About

This is the blog of Don Taylor, Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, and Director of the Social Science Research Institute at Duke. I used to blog a lot, and cut my teeth as a blogger during the Affordable Care Act, when blogging was fun and a great learning process. I have blogged very little the past four years or so, when policy discussion seemed quaint. Beginning January, 2021 I am refocusing my blog around my intellectual passion these days–reckoning with the disconnect between the two original American ideas–“all men are created equal” from the Declaration of Independence announced to the World in 1776, and a “hierarchy of human value marked by Race” found  in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, ratified just 11 years later.

American history is the tussle between these two ideas, and I believe our future as a multi-Racial democracy rests on our ability to reckon with the Two and one half Century duplicity in how these ideas have played out.

I have two book projects underway, the first is entitled “Browntown: Trying to remember things I never knew” which is a memoir of Race. The second is the capstone of my research career to date that focuses on how U.S. society care for the elderly and has a working title “Policy Induced Trauma: the American way of caring for the elderly.” I will be blogging about these projects and related themes–they each intersect with the two American ideas.

I began blogging in June 2009 at my freeforall blog (a blogger blog) before joining The Incidental Economist Blog from March 2011 to March 2012. I then relaunched freeforall on this wordpress site and all of those (several thousand) posts are archived here. I also used to blog at http://www.samefacts.com.  December, 2020.