Kevin Drum checks in with the latest from the class wars: In the middle of a rant about healthcare reform and the compromise over the Cadillac tax, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers says this: The idea that public employees make less than those in the private sector is a myth that needs to die. Most […]
Category: Class Issues
The Latest from Awful Yuppie Town: Green Divorce
One of the less attractive features of the New York Times is its tendency to feature little profiles of horrible people. They’re not presented that way, of course, but that’s the effect– I read these articles, and just want to slap everybody involved. Today’s story on marital tensions caused by environmental issues is a fine […]
The Visual Misrepresentation of Quantitative Information: Wages and Debt
Regular readers will know that I have a bit of a Thing about bad graphs used in the media and on blogs. When people use stupid presentation tricks to exaggerate features of data to make their argument look stronger, it bugs me. But what really irks me is when people use stupid presentation tricks to […]
Think of It as Kid Insurance
Janet has a typically thoughtful post about tuition benefits, following on a proposal to eliminate tuition benefits for employees of the University of Illinois. Janet does a great job of rounding up the various pros and cons of the benefit and its possible elimination. It takes no time at all for the “Tuition benefits are […]
Even in Education, The House Always Wins
Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber has a very good post about schools that appear to “beat the odds”, getting good results with populations that don’t typically do well in school. It does an excellent job of laying out the problems with the vast majority of attempts to determine which schools are “beating the odds,” let […]
Why the Record Industry Sucks, Aleph-nought in a Series
As a companion piece to Steve Albini’s famous rant about how the pop music industry systematically screws its artist, theToo Much Joy blog provides a look at their royalty statement: I got something in the mail last week I’d been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included […]
Notes Toward a Unified Theory of Political Blogging
Theorem: The worthiness of a blog post on a political or social topic is inversely proportional to the number of times derisive nicknames are used to refer to the author’s opponents.
Thursday Sense of Obligation Blogging
A couple of things that I’m not excited to blog about, but sort of feel like I ought to say something about: 1) The Washington Monthly article about StraighterLine, an online program that lets you take college courses for $99/mo. The article is all breathless excitement about the revolutionary transformative power of technology, but it […]
Beauty’s Just Another Word I’m Never Certain How to Spell
Like every other blogger with a political opinion, I read Paul Krugman’s essay on economics last week, and tagged it for Saturday’s Links Dump. And while I appreciate Eric Weinstein calling me out as part of the “high end blogosphere,” I’m not sure I have much to say about it that is useful. But, since […]
Let’s Hear It for the Staff
The Dean Dad had a great post about staff yesterday: Politically, hiring office staff is a harder sell than hiring faculty. Faculty are conspicuous, and the tie to the classroom is obvious. Back-office support staff are inconspicuous, and show up in public discussion as ‘overhead’ or ‘administrative bloat.’ But their work is necessary, as anyone […]