I find Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ writings about racism to be thoughtful and a useful perspective. I was surprised to read how sanguine he is about the Trayvon Martin verdict. I don’t know what we can do about racism and racial profiling…
Blog Archives
Walmart, Job Destroyer?
My former PhD advisor, Joseph Persky, published research a few months ago showing that a new Walmart in Chicago destroyed, “approximately 300 full-time equivalent jobs in nearby neighborhoods. This loss about equals Walmart’s own employment in the area.” Persky’s work…
The Fed Hates Unemployed People
The Fed is the one institution in America that is specifically responsible for centrally planning our economy by controlling the supply of money, the price of money (interest rates), and the inflation rate. Although the press and the textbooks commonly…
Colleges Neglect The Needs of The Median
Yesterday I wrote that the US is moving towards a more Asian-style culture that is focused on manufacturing meritocracy, where elites are paying for more educational enrichment than the average American can afford. However, it isn’t really clear to me…
Posted in Labor
Manufacturing Meritocracy
I was recently talking with some wealthy parents and I was struck by how they are able to lavish private preschool education on their children that cost more than the $30,000 tuition at private colleges like Bluffton University and then…
Posted in Inequality, Labor
Distribution Matters
Kevin Drum gives a little statistical lesson about how thresholds have very different effects when they apply to the center or the tail of a statistical distribution. In the case of violent criminals, a slight shift in the distribution has…
Medianism 