Blogs

The June unemployment rate staying at 8.2% is really not a surprise. The economy is lackluster and the 80,000 jobs added, a number well below what would be necessary to reduce the unemployment rate, is all the economy is capable of generating. Of greater concern and regardless of the November presidential /congressional election results, the economy will not quickly spring to life with a major decline in the unemployment rate.

This morning (Tuesday), I tweeted The New Yorker article that is making the rounds about how American kids are spoiled. Compared to kids raised in tribes in the Amazon, our kids are positively useless (and we as parents are positively failing them). We tie their shoes for them and don’t let them cut the grass with machetes.

I have wanted to write about the "having it all" media flapdoodle, but the published responses have gone off in so many different directions I have had trouble keeping up. So I am grateful to Libby for her elegant distillation.

As I write this, I am having a rare off-the-grid moment, looking over my laptop at a view that reminds me of the coast of Maine except that it doesn’t smell like the sea and there are no tidal pools full of sea urchins and starfish. But the North Shore of Lake Superior is, like Maine, a country of pointed firs, and interlaced among the conifers are the white trunks of birch trees. The hillside bristles with them rather starkly, because many of them have lost their crown of whispering leaves.

BREAKING: Community colleges are useful, and The New York Times is ON IT! It reduces them to vocational training centers, but it’s a start.

First the good news: The need for management education is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

I'm calling it. The age of software training is dead. We should never purchase another application or platform for our campus that requires any workshops, documentation, FAQs, or dedicated support people. If software is not intuitive and simple enough for people to teach themselves to use it then that software is flawed.

We like to joke in economics that we economists seem to always have two hands. We are known for saying “on the one hand” and then explaining some policy implication, only to follow quickly with “on the other hand”, followed by a conflicting policy implication. I found myself thinking of this recently while on vacation as I debated the merits and costs of possibly buying a laptop computer or a tablet.