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Sam B. (he/him)

@sbarbour.bsky.social
148 followers 256 following 338 posts

Community college econ instructor; music nerd

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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The NYT has a way of making Dems sound like Bolsheviks - "don't scare the middle" they plead, as the administration terrorizes minorities and dismantles the administrative state. I think it's more accurate to say that political moderation is a wilderness in the 21st century.
nytimes.com
Opinion | What Mary Peltola Knows About Winning in Red States
Inside the weird campaign that could flip the Senate to the Democrats.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Listening to the discussion of Medicare for All I could not help wondering about infrastructure - like, we need more nurses, we should probably build more hospitals, we should ensure obstetrics is easily accessible, etc. M4A doesn't seem to solve any of that.
nytimes.com
Opinion | What Does Abdul El-Sayed Believe?
The Senate nominee talks about his view for the future of the Democratic Party.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
We Americans have a terrible time discussing social hierarchy - do people want unfairness in the economy addressed? Yes, but. Tim Wu talks about Jackson and FDR as populist upswings - both relied on support from white supremacists. If that's fairness, I want nothing to do with it.
nytimes.com
Opinion | Affordability Is a Winning Message for Democrats. But There’s an Even Better One.
If Democrats can embrace what affordability is really about, they might do even more than win elections.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Bots take money from people who need healthcare and give it to the people who own the bots. Which is why they wanted the bots in the first place.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Right, okay everybody, I’ve had a lot of meetings and talks this week and I have to share some top line thoughts. Things are quite a bit worse than i am usually willing to share with people because panic does no good. It’s kinda bad. The baddies have the wind at their back. No denying that.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
For real, though.
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Anna Gifty @itsafronomics.blacksky.app · 12/09/2026
May her cup runneth over (but also we need to tax her too)
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Trump's supporters see much of post-war US history as the ongoing subversion of social and cultural norms - betraying the constitutional order in the pursuit of restoring desired social hierarchy is entirely permissible.
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Kristin Du Mez @kkdumez.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Aspire to live in such a way that reporters write stories on why people don’t like you. 🙃 baptistnews.com/article/what...
baptistnews.com
What’s so upsetting to evangelicals about Kristin Du Mez?
Unfortunately, not everyone in evangelicalism receives Du Mez’s scholarship with such openness, says Rick Pidcock.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
WTAF
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
When God snatches your hairline back, you got to love the Devil.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
David Crowley wins and the NYT is falling all over itself talking about a massive defeat for socialists and progressives. Also, there was apparently a GOP superpac campaigning for Hong because they thought she'd be easier to defeat. What does it even mean to be a moderate Democrat?
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Ladies and gentlemen, the definitive take on TA Harper's Atlantic article.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Some historian of economic thought should write a paper called "Das Noah Smith Problem" about the confusion between liberal advocacy of shareholder interests and voter interests.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
What Galloway fails to grasp is that, in order to have the kind of successful men he imagined, you need lots of underpaid workers. If you want to help "unremarkable young men" you'll need to redistribute income away from "successful" households, and they won't like that.
nytimes.com
Opinion | Scott Galloway: America Abandoned Its ‘Unremarkable’ Young Men
And what society can do to help a struggling generation.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I went through the quote tweets of this post and it's nearly all negative - and I can't imagine the author put it out just to humiliate herself. Someone besides me surely read this as meaning "Mamdani's grocery stores just might work." But who?
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Isabella M. Weber @isabellamweber.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Grocery margins are low is a frequently rehashed point to argue against Mamdani’s public grocery stores. Grocery is indeed a low margin business. But its median return on invested capital is above that for all firms, so it is NOT a low profitability business. Let me explain. 🧵
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
What I can't get over is the glee w which people predict black market groceries - like, here's a guy trying to help people and there's this Malthusian cheerleader squad going "haha! helping only makes it worse! better to let them starve!"
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
More adventures in old-time music. buttondown.com/sbarb/archiv...
buttondown.com
July update
“Let me explain…there is too much. To sum up…”Indigo to Wesley as Wesley revives after being mostly dead, while in the middle of storming Humperdink’s...
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Looking at this conjures up voices from X insisting that, if only you would read and study their research, you would see that workers are better off than ever, and all we need to do is to move further in this direction...
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LPE Blog @lpeblog.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Today, @madisoncondon.bsky.social & @lookheron.bsky.social explain how modern Law and Economics scholars continue to overlook legal scholarship that draws upon non-neoclassical economics. And to help correct this oversight, they offer a valuable overview of that scholarship!
lpeproject.org
The Economics that Law and Economics Ignores
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Absolutely one of my all time favorites.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
This is my congressional rep, Lauren Underwood, who hails from Naperville, a diverse suburb of Chicago. She's a Registered Nurse who has tirelessly advocated for improvements in our health care system. Democrats should be promoting more candidates like her.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
I'm just screaming into the void here, but, like, there are all these folks insisting that things really aren't that bad - I mean, I'm fine, but also, I'm one serious accident/illness away from poverty - and that maybe things were actually better for ordinary Americans before the New Deal...
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
The Games shop in my small country town is packed every weekend with folks playing Magic, Warhammer, and Dungeons & Dragons. Meanwhile I'm putting together square dances in a church basement.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
I'd wager that 30% are the ones with good insurance and access to responsive medical services; the same who would howl with rage in the face of systemic change. The health care system prioritizes enforcement of social hierarchy over improvement of living standards, and thus was it ever.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I used to think of myself more-or-less as a normie lib, but Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias are becoming hard to stomach for me. Like, why does it seem like they accept the conservative frame of politics as basically true?
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
If AI is a bubble, what will make me most upset is that investors hyped it instead of increasing wages or, God forbid, paying taxes.
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Derf Backderf @derfbackderf.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
THE DISSIDENTS is the true story of the political cartoonists who draw for the provocative magazine, THE MASSES. What they show in their cartoons is a country spiraling into darkness, under attack by saboteurs, and brutal private militias, plagued by racism, and rocked by class war. Out Sept. 15.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
I haven't heard anyone speak well of this report. It's all wailing and gnashing of teeth over "degrowth" and how the authors want to immiserate us all. So, like, is that it? The conservatives won?
share.google
Global Justice Report: the World Inequality Lab maps a path to €5,000-a-month average incomes for all countries within +1.8°C of warming - WID - World Inequality Database
Global Justice Report: the World Inequality Lab maps a path to €5,000-a-month average incomes for all countries within +1.8°C of warming The newly released Global Justice Report sets out a new vision ...
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
I've been having a whole discussion on the other site off some grumpy Cochrane post about how Piketty et al. don't understand economic growth. It's a little ridiculous, but kind of fun to actually get some back and forth.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
I have this recurring problem lately where I think about trying to escape the Alphabet/Meta/Microsoft matrix but have no idea where to start because I don't think you can Google that...
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
I was not prepared for where my mind went when I read this - like, are the Knicks the Dems or the GOP? What about the many celebrities court side? And Wu-Tang? How do you interpret Weby and his three flagrant fouls? What does it all mean?!?
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Chicago deep dish pizza is a tourist trap and nothing more.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
We are completely and totally effed, aren't we?
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Can't decide if it's more exciting that this is a thing or that I am sufficiently familiar with the Winnie-the-Pooh stories that I know precisely what the term refers to.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
That the NYT doesn't bother to differentiate between income and payroll taxes is poor reporting - your average person will read this as a call to eliminate payroll taxes, which sounds great until you square that with ending Social Security and Medicare, which are funded by payroll taxes.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Was looking at Twitter and now I feel depressed.
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Krisanne Combs @ennasirk.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Whew, @tressiemcphd.bsky.social hits another one out of the park. 🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/o...
Tressie McMillan Cottom: I have, for years, written about the female empowerment industrial complex's many foibles. While writing about this latest AI-fueled iteration, it dawned on me that girlbossing for profit feels cruel. The genre has not changed but women's lives have. The Trump administration's policy agenda and the existential threat of AI are undoing women's economic, social, political well-being. American women's livelihoods are no longer secure enough to entertain celebrity girlbosses.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
The idea that anyone can be a billionaire is a kind of perverse egalitarianism: it defends hierarchy by insisting on its fairness.
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Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof @evanbernick.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
And what it is likely to do is perpetuate the idea that Rawls is tired and boring and beyond ordinary people and only academics are obsessed with him. I think that is untrue and condescending and people should read Rawls.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
I seem to recall the original title was "About Money" - I'm assuming the publisher wanted something a little edgier? Excited to check it out all the same.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
This makes me feel good about organizing inclusive old-timey barn dances. I mean, I do it because I want to play fiddle for said dances. But also because it's a good way for people to hang out and get a little exercise.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
If the Democrats manage to take the House and Senate, I expect austerity policy for two reasons: 1) Republicans will seek to fence Dems in on fiscal policy, and Dems will go along in the spirit of bi-partisanship; and, 2) it's what wealthy donors have wanted all along.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
I can't get over how "artificial intelligence" is promoted as a way to push down wages - nobody says it that way, but that sure seems like it's the basic story.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
I pay attention to V Spehar the way I did Jon Stewart 20 years ago but they actually report the news instead of satirizing it. Pretty great.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
media.tenor.com
sesame street characters are standing in front of a radio with the word yep on it
Alt: sesame street characters are standing in front of a radio with the word yep on it
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Exasperating and yet somehow of no surprise at all: this is a straight up war of conquest and its supporters knew that all along.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Praying for a TACO Tuesday.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
After Trump, austerity. We'll recall these years as decadent. Whenever the next administration comes in there will be no money. For anything (except law enforcement and the judiciary and the military). Eventually social services will be restored by private charities.
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