As a kid I heard the joke that Mennonite women in my mother’s generation went to college to get an MRS degree and indeed, my own mother dropped out of college soon after she got married. Of course, my dad…
Blog Archives
Is there a better way to educate smart people?
Alia Wong at The Atlantic reports about a new Harvard study that surveyed roughly 500 economics Ph.D. candidates at eight elite universities, and found that 18 percent of them experienced moderate or severe symptoms of depression and anxiety. That’s more than…
Posted in Labor
“no other nation has the equivalent of American college sports.”
College football might be in the news because of CTE lawsuits that might end the game, but Saahil Desai at The Atlantic points out other problems with college sports. He argues that college athletics are sucking resources out of our…
Posted in Labor
Democratic corporate governance
Are corporations authoritarian or democratic? Corporations tend to be hierarchical institutions in which workers often feel like they are working within a communist dictatorship, but compared with privately-held companies, corporations are extremely democratic. A privately-held company can be owned by…
How to avoid getting murdered by your coworkers
Homicide is the third leading cause of workplace death after vehicular accidents and falls according to the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is part of the green bar below which is actually bigger than the…
Posted in Labor, Managerial Micro
Policing crime vs immigration?
Do you fear crime? Do you fear terrorism? Do you feel safe? It turns out that the government is much more afraid of immigrant groundskeepers and farm workers than terrorists or violent criminals: Congress… has elected to spend more than…
Posted in Labor, Public Finance
88 years of unemployment data
Unfortunately FRED has four different somewhat-overlapping data series that must be combined to get the full, long-run picture of the unemployment rate from 1929 to the present. The first data series in light green is undoubtably the least accurate of…
