Social

The votes are cast, the results are coming in. There’s not much more to do on the political front, other than wait for the final results. While I’m waiting for that to happen, a few remarks on a conversation that I recently saw too late to comment on. The question was why is it so hard to get third party candidates on the ballot (e.g., libertarians, greens, etc.)? One person noted that even the Iraqis and Afghanis have more choices than we do in the U.S. where you have to decide between the Democratic and Republican parties. ...

last week saw the 300 millionth American. I happened to be online about that time and saw the U.S. census office’s population clock hit 3×10^8: I don’t have too much to say about hitting 300 million people. It seems like something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, population growth helps increase the level productivity in the economy. On the other hand, it already seems like we’ve got too many people, particularly at the U.S. level of per capita consumption.

I’ve never understood why the separation of church and state is still debated in this country. I have an even harder time understanding why people would try to undermine the separation of church and state, but as this article in the New York Times shows, they do. Keeping religion out of politics and politics out of religion has a long history in this country. Our first amendment has a clause which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This clearly states that congress may not create a national religion. But, may congress write laws with respect to a religion? Can congress financially support or encourage a religion? Supporters of the separation of church and state say, “no, while many religious advocates say “yes. ...

Brad DeLong discussing why we like diversity and identitity notes that in addition to prefering to discuss diversity because it is easier than tackling the hard problem of a lack of equality in opportunity, we like identity and diversity because they are inherently a good thing: Now normally–in my usual mind–I am an enthusiastic supporter of what I take to be Walter Benn Michaels’s central point: that we have collectively gotten ourselves off balance because we are responding to the fact that celebrating diversity is easy and doing something about upward mobility and the intergenerational reproduction of economic and social inequality is hard. ...

You can bet that any article written by a conservative that starts with “Liberals don’t value a college education? will be full of crap. The only relevant question is “what kind of crap will it be full of? In the September 22nd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Chronicle Review, Anthony P. Carnevale writes an opinion piece titled “ Discounting Education’s Value. The first couple of paragraphs give you a flavor of his arguments: ...

As I read the newspaper this morning, I came across Charles Krauthammer’s latest piece on how Iran is in the crosshairs of a U.S. decision. In the opinion piece, he lays out the costs of action and the costs of inaction and concludes that the U.S. has less than a year to decide how to handle Iran. Leave aside the callousness of someone whose costs do not include tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. The thing that struck me most is why do we let this man write a column at all?! He been wrong about everything he’s written in the past five years. He’s been wrong about how to fight terrorism, he’s been wrong about the war in Iraq. He hasn’t gotten a thing right in all the years I’ve seen him in the paper. ...

Okay, I’m a bigger nerd than I thought. The latest book that I’m dying to get when it comes out on Monday… “The State of Working America from the Economic Policy Institute. 350+ pages of analysis on wages, health care, wealth and productivity in America. How can you resist. If that doesn’t sound appealing, at least read the executive summary. It’s only 14 pages, it’s online, and it’s free.

Matt Yglesias sees the recent Washington Post article describing the fall in SAT scores after the most recent test changes and asks what’s the big deal. On the face of it, Matt makes some good points. Scores are only down 7 points (5 in reading and 2 in math) and for any given student, that really isn’t a big deal. The Washington Post article, while suggesting that there may be some underlying causes (e.g. the test changes or students not learning enough) also notes that it could be a one year blip. ...

An article today in the New York Times titled “Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity takes a look at how wages have risen, or more to the point failed to rise, during the most recent economic expansion. At a time when productivity (the monetary value of an hour of labor) has risen dramatically, increasing corporate profits, employee wages are basically falling. If you include benefits such as health insurance, they are rising – but nowhere near as fast as productivity. ...

Last week there was a minor uproar in the academic world when the government presented the list of majors that qualified for money under the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant program. The problem was that evolutionary biology was left off of the list. The feds claim that this was an oversight and on Friday added evolutionary biology back to the list of qualifying majors. So, even I am not so paranoid as to think that this was a conspiracy to keep students from studying evolution. But at the same time, I am not so dumb as to think this was accidental. The list of majors comes straight from the Classification of Instructional Programs codes. In the biology section, there are ten biology related programs. Of those ten, only one was missing – evolutionary biology. ...