9/12/14 Today's Inquiries

Only the linkiest survive.


The Links:

In news that should shock nobody, parents want to send their kids to elite schools because they seek the status conferred by those institutions. Unfortunately this manifests itself in paying for buildings and other status objects rather than improving education quality.

But, colleges are worrying about the dropping attendance numbers at football games. After all, those kids are supposed to be future donors. Maybe all those kids are studying?

In 2013, the University of Georgia's designated student section was nearly 40 percent empty.

In defense of social insurance. Again, welfare/unemployment benefits/SNAP/social security/universal healthcare/medicare are probably freedom maximizing propositions where the state and taxpayers take on a financial burden that many individuals should not have to bear.

It would appear that Obamacare has not yet improved employee paychecks. The idea was that broadening the insurance pools and spreading the risk would reduce the premiums companies have to pay and the savings would go to employees. Sure it would.

More on the relationship between new suburban poverty and Ferguson. It's been commented on before but is worth repeating.

Exactly how did the suburbs get so poor anyway? Hmm, oil prices, housing bubble, financial collapse, undoing the greatest generation's social programs. Yeah, that'd pretty much do it.

Robert Reich on the bankruptcy of Detroit and the freeloading white flight which benefited from city services and infrastructure without contributing to it. After reading all this anti-suburban stuff, I think the trend toward urban living is a net positive for America.

Stressed borrowers rattle resurgent subprime lenders. Yup, extending credit to those who can least afford it has predictable results.

Efficient credit policies and the housing crisis.

Since 2007 we have built between 500 and 600 thousand houses per year when long-run trend used to be 1.2 million a year. Netting out the 1 million extra houses built, we are now 4 million single-family houses short–4 million families who in a normal economy would be in their own homes are now living in their sisters’ basements, with little sign that the by-now enormous underhang relative to 1948-2008 housing trends is exerting any pressure for a single-family housing construction recovery.

This just in, politicians who state positions are liked by the public. Okay, maybe it's a little more nuanced than that. A little.

Politicians have been depicted as, alternatively, strongly constrained by public opinion, able to shape public opinion if they persuasively appeal to citizens’ values, or relatively unconstrained by public opinion and able to shape it merely by announcing their positions. We conduct unique field experiments in cooperation with legislators to explore how constituents react when legislators take positions they oppose. For the experiments, state legislators sent their constituents official communications with randomly assigned content. In some letters, the representatives took positions on salient issues these constituents opposed, sometimes supported by extensive arguments but sometimes minimally justified. Results from an ostensibly unrelated telephone survey show that citizens often adopted their representatives’ issue positions even when representatives offered little justification. Moreover, citizens did not evaluate their representatives more negatively when representatives took positions citizens opposed. These findings suggest politicians can enjoy broad latitude to shape public opinion. 

Andrew Sullivan on our "new" war in Iraq/Syria.

This is not just a betrayal of a core principle of his presidency – a restoration of normality – it is a rebuke to his own statements. 

Things we are afraid to say about ebola:

The first possibility is that the Ebola virus spreads from West Africa to megacities in other regions of the developing world. 

The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. 

Strong female characters who make mistakes and learn form them. Good to see some Xena love. Also, Orphan black is a good show if you give it some time to broaden it's scope.

PC gamers spend way more money on their obsession than other gamers. Speaking of which, I will be completely rebuilding the core of my computer soon. I built my current rig in Jan. 2009 and it's getting a little long in the tooth. I did upgrade the graphics last year so they're good for a while but my mono/CPU/RAM and probably hard drive are going to need some upgrading. Hmm, 8 cores? Why yes, I just may. Maybe I'll blog about it and put some photos up because why not?

#183774630 / gettyimages.com