Monday, October 31, 2011

Vivid thoughts about the future

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From Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception by George Musser. The world as we perceive ...
Sunday, October 30, 2011

An influx of skilled, ambitious people

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It's all about productivity. The Vanishing Middle Class by Reuven Brenner. Perhaps a source of woes is that we are losing our compara...

Practice and language shape habits of mind

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From Unsettled civilizations: How the US can handle Iraq by Reuven Brenner. On some of the critical distinctions between mobile (Enlighte...
Saturday, October 29, 2011

The fruit of chance and necessity

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Democritus: Everything in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity Makes sense when you think of chance as being random variation ...
Friday, October 28, 2011

What are you rewarding, and what are you punishing?

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From Black and right by Ray Sawhill. Thomas Sowell: Over the years, I’ve reached the point where I can hardly bear to read the preamble o...
Thursday, October 27, 2011

If fewer than seven men attack private property, they are thieves

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From Unsettled civilizations: How the US can handle Iraq by Reuven Brenner. There is an old clause in the law codes that King Ine of Wesse...

Four traps

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From Popular Development Economics—An Anthropologist among the Mandarins by Mike McGovern. It is interesting that what has happened in the...
Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Less than 1 percent of the American population is in the bottom income quintile for that duration (15 years)

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From Black and right by Ray Sawhill. We tend to think of poverty as a static condition whereas, in the US, it is highly dynamic. People mo...
Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Achievement gap is attributable to out-of-school factors

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From Group Urges More Money to Aid Poor in School by Winnie Hu. A classic example of difficult decision-making, trade-offs, noble goals and...
Monday, October 24, 2011

Most of the 106 billion people who’ve ever lived are dead—around 94 percent of them

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From The Geniuses We'll Never Know by Niall Ferguson. Numbers and context - always a winning proposition. This essay is not about Ste...