Tag: us

Stuck Academia

But universities are stuck, like auto plants – like newspapers – like TV Studios – like the US Armed Forces – with infrastructure and unionized workforces that cost a bomb. Like the newspapers or auto makers, they will soon be faced with a dilemma. They cannot get their revenues up to cover their costs. Like papers they will have to cut “content”. At some point like the newspapers they will be left with being expensive and poor value. Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.

Too many people going to “college” learning too little.

Election behind the scenes

If you followed or were at all interested in the 2008 presidential election, this 7-part series by a group of Newsweek reporters is a must read. The reporters were granted exclusive access to the campaigns of Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton for 1 year on the condition that they wouldn’t print anything until after the election was over. The series, of which the first 3 parts are currently up on the Newsweek site, is a fascinating look at how the political process works and contains all manner of salacious political gossip.

American Dream a Biological Impossibility

He paints a disturbing picture of 21st century American life, where behavioral tendencies produced by millions of years of scarcity-driven evolution don’t fit the social and economic world we’ve constructed.

Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna, but not the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can’t actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed.

That individual weakness is reflected at the social level, in markets that have outgrown their agrarian roots and no longer constrain our excesses — resulting in the current economic crisis, in which America’s unpaid bills came due with shocking speed.

But with this crisis, comes the opportunity to rethink how Americans live, as individuals and as a nation, and build a country that works.

let the deconstruction begin