Across the political spectrum, Americans strongly disapprove of gerrymandering, and rightly so. The practice undermines the foundational principle of district-based representation: that voters within a constituency should share local perspectives and live reasonably near to one another. Recent national discussions of gerrymandering, however, have been missing the point. For needed reform to occur, we must get the focus off of political engineering and back to the foundational purpose of legislative districting.

According to recent estimates, the Treasury Department could run out of cash in September. Eventually, Congress will either raise the debt limit, face another government shutdown, or allow the United States to default on its debt. A temporary fix or even a government shutdown is likely, but not a default – yet. Applying public choice theory to Congress’ habitual debt limit increases show that lawmakers, in their quest to get reelected, want to give constituents more benefits for less taxes, leading to deficit spending. In the Washington Examiner, Bruce Yandle explains that members of Congress use artificially created budget crises to add more pork barrel spending into bills that will not get enough time for debate.

The simplified notion that protecting the US market with tariffs is a good idea misses the great lesson of economics: that global markets are connected in surprisingly intricate ways. Even now, tariffs have distorted market signals for American steel consumers and backfired against the US steel industry, which are ostensibly protected. Veronique de Rugy explains how tariffs create massive market distortions and malinvestments.

Across more than a dozen books, Neal Stephenson has created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and provoked real-world progress in cryptocurrency, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the future of physical surveillance, how much freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions, and much more.

How much is a strong community worth in the sense of a neighborhood? Because it’s not a strictly defined good and different people mean different things when they use the term, the strength of any given neighborhood is not quantifiable. For these reasons, it can be difficult to perform an intelligible economic analysis on the construct. In National Affairs, Salim Furth sketches the contours of what an economics of neighborhoods might look like, which can help us figure out what makes a strong neighborhood and how individuals, organizations, and policymakers can work together to allow neighborhoods to thrive.