This is going to be a bit of a rant, because there’s a recurring theme in my recent social media that’s really bugging me, and I need to vent. I’m going to do it as a blog post rather than an early-morning tweetstorm, because tweets are more likely to be pulled out of context, and… Continue reading On Feelings and Votes
Category: Class Issues
Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension
When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn’t because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and… Continue reading Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension
Kids and Schools and Liberal Guilt
Matt “Dean Dad” Reed is moving to New Jersey, and confronting one of the great dilemmas of parenting (also at Inside Higher Ed): what school district to live in. This is a big problem for lots of academics of a liberal sort of persuasion: From a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting into the… Continue reading Kids and Schools and Liberal Guilt
On Intelligence and Talent
Probably the dumbest person I’ve ever met in my life was a housemate in grad school. I didn’t do my lab work on campus, so I wasn’t living in a neighborhood where cheap housing was rented to students, but in a place where folks were either genuinely poor, or in the market for very temporary… Continue reading On Intelligence and Talent
Cash and Respect
The London School of Economics has a report on a study of academic refereeing (PDF) that looked at the effect of incentives on referee behavior. They found that both a “social incentive” (posting the time a given referee took to turn around the papers they reviewed on a web site) and a cash incentive ($100… Continue reading Cash and Respect
Intelligence vs. Priorities
Steven Pinker has a piece at the New Republic arguing that Ivy League schools ought to weight standardized test scores more heavily in admissions. this has prompted a bunch of tongue-clucking about the failures of the Ivy League from the usual suspects, and a rather heated concurrence from Scott Aaronson. That last finally got me… Continue reading Intelligence vs. Priorities
Kids Those Days
Lance Mannion has a really nice contrast between childhood now and back in the 1970’s that doesn’t go in the usual decline-of-society direction. He grew up not too far from where I now live, and after describing his free-ranging youth, points out some of the key factors distinguishing it from today, that need to be… Continue reading Kids Those Days
Of People, Things, and Places
I’m not quite awake enough yet to deal with reviewing copyedits and reformatting figures for the book-in-process, so while I wait for the caffeine to kick in, let’s talk something simple and cheerful: rural poverty. This week, Vox and the New York Times both touched on this, the former with a story about the food… Continue reading Of People, Things, and Places
Great Moments in Puzzling Axis Labels
While I’m complaining about statisticulation in social media, I was puzzled by the graph in Kevin Drum’s recent post about college wage gaps, which is reproduced as the “featured image” above, and also copied below for those reading via RSS. I don’t dispute the general phenomenon this is describing– that the top 10% of college… Continue reading Great Moments in Puzzling Axis Labels
Food Takes Time
Kevin Drum and Aaron Carroll report on a new study of the effect of new grocery stores opening in “food deserts” in poor neighborhood. The study is paywalled, so I can’t speak to the whole thing, but both of them quote similar bits making the same point: no statistically significant effects on the BMI of… Continue reading Food Takes Time