Anthony Comegna reviews David Graeber’s recent posthumously published collection, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World (2024), in the July 2025 issue of Reason:

Shared Article from Reason.com

The best democracy is anarchy

"Anarchism and democracy are—or should be—largely identical," wrote the anthropologist David Graeber.

Anthony Comegna @ reason.com

This is clearly a crime, and [Department of Homeland Security Secretary] Noem and others should be impeached for it. —David J. Bier (May 19, 2025)

Shared Article from Cato Institute

50+ Venezuelans Imprisoned in El Salvador Came to US Legally, Ne…

The US government not only denied these men due process; it has generally failed to provide their families, their attorneys, or the public any informa…

cato.org

Shared Article from Reason.com

The anarchist and the Republican

Their two paths that offer lessons not just in libertarian and decentralist ideas but in the ways people pursue them.

Jesse Walker @ reason.com

The man on the motorcycle was an anarchist, a lawbreaker, a guy the Black Panthers could turn to when their leader needed transportation; his FBI file fretted that he might “participate in violent activities, such as bombings, should the right opportunity present itself.” He was in Vermont to speak at a hippie college, but he took a detour to visit someone else in a mountainside cabin about 40 miles away.

It was the middle of the 1970s. The man in that cabin was a longtime Republican who had served in the state Legislature. He used to work for Richard Nixon, and he would soon write radio scripts for Ronald Reagan. He and the anarchist had never met before.

They chatted in the kitchen for hours, enjoying each other’s company. After all, they agreed about a lot. . . .

— Jesse Walker, The Anarchist and the Republican
Reason, May 2025

Here’s a long post by Kelsey Piper, block-quoted in its entirety from the Ex Birb site (so you don’t have to, etc.); boldface is added by me.

Shared Article from X (formerly Twitter)

"... [L]et me describe what cheap goods mean to me."

But I keep having conversations in which I say 'yeah I like cheap low quality goods and they make my life better' and people express incredulity at th…

Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) @ x.com

Kelsey Piper

@KelseyTuoc

I dislike having to plead with the public to make the case for the worthiness of the things I want to spend my money on; it’s a free country, and it should be sufficient that it’s my money.

But I keep having conversations in which I say yeah I like cheap low quality goods and they make my life better and people express incredulity at the very idea, or insist that I’m rationalizing what is obviously a deep void of meaninglessness, so let me describe what cheap goods mean to me.

The first thing it means is that I can try things. If a hobby requires gear or supplies or books or whatever else, and there’s no cheap version of those things, I know myself – I simply never dip my toes in the water in the first place.

It’s not worth spending $1000 to figure out whether my kids like camping. But if camping gear is cheap, we’ll try it. We did some camping with cheap gear, we liked it, now maybe we’ll upgrade and get good, long-lasting stuff.

I started playing D&D with a $5 bag of dice. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount on gorgeous metal dice now, but if it’d cost that much to get started I would never have tried at all.

5yo developed an enthusiasm for armored knights and swordfighting, so we tried out some SCA events. Because it’s easy to get cheap Viking tunics, I now own one. I was never going to spend hundreds of dollars on the nice version. (I was also never, realistically, going to find something that niche on the local buy nothing groups which I participate in.)

When consumer goods are expensive, it’s not worth taking risks and trying things you might end up disliking, or might not have the skill to execute on. We had an awful landing on our stairs where the door to the yard opened and the wood was badly damaged by six years of people tracking in water and mud. I wanted to try putting down vinyl tile flooring there, but I’d never laid vinyl flooring before and I’m not exactly a home improvement pro. I wouldn’t have tried it if it was expensive, but it was $20, so I was willing to take the leap. It turns out to be very easy to install and it looks so much better now. With greater confidence in my DIY skills I’ve ordered wallpaper for the kids’ rooms.

The fact that consumer goods are cheap also lets me try out companies I don’t already know and trust. If something costs $200, I’m only going to buy from a company that has a good reputation, where I trust the warranty, which has been around a while. For cheaper products, I’m willing to take a chance on new entrants just off seeing an ad and some credible good reviews.

The second thing it means is that I can do crafts and experiments and activities at the microschool. It has ten kids now; buying ten of anything will start to pinch the pocketbook. But because consumer goods are cheap, I can buy the things we need for papermaking when we’re learning about how papermaking works, or model city kits when we’re talking about urban design, or play money for practice making change and running a business. I can buy a gumball machine so we can take it apart and look at the mechanism. I can buy so, so many books. Do you have any idea how expensive books used to be? Do you have any idea how many our microschool library now has? My children will never run out of good books to read because consumer goods are cheap.

Or they were cheap, last week.

I keep talking to people who have in mind huge swathes of the consumer economy that they’re sure we don’t really need. Big TVs, someone said to me last week. Surely you can admit we don’t really need big TVs.

I do not admit this. Sometimes six or eight kids want to crowd around downstairs in my home and watch a movie or play Smash together and they need a big TV.

4-cent bouncy balls, surely we don’t need those.

I do not admit this; I bought a bunch for a civics lesson last week.

Would it be such a big deal if toasters were $100?

Yes, because I would never buy one to disassemble and learn how it works.

How about Shein clothes, surely no one needs those?

Actually, I kind of like that I can attend costume parties! I have a cheap Victorian ballgown with an absurd hoopskirt my children like to hide under, and it makes my life better!

I would not pay four times more for a better version of any of these things. I would just do without them; they are not important enough to break the bank for. But my life would be worse without them. It would have less spontaneity in it, less curiosity, less whim, less exploration.

If you find that cheap consumer goods cause you depression, my condolences. I think that’s a skill issue. Cheap consumer goods make it easier for me to live the life I want to live, surrounded by the people I want to live it with, while donating to charity and saving for retirement and living within my means. You can raise my taxes, but don’t pretend you’re really truly doing me a favor while you do it.

— Kelsey Piper, … [L]et me describe what cheap goods mean to me.
Twitter/X dot com, April 4, 2025 @ 7:06PM

Shared Article from NPR

Glasses aren't just good for your eyes. They can be a boon …

That's the finding of a new study in Bangladesh, which gave reading glasses to hundreds of people and then measured their earnings.

Gabrielle Emanuel @ npr.org

The study [Sehrin et al. (2024), “The effect on income of providing near vision correction to workers in Bangladesh: The THRIVE (Tradespeople and Hand-workers Rural Initiative for a Vision-enhanced Economy) randomized controlled trial”] — published Wednesday in PLOS ONE — found a dramatic increase in earnings with a very low-cost change: a new pair of reading glasses.^[1]

The researchers went to 56 villages in Bangladesh and found more than 800 adults ages 35 to 65 who are farsighted – that is, they could not see well up close. Half were randomly selected to get glasses; the other half got glasses after eight months. In that time, the researchers found that income grew by 33% for those with glasses – from a median monthly income of $35 to $47 – and that people who were not in the workforce were able to start jobs after getting reading glasses.

This is a really big study, says Dr. David Friedman, a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the project. This is the first time we can really say that something that will improve [someone’s] quality of life from a visual standpoint will also help with poverty alleviation, which is an enormous finding.

— Gabrielle Emanuel, Glasses aren’t just good for your eyes. They can be a boon to income, too
NPR Morning Edition, April 3, 2024.

O.K., so if cheap, commodity reading glasses are such a big economic benefit, why don’t lots more people in poor countries get reading glasses? Or why don’t development or aid outfits give lots more glasses out? Is it because they’re cheap for people in affluent societies, with affluent incomes, but just turn out to be an unaffordable expense for poor people, or for people in poor countries? If the problem were some unavoidable cost structures of making or distributing commodity reading glasses, in any case, this would seem like an obvious case for a really, really low-cost charitable intervention by NGOs. But even that seems like a real stretch — you can pick up commodity reading glasses for $10, retail, at Wal-Mart. That’s a lot more to a poor person than it is to a rich person — or to anyone in a rich society. But it’s not the real bottleneck.

The real bottleneck is a story that is as old and familiar as it is frustrating.

In the U.S., the U.K. and many other European countries, reading glasses are readily available over-the-counter at most drugstores. That’s not the case elsewhere.

A pair of glasses can be hard to find

In a lot of low- and middle-income countries, glasses are still tightly regulated, says Dr. Nathan Congdon, a co-author of the study and chair of Global Eye Health at Queen’s University Belfast. People often have to get a prescription from a vision specialist before they can purchase glasses, even reading glasses. This proves to be a huge hurdle for those living in poverty and those in remote areas, he says.

. . . The glasses themselves cost maybe $3-4. And using village health workers, we can make the cost of delivery very inexpensive as well, said Congdon. So the whole thing can really just be a handful of dollars to deliver something that’s potentially quite life changing.

. . . Congdon would like to see regulations loosen to improve access to reading glasses. He says the regulations, the cost and a general lack of awareness have meant many people who need glasses go without. When searching for participants, his team met almost nobody in the Bangladeshi villages with glasses.

The state of global vision care: in need of correction

Congdon, who is an ophthalmologist himself, largely blames his own profession.

**Ophthalmologists and optometrists may be advising the government that they should tightly regulate access to these products [to] strengthen their professions. They may see themselves as gatekeepers of quality, he says. I wouldn’t be recommending that we just hand out distance glasses, but I do think that for near [vision] glasses that’s a reasonable thing to do.

— Gabrielle Emanuel, Glasses aren’t just good for your eyes. They can be a boon to income, too
NPR Morning Edition, April 3, 2024.

Well, hell, if he won’t, I will: I would be recommending that we just hand out distance glasses. Come on, seriously, why in the world not?^[2] But in any case, the big lesson here is — once again — the real barriers, which build the structure of global poverty as we know it and confine people to it, are not a matter of the economics of eyeglasses in a market society or whatever; it’s a specific dysfunction of the political economy of optometry and medical professions. The best solution — and the thing that matters even more for the poorest people in the poorest societies — is to get regulation out of the way.

1. ^[1][Abstract from PLOS One: Presbyopia, the leading cause of vision impairment globally, is common during working years. However, no trials have assessed presbyopia’s impact on income. In April 2017, we conducted a census among 59 Bangladesh villages to identify persons aged 35 to 65 years with presbyopia (presenting distance vision > = 6/12 bilaterally and correctable inability to see 6/13 at 40 cm with both eyes), who never had owned glasses. Participants were randomized (1:1) to receive immediate free reading glasses (intervention) or glasses delivered 8 months later (control). Visual demand of different jobs was stratified into three levels. Outcomes were between-group differences in the 8 month change in: self-reported monthly income (primary) and Near Vision Related Quality of Life (NVRQOL, secondary). Among 10,884 census participants, 3,655 (33.6%) met vision criteria and 863 (23.6%) comprised a sample enriched for near vision-intensive jobs, but 39 (4.52%) could not be reached. All participants allocated to intervention (n = 423, 51.3%) and control (n = 401, 48.7%) received the appropriate intervention, and follow-up was available for 93.4% and 96.8% respectively. Groups were similar at baseline in all characteristics: mean age was 47 years, 50% were male, 35% literate, and about half engaged in “most near vision-intensive” occupations. Glasses wear at 8-month follow-up was 88.3% and 7.81% in intervention and control respectively. At baseline, both the intervention and control groups had a self-reported median monthly income of US$35.3. At endline, the median income for the intervention group was US$47.1 compared with US$35.3 for control, a difference of 33.4%. Predictors of greater income increase in multivariate models included intervention group allocation (OR 1.45, 95% CI 1.12, 1.88, P = 0.005), male sex (OR 2.41, 95% CI 1.84, 3.16, P <0.001), and not engaging in income-producing work at baseline (OR 2.35, 95% CI 1.69, 3.26, P<0.001). —RG]↩
2. ^[2]If people need a professional exam and prescription to get glasses that work well for them, then there are lots of ways they can figure that out and go get the professional exam and prescription. No doubt you need careful measurement by a professional to get a good tailored suit, too. But this is a matter of judgment where the customer can easily judge for themselves how much they need and how well it worked out. There’s no need for a regulatory requirement here, either.↩