A key reason why I started a discussion of public pension funds in Texas by saying “Don’t Panic” is because 88% of Texans covered by a public pension plan are participants in one of just four plans, and the good news is that none of these four are in distress. Right now.  The largest four [&hellip

How does a profane, hip-hop, hit of a show, and a chapter, dropped in the middle of a behemoth book on Alex Hamilton, by Ron Chernow capture the current zeitgeist, show us to treat our debt with sacred honor? Hamilton, the musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, swept through my household this Summer like a hurricane, buffeting [&hellip

Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy famously advised us on the book cover “Don’t Panic,” and I think that’s a useful starting point for discussing public pensions in Texas. You see, I started by wondering “should we panic?” when I began a personal project of studying public pension, for a variety of reasonable suspicions, [&hellip

I’ve become a bit obsessed with public pensions this month.[1] As a lesson in how pensions can go wrong, I began looking into the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System. Dallas’ Police and Fire Pension ranks as the tenth largest in the state and easily qualifies as the most dire, according to the usual metrics [&hellip

Julie, the privileged white woman of Johannesburg and Abdu, the illegal immigrant at the car repair garage, come together, improbably, in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup. Each may benefit from the other to fulfill their most urgent quest. Julie has already eschewed the comforts of her father’s world in The Suburbs. She probably already suspects, unconsciously, that the pretensions of her young [&hellip