5/3/15 Today's Inquiries

Finding good employees is apparently a difficult thing in rural Appalachia. I find this surprising given the high unemployment. 

The Links:

Let's start with a great discussion of the limits of technology in education. Specifically, I enjoyed this part as it echoes many of my own criticisms of NCLB/CC education:

I think one of the issues is we tend to think of education as being the content. We overemphasize the importance of content, as opposed to emphasizing the part that’s really difficult in any good education, which is adult-supervised motivation—the motivation of the child to learn something.

An analysis of City Year's efficacy. I find this program far more appealing than, say, Teach For America and it has far better outcomes. Plus, it doesn't displace teachers or school employees and adds resources to every district without cost to the schools. 

The housing market continues to change significantly from prior generations. The housing ladder is pretty much broken. 

HVS estimates suggest that the trend toward more single-family units being rented rather than owned continued over the last year. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2005, HVS estimates suggest that the number of owner-occupied one-unit homes fell by about 1.969 million units, while the number of renter-occupied one-unit housing units increased by about 4.345 million units.

Kansas sucks and so does its short term economic outlook. 

California's low-wage workers are older and better educated than in the past. So, I guess education isn't the only key to a good job?

California's low-wage workers are older and more educated than they were three decades ago — but they earn less, according to new research from UC Berkeley.

David Brooks blames the poors for being poor.

Of course if NYT columnists were expected to be accurate when they talked about government programs, Brooks would have been forced to tell readers that around 40 percent of these payments are Medicaid payments that go directly to doctors and other health care providers. We pay twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries, with little to show in the way of outcomes. We can think of these high health care costs as a generous payment to the poor, but what this actually means is that every time David Brooks' cardiologist neighbor raises his fees, David Brooks will complain about how we are being too generous to the poor.

The other point that an honest columnist would be forced to make is that the vast majority of these payments do not go to people who are below the poverty line and therefore don't count in the denominator for his "poor person" calculation. The cutoff for Medicaid is well above the poverty level in most states. The same is true for food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and most of the other programs that make up Brooks' $14,000 per person figure. In other words, he has taken the spending that goes to a much larger population and divided it by the number of people who are classified as poor.

Elizabeth Warren gives zero fucks about your diamond ring. 

Pension Funds, the last bastion of proper liberal retirement policy, have absolutely no idea how much money investing with private equity costs them. 

Some men pretend to work 80 hours a week. Highly recommended.

In many professional jobs, expectations that one be an “ideal worker”—fully devoted to and available for the job, with no personal responsibilities or interests that interfere with this commitment to work—are widespread. We often think of problems with these expectations as women’s problems. But men too may struggle with them: my research at a top strategy consulting firm, first published in Organization Science, revealed that many men experienced these expectations as difficult to fulfill or even distasteful...

 some men made small, under-the-radar changes to their work that allowed them to pull back, while still “passing” as the work-devoted superheroes the firm valued. Others were more transparent about their difficulties, and asked the firm for help in pulling back. Their efforts resulted in harsh penalties and marginalization...

Thus, like women, many men in professional jobs also experience difficulties with demands that they be ideal workers, and like women, men who express these challenges and seek the firm’s help to redress them face resistance and penalties. What seems to differ is that many men are able to stray while passing as fully devoted. 

Boots or Heels: A Wardrobe Paradox for Women in STEM. 

So I am crossing my fingers that we can find ways to shrink this divide. Boots and dresses, or neither, or anywhere in between. Girls should not feel that their taste in clothes/decorations/hobbies/accessories leaves them needing to defend either their intellect, their interest, or their legitimacy as a girl. More than asking boots and dresses to unite, maybe we can stop worrying about what people are wearing at all. A girl can dream.

The Police State is Already Here. Yeah, but only for black people. More here.

Why are so many Republican running for president all the time? 

First, there is a strong sense that the hierarchical tradition of Republican presidential nominations may not apply in 2016...

Second, it is a sign that with our political process awash in money, the financial barriers for entry aren't really there anymore...

Third, this much interest reflects a perception that, despite the demographic challenges facing the Republican Party, this nomination is worth having—that there is a fair chance that one of these people will be the next president of the United States.