9/6/14 Today's Inquiries

I didn't notice that I started writing links instead of inquiries in the post titles a few days ago. I'll try to keep an eye on that.

The Links:

Elizabeth Warren was on Bill Moyers.


Poor jobs report for August.

Did you know that 34% of American workers are considered "freelancers?" I had no idea. Thanks Justin Fox.

Over at FiveThirtyEight, we're asked not to blame boomers for people leaving the workforce. It's actually younger cohorts who are giving up looking for jobs in large numbers.

Brookings notes the gap between public sector job destruction and private sector job recovery. It looks like many states were able to down their governments in the bathtub.

FRBNY looks at the possibly improving job prospects of recent college graduates.

FRBD published some good info about inequality and political polarization.

We find that a more precise measure of inequality (the inverted Pareto-Lorenz coefficient) is statistically related to polarization while a less precise one (top 1% income share) is not, and that there are bi-directional feedbacks between polarization and inequality. Findings support a nuanced view of the links between polarization and inequality.  

What exactly does it mean when we say that printing money causes inflation? Very much worth reading.

Here are three meanings of "Printing money causes inflation":

1. If the central bank prints money, so the stock of money grows at above 0%, that will cause the inflation rate to be above 0%. (And if it prints a lot of money, so the stock of money grows a lot above 0%, that will cause the inflation rate to be a lot above 0%.) Relative to 0%.

2. If the central bank prints money faster than it did in the past, that will cause the inflation rate to be higher than it was in the past. Relative to the past.

3. If the central bank prints money faster than it would otherwise have done, that will cause the inflation rate to be higher than it would otherwise have been.Relative to the counterfactual conditional.

Why do we subsidize mansions? Because that's where the money is. Remember, all of our housing silliness is the result of policy choices somewhere down the line.

One area for hope in future policy decision making is, and I'm not being sarcastic, Climate Change. Why do I think this? Well, companies throughout the world are making plans to respond to climate change and are, pretty much, behind the scientific consensus. Those same companies are supposedly major backers of science denying republicans. How long can that dissonance continue?

How much does it cost to guarantee your child a place in and Ivy League school? About $600,000 granted directly to the university plus following all the unwritten rules about going to good public or private schools and maintaing a decent GPA and extracurriculars.

Chris Blattman takes The Economist to task for their horrible review titled Blood Cotton. Let's just start with everyone in the universe agreeing that slavery is never ever good. Ever. Seriously, slavery is bad. Always. I lost a lot of respect for the magazine after reading the review. They retracted it, too.

The LA Times has a great piece on the drop in vaccination rates in California's children.

In Los Angeles County, the rise in personal belief exemptions is most prominent in wealthy coastal and mountain communities, The Times analysis shows. The more than 150 schools with exemption rates of 8% or higher for at least one vaccine were located in census tracts where the incomes averaged $94,500 — nearly 60% higher than the county median.

Here's a short and decent, only decent, interview with Dana Goldstein, author of The Teacher Wars. She discusses the absurdity of asking teacher to fix poverty.

One big criticism of teacher evaluations prior to NCLB and RTTT/Common Core was the absurdly high percentage of teachers scoring at the highest levels of competency. It looks like nothing has changed, despite the new rules and testing regime.

Benedict Carey thinks falling exams is a good thing. Now, he's writing about pretests and showing growth. The article assumes a very narrow definition of learning in which mastery is simply knowing a set of facts.

Imagine that on Day 1 of a difficult course, before you studied a single thing, you got hold of the final exam. The motherlode itself, full text, right there in your email inbox — attached mistakenly by the teacher, perhaps, or poached by a campus hacker. No answer key, no notes or guidelines. Just the questions. 

That is: The (bombed) pretest drives home the information in a way that studying as usual does not. We fail, but we fail forward.

Did Jane Austen read Adam Smith? Did Adam Smith read Jane Austen? Who cares? This kind of writing is sure to drive site traffic though!

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