Winston Shepard

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

In February 2024, an NLRB regional director ruled that Dartmouth's men's basketball players are employees of the university, and the team voted to unionize that March. This isn't a thought experiment anymore. A federal labor board looked at the hours, the control, the compensation in the form of equipment and tickets and early recruiting perks, and said: these are workers. The [NLRB](https://www.nlrb.gov/) decision is under appeal and Dartmouth refuses to bargain, but the legal logic is now on the record. I coach high school kids who ask me about this. I tell them the adults spent decades saying it was impossible, and then a labor board in New England looked at an Ivy League basketball team and called it employment. The dam didn't break at Alabama. It broke at Dartmouth, which tells you how strong the case is.

Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

Strip away the feelings and look at the incentives, because this is a textbook free-rider problem. Pay-as-you-go pension systems, public healthcare, and the general tax base all depend on future workers existing. Someone who opts out of producing those workers while fully expecting to collect the benefits is doing exactly what economists mean by free-riding: enjoying the commons without restocking it. You can call that a personal choice, and legally it is, but the math doesn't care about your framing. Every childfree retiree drawing a pension is being subsidized by somebody else's kids. If everyone made the same personal choice, the system collapses in one generation. A choice that's only sustainable when most people don't make it is, by definition, an extractive one.

Should the standard full-time workweek be cut to four days with no pay cut?

I spent forty years watching management fads, and this one has the classic tells: self-selected participants, short timelines, and outcomes measured by the same consultants selling the idea. The UK trial ran six months; nobody knows what happens in year three when competitors who kept five days pull ahead. Microsoft Japan's famous 40% productivity jump in 2019 lasted one month, in August, when half the country is on holiday anyway. I am not against rest. I am against declaring victory from a pilot and legislating it. Let companies experiment, publish honest five-year data, and then we will talk about standards. Even sympathetic reviewers agree on the gap: [What Works Wellbeing's review](https://whatworkswellbeing.org/blog/findings-from-four-day-work-week-trial/) notes the trial had no real counterfactual, since participants volunteered and were compared only to their past selves.