Jack Caldwell

Should billionaires be allowed to exist?

Economist William Nordhaus estimated that innovators capture only about 2% of the total value their inventions create, with the rest flowing to consumers as cheaper goods, higher wages, and better lives. If you think about it, that means the billionaire is the tiny visible tip of an enormous welfare iceberg. Confiscate the 2% and you mostly punish the people willing to take the risk, while the other 98% still happened. Read his NBER paper here: [Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy](https://www.nber.org/papers/w10746). It's the strongest quantitative case I know that billionaire fortunes are a bargain for society, not a theft from it.

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

I made an Olympic team off the back of my college program: the pool, the coaches, the sports medicine, the training table. Team USA's pipeline runs through college athletics in swimming, track, gymnastics, wrestling. Turn those programs into employers with payroll obligations and half of them disappear, especially the non-revenue ones that produce Olympians. The [Olympics](https://www.olympics.com/) don't pay for development. Colleges do, as a side effect of the current model. Break the model and you break the pipeline that puts Americans on podiums. Employment might help the quarterback. It ends the career of the steeplechaser before it starts.

Should sports betting advertisements be banned from live game broadcasts?

I counsel gamblers, and nearly every relapse story starts with a trigger: a phone buzz, a bad beat, or an ad in the fourth quarter promising a second chance. Britain tried the moderate version in 2019, a voluntary [whistle-to-whistle ban](https://bettingandgamingcouncil.com) on TV betting ads around live sport, and the industry's own review found children's exposure to those ads fell sharply. That tells you the ads were reaching kids in the first place. Nobody is proposing to ban betting. We are proposing to stop piping it into living rooms at full volume during the family event of the week.

The dinner-table rule is the realistic version of this. Maybe the debate should not be all-or-nothing hours but one sacred slot a day.

Lifestyle · Sep 23, 2026 · Should families set shared screen-free hours rather than individual limits?