Graph Humor

The relationship between CEO pay and stock return. The jokes on us. Interactive version here.

Am I a shallow person ...

if I gain some pleasure from the fact that my gut is no bigger than Lea's?

And smaller than Leo's.

Let us praise the Daily Mail and its never-ending obsession with the physical flaws of our pulchritudinous stars.

Is it such a horrific idea that we might teach math the way math has always been taught?

Erick Erickson, of Red State, posed the question, is it such 'a horrific idea that we might teach math the way math has always been taught?' The answer is yes. Our citizens have an appalling inability to understand and put into practice even very basic math concepts and the weak performance of our school students on international tests, if anything, understates the problem. This is one area where real conservatism, the desire to retain the 'old ways', produces a deeply flawed analysis. The old ways produce results that suck.

Much is made of the inadequacies of teachers but the growing resistance to the Common Core reveals the inadequacy of parents. To argue, as Erick Erickson does, that parents cannot understand grade school math problems is more revealing than he appears to understand. Erickson is incredulous that common core supporters quote studies claiming that children whose parents do not help them with homework will, over the long term, out perform children whose parents do help them. Sadly, these studies are all too believable. Generational change in something as central and contentious as math education will inevitably be disruptive and slow but the status quo is unsustainable if we wish to remain a first rank nation.

The Great Recession and Material Discontent

The causes of the Great Recession have been subject to much fruitless debate. A recent book House of Debt by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi and a review of Timothy Geithner's book Stress Test by Paul Krugman provide some of the most convincing analysis to date. Geithner's book itself focuses on the bank run that triggered the recession and the steps taken to restore confidence but, as Krugman's review makes clear, although the recovery of confidence in the financial markets was achieved relatively quickly, and surprisingly cheaply, a full recovery from the Great Recession has yet to be achieved. Krugman is critical of the narrowness of Geithner's vision in approaching this problem since it is clear that the Great Recession was not simply due to the loss of confidence in the financial system. The fundamental problem appears to have been the doubling in household debt between 2000 and 2007. It has taken years to begin to clear this debt load and the task is still incomplete.

Debt is a financial issue but it is also a moral problem. We have been sold a bill of goods by our leaders, that wages could stagnate for decades but our living standard would continue to rise. The inherent contradiction was inevitably going to cause chaos. Our leadership was unwilling to admit that middle and lower class wages have stagnated, in large part due to their actions, and they turned a blind eye to the house of cards being constructed from the staggering increases in personal debt during the lead up to the Great Recession. They seemed to believe that things would be fine as long as they weren't actually leading the charge when the stampeding herd finally arrived at the cliff. Although Bush II fully deserved his own fall from the cliff, a failure of this magnitude had many fathers.

Ian Thorpe

Ian Thorpe is an Australian sporting hero and until recently a very tortured soul, subject to long periods of deep depression. After more than a decade of denial he has recently acknowledged that he is gay. It is one thing to come out when you work in theater, an all together different thing when you are one of a nation's greatest sports stars. The growing acceptance of homosexuals in sports together with his own increasing maturity presumably made it possible for Thorpe to finally break out of a life in the closet and it is to be hoped that this brings him some measure of personal peace of mind.