeared?” on man-made, er, lab-created diamonds.

36. November 11, 2015, “A few words on Dutch moms,” who, as it turns out, aren’t interested in Leaning In.

37. November 13, 2015, “How to make immediate legalization work.” My answer, which I couldn’t interest anyone in, was to give displaced workers standing to sue the government if they fail to enforce immigration law.

38. December 2, 2015, “What if diversity is our . . . liability?” in which I suggest that we admit to ourselves that having multiple ethnic and religious groups in the United States is a challenge.

So that’s my tour of blog posts. I hadn’t intended to link to quite so many, but after a while it became interesting to me to look back to see what I’d written. I have to admit, though, that I thought that looking back would give me some insights in how to improve my blogging in the year to come, to be more interesting to readers and to me, too, but I came up empty.

One last item before I click “publish” and check on the kids: some thank yous.

To Ann Althouse, who gave the blog a mention and a boost when I first started.

To Elizabeth Scalia, for inviting me to Patheos.

Glenn Reynolds/instapundit.com, Legal Insurrection and Robert Stacey McCain for their links and retweets.

Plus Megan McArdle, who even mentioned me in a post that made its way into newspapers across the country via syndication (though with the mention getting a bit muddled in those papers).

And now, on to 2016!

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