JayB

Am I the only one that ever learned that you have to be careful to differentiate between causation and correlation? There are two central problems with the literature that evaluates the connections between attending college and life outcomes. The first is selection bias, the second is too much aggregation. The problem with comparing college graduates to non-college graduates is that you are comparing vastly different pools of people. When you compare the most diligent, hard-working, gratification-delaying etc third of the population, who tended to have more involved, responsible parents with middle class or higher incomes and went to better than average schools...of course you find that they tend to smoke less crack, knock-off fewer liquor stores, take better care of themselves, etc. Take a moment and ask yourself what kind of study it would actually take to measure the effect of college on X - all else being equal. The main area where the over-aggregation problem is most evident is in the income stats. The lifetime income trajectories for different majors are radically different, and profoundly affected by the small subset who go on to careers in very lucrative professions with significant barriers to entry. Ditto for the pool that you are comparing college grads to. When you include high-school dropouts in the pool you get one picture, but when you compare - say- people who got a BA and nothing more to people who chose to go into a skilled trade, or at least one requiring a couple of years of post-secondary training and a certification, the picture looks very different.

I'll see your bet and raise it to "anywhere there are women." The real question is - in which parts of the world, and which set of cultural norms, religious convictions, and ideologies does it suck the most to be a lesbian?

Similar dynamics to the housing bubble. Price growth can exceed income growth for only so long, then people start to reconsider the costs and benefits. To the extent to which this causes 18-year olds to consult loan amortization charts and income trajectories before uncritically accepting all of the claims about the benefits of going to college - there's a bit of a silver lining here. The claims about the lifetime income trajectories of college graduates vs non-graduates are so thoroughly compromised as to be useless. Once you account for selection bias on the way into college and the distortions introduced by people who go onto a small subset of lucrative professions after college - it's not at all clear that the most college grads are in any position to bemoan the fate of the machinists, HVAC techs, backhoe operators, etc.

I'm going to stick with education because I just don't have the time to do the Gish Gallop today. -When the price of something increases more than people's ability to pay for it for decades, how does one explain that? It's only possible when you take money from somewhere else to fill the gap between the price and what people can afford to pay. The money from elsewhere in this case is grants, loans, and a variety of subsidies. These are what have allowed more people than ever to pursue a degree if they want one. Unfortunately - it also means that universities can get away with charging more - or, alternatively, to "offer more" - so they have and they do. We've pumped so much money other than wages and savings into higher ed that it's vastly inflated the price structure. Problem - yes. Worse than ever, armageddon, existential crisis? No.

-Where is the crisis? College has been getting more expensive for decades, and the percentage of people getting degrees has been increasing right along with it. 5% of the population was getting degrees at the civilizational apex that you lust after, and very few of them were women or minorities. Now 30% of the population is getting degrees, most of them are women, and there are more minorities enrolled in universities than ever before. This is armageddon? This is what I get in every single conversation I have with people. "X is getting worse." -No it's not. Look at the data for X. X is getting better." "Well, what about Y?" This isn't Panglossian, it's perspective informed by actually taking the time to acquaint oneself with history. Life is better in more ways for more people now than at any other time in human history, and we have both more wealth and more tools to deal with whatever problems we have than we've ever had before.

Woah Duane Gish! Let's take these one a time! Let's take education for starters: Where's the crisis of access? When have opportunities for everyone to pursue a degree regardless of race or sex been better?

Can't imagine why folks of a particular political persuasion ate this stuff up: ""Reality, of course, is different. Having lived in both worlds [the United States and Syria], I can tell you this in all honesty; I have never once encountered any problem here on account of my sexuality that I would not have encountered were I straight as an arrow. I have never once been attacked or beaten or even screamed at for being a lesbian in an Arab land. On the other hand, I have had dung thrown at me in America for wearing a hijab, been attacked and struck by strangers for being an Arab." http://dscriber.com/watch/3648-amina-araf-gay-girl-blogger-disappears-in-syria

because, of course, you can't think of moments in our nation when neither obesity or hunger were systemic problem. There was a time - but all things being equal it was worse than the present. Cold war, race riots, more pollution, vastly more poverty all over the globe, imprisoned behind the iron curtain etc, etc, etc. No thanks. I'll take the present, fatties included.

it's somewhat like claiming one can't think of better times than during the great depression. Perhaps you ought to consider the reality of others and stop ogling at your belly button. Do you think you can handle that? Well - there's tens of millions of Indians and Chinese who have to been lifted from poverty far more severe than anything people in the US have had to endure for ages since whatever recent economic golden age you are pining for, so no sale for me. When you are making these comparisons, you can't yank bits and pieces out of different points of time like you are at some sort of historical buffet to craft a utopia of your choosing. At least not if the goal is to make real comparisons between time A and time B, vs coming to the surprising conclusion that the present falls short of a time and a place that never actually existed.

Voting for "effect." Effect in this case = establish. "affect" change would be altering or modifying the said changes.

I can make plenty of determinations and use empirical data to support them, but whenever I get in these conversations with people and I start cranking through the litany of things that are better than they used to be at some arbitrary point in the past - the response is never to challenge the numbers but to assert that something like, say, having fewer women die in childbirth or the eradication of smallpox is not "good" in any objective sense, and then go on to cite the litany of problems that we now have the luxury (in my view) of worrying about. Like obesity. Exhibit A. Problem - yes. Better problem to have than chronic mass hunger or starvation? Yes. Next.

"A Gay Girl in Damascus': how the hoax unfolded For months Tom MacMaster convinced thousands of readers – including some media organisations – that his hoax blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” was genuine." Here were examine how events unfolded which led to the diary being exposed as the work of the a married American man studying at the University of Edinburgh: February 19, 2011: MacMaster posts the first item on the blog, pretending to be Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari. The first posts introduce the author as a lesbian of American and Syrian parents, born in the US and now living in Damascus. February to April, 2011: MacMaster gives sporadic updates from his character, ranging from political analysis and hard news accounts of the brutal repression of the country’s pro-democracy movement to love poetry and Mills and Boon-esque homosexual memoirs." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8572884/A-Gay-Girl-in-Damascus-how-the-hoax-unfolded.html Best Summary: "It would be nice if "Amina Arraf" existed. As niche constituencies go, we could use more hijab-wearing Muslim lesbian militants and fewer fortysomething male Western deadbeat college students. But the latter is a real and pathetically numerous demographic, and the former is a fiction – a fantasy for Western liberals, who think that in the multicultural society the nice gay couple at 27 Rainbow Avenue can live next door to the big bearded imam with four child brides at No. 29 and gambol and frolic in admiration of each other's diversity." http://articles.ocregister.com/2011-06-17/news/29675338_1_lesbian-assad-bashar

The question bears repeating: what kind of freedom allows the kind of massive growth and consolidation of wealth and power, the rigidification of class inequalities, and the near-paralysis in our ability to solve urgent and growing problems? What kind of freedom reduces humanity's better instincts and aspirations to "stuff" that the people with access can "appreciate" over a glass of wine (or coconut water) while computers and bond-traders decide how to run society? We've traded politics, progress, and the expansion of our definition of freedom for efficiency targets and "consumer choice" while real power becomes more concentrated and the access to education, health, space becomes more restricted to the ability to pay? Where does the will to solve problems that impact us collectively come from in this configuration? "Market democracy" has failed us; it's failed in the conflagration of the financial collapse, it's failing us in the deepening crises it's caused, it's failing us in our ability to address the mounting ecological catastrophe and in our ability to exercise control over a bloated national security state at home and abroad. Trading away an engagement with our collective future by narrowly defining freedom as lifestyle consumption is a grotesque perversion which you need to address Jay, if only through an explication of your irrational fear of "the mob" and your dogged defense of an increasingly indefensible status quo. Maybe we should just read each other passages from the Paul Ehrlich v Julian Simons debate from the 70's? No need to point out to a Critical Studies jockey like yourself that better and worse are incredibly subjective - but for me it's hard to look at any arbitrary point in the past and find someplace where I'd like to make time stand still, much less any time in history where the global aggregate of misery and suffering was lower. Market democracy has failed compared to what? Things worse relative to when?

Odds of finding high scores for all of the stuff you cited earlier as being more important than GDP are much better for the top 20 than the bottom 20. Dredge up the scatter plot that shows an inverse correlation between the statistical aggregate of your choosing and all of the EFI scores and we then we'll be getting somewhere.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can appreciate all that stuff *and* appreciate not having to travel to fro in a Dodge Stratus.

Great scold of Pottery-Barn and boutique-produce Progressivism- hold thy tongue! I see the smoking ruins of a great many greater Seattle area dinner party conversations strewn about the ends of once languid and peaceful dinner tables* in your future. *tastefully distressed and constructed from timbers salvaged Quaker barns at an equalitarian community of local artisans.

Oh, they most certainly did. We just called it deregulation, privatization, corporate offshoring, union-busting, and tax cuts. Too subjective for you? Guessing most of the time was spent parsing the gendero-lexical oppression encoded in the linguistic roots of the character between the words "union" and "busting"?

Nope. The more easy it is to purchase, say, a superior Japanese made car without the Big 3/UAW making it harder or more expensive the more economic freedom I have. Agreed. Very concrete.

-It's clearly subjective. In my personal definition, the less statutory restraints there are on your ability to earn and spend money in ways that don't directly harm anyone else, the more economic freedom you have. I meant specifically. Specific is one thing, objective is another. We're talking ideas here - so it's not like you're going to get an objective definition of economic freedom that's derived from the atomic radius of zinc and stored in a French vault next to the platinum alloy Ur-Kilogram. Didn't they cover this stuff in your many undergraduate Critical Studies symposia on "Problematizing the Heteronormative Reflexality of Conjunctions in the English Language," etc, etc, etc?

Comeon Jay you aren't this dogmatic are you? Where does a business owner find information on the viability of a new method of promotions? Shit, most small business owners I know don't have the time to do in depth cube monkey level research. Per this paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1863466 and my personal experience, that's rare. I'd be particularly surprised at a liquor/beer store. anyways, groupon as a company is a scam Trial and error. Bet the farm on a single If you're the the type that will be the farm on a single Groupon promo you will probably be out of business soon anyways..

-It's clearly subjective. In my personal definition, the less statutory restraints there are on your ability to earn and spend money in ways that don't directly harm anyone else, the more economic freedom you have. -The methods used to calculate the values plotted on the chart above can be found here: http://www.heritage.org/Index/

The data look the same irrespective of what time period you choose to look at. The scattering of the individual countries about the regression-line will vary over time, but not the fact that when you look across the globe, economic freedom and prosperity are positively correlated with one another. Given the roster of countries at the top of the index of economic freedom - your odds of plotting economic freedom and any of the even-more-nebulous-and-more-difficult-to-reliably-quantify factors you cite above and finding an inverse correlation is quite small - but let us know what you find.

Seems like a key function of any viable business is the ability to independently determine whether something is or isn't good for the said business.

Given that all of the above were both present and had a more significant role before the reforms introduced under Schroeder were enacted - you'd expect the weakening of them under the said reforms to have undermined rather than enhanced their economic performance. Then it might be worth comparing Germany to another country with a similar set of policies - like Japan - and evaluate the extent to which they've established that they are the magic formula. Then perhaps extend the sample to Europe, or the entire world, and draw correlations between economic liberalism and economic performance....

I think the actual chronology goes from war-time rationing and price controls, to full-tilt liberalization, to a gradual cartelization/socialization at some point in 10-20 years thereafter, followed by a round of liberalizing reforms initiated under Schroeder. Post War Liberalization: "The German Miracle: Another Look Germany has cut government spending and its economy is growing smartly. It's not the first time that market-friendly policies have led the nation out of crisis." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575461873411742404.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Schroeder Reforms: "Schröder Reforms Bear Fruit in German Recovery By Christian Reiermann Once the sick man of Europe, Germany is currently enjoying an economic recovery, with fewer people out of work and solid growth. And unemployment is likely to remain low -- largely thanks to unpopular labor reforms pushed through by the last chancellor, Gerhard Schröder." http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,528757,00.html