it just occurred to me just now that the crowds around the supreme court, are not that far from where i'm sitting. i saw an article - best signs from the protests - but they were all terrible and uninteresting, so i'm not posting them here.
music suggestions - haven't heard of all of them
a new
to me, this felt like earning the right to choose, not irrationally thinking about numbers
reading this
1. we can dream
2. i saw that too but didn't think it was that interesting. oh poor you, you can't live like a millionaire because you're not one. shoulda been raised by my parents, who laughed themselves out of Saks on 7th Avenue.
4. i think it's strange that there haven't been any sob stories from people facing the sequester. doesn't seem like we talk about the sequester much at all anymore. i thought the propaganda machine would have really liked those stories. just liked they liked these stories
Btw, to weave your response to the economic inequality article together with the big Reason article on education I sent, there is one place where this phenomenon happens that is less obviously wrong, and that's college. The Gochenour article talks about how it's possible (in my view, probable) that the benefit for employers with respect to college is primarily about signaling. Justice Scalia made a similar argument about picking law clerks from Yale or Harvard over a lot of other law schools, not because these kids know the law better, but because all of the relevant indicators (high LSAT, high college GPA, etc.) suggest that these kids have more talent than others. So as a result, education spending may remain distorted because, even though the primarily benefit to the student may be learning things that only marginally add to his skills as a future worker, the real benefit is appearing to be smarter by virtue of the better (and possibly more expensive) college on the resume.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, middle-class kids who could have an equally good experience at a regional or state school try to go to expensive private schools or out-of-state public schools, spending a lot more on education than they reasonably should in an attempt to "keep up with the Joneses."