Weekly Writers Round-Up: Amazon Cronyism, the Housing Market Crisis, and Student Loan Forgiveness

Each week, we’ll be featuring the work of the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. For more information on the program, see here.

Amazon’s Electricity Sweetheart Deal by Josh T. Smith (Summer 2015) in The American Conservative
Just over a year ago, on September 7, 2017, Amazon began searching for a location for its second headquarters, HQ2. Though they haven’t made a public decision yet, meetings in prospective cities by some of Amazon’s leaders have created great hubbub and public interest. The problem is that officials attempting to lure Amazon in with offers of tax incentives and other goodies may not see the benefits they expect…

A Decade after the Financial Crisis, the Government Fuels Another Housing Bubble by Daniel Press (Fall 2017) in The Washington Examiner
Ten years ago this month marks the anniversary of one of the most dramatic events of the 2008 financial crisis: the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States. While the spectacular failures of Wall Street firms grabs most of our attention, it is important to remember that it was the meltdown of the U.S. residential mortgage market that precluded the failure of the investment banks…

Everyone Calm Down About Rejected Student Loan Forgiveness Applications by Preston Cooper (Fall 2015) in Forbes
Recent headlines have blared that a loan forgiveness program for government and nonprofit employees has rejected 99% of applicants for relief, according to a recently-released batch of data on the program. While it’s true that very few borrowers have had their applications approved for relief under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, there are a number of reasons why that isn’t nearly as shocking as it first appears. This is the first full year in which it is theoretically possible for PSLF applications to be approved—and discharges were always going to be low in the first year…

The Austrian School Did Not Create the Alt-Right by Tyler Bonin (Fall 2017) in The Duke Chronicle
The points which Eladio Bobadilla makes in his recent Chronicle guest column on accepting Koch Foundation money is troubling in that it assigns cause for the rise of violent nationalism in this country to a school of thought that is, based on its underpinning tenets, fundamentally at odds with the alt-right movement. It furthermore paints a caricature of Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek that is inconsistent with his most famous writings. I expect more from the history department at Duke.…