I’ve written a bit on the housing bubble here, and why, if anything, it’s more a macroeconomic danger than anything else. But there’s a greater, more easily identifiable problem: our currently low savings rate. Kash at Angry Bear considers capital flows and savings behavior and provides a useful chart comparing the savings rate of several […]
Just a reminder that tomorrow is the first book club meeting. It’ll be at 6 PM at Espresso Royale near Northeastern (take T to Symphony or Mass Ave. stops, then walk a block to Gainesborough). I’ve gotten some feedback already about how light the read was, so if you’re looking for more heft, do check […]
I think that Sam Fuller’s work can never get enough recommendation. Sure, a Fuller film is the sort of Hollywood film liable to put off anyone with a congenital aversion to action genres, sensationalist tone, and a hyper-masculinist milieu that flies in the face of serious drama and liberal politics. In fact, after initial early […]
AG Tom Reilly happened to be on Greater Boston last night, where he restated his unflagging support for the standardized testing requirement in science and in general. Which made me wonder: where does Deval Patrick stand on the issue? Going to his website, I then began to wonder, where does Patrick stand on any issue? […]
Word comes in that the state’s education board has voted nearly unanimously to require successful completion of the MCAS in Science in order to graduate. Good for them. The State Democratic Party (though often not its members) are on the wrong side of the standardized testing, both on substance and for public opinion’s sake. The […]
Matt Yglesias has a good post up on the Grokster case. But it’s a side point he makes that caught my attention:
A world where you can’t make a profit selling albums would radically alter the music business but not, I think, kill it off. Recording music is relatively cheap, being a rock star is […]
Anne Applebaum had an interesting critique of the Smithsonian’s “America’s Attic” approach last week.
It collects everything from first ladies’ gowns to family photo albums to old ballots. It owns, among other things, Helen Keller’s watch, Cesar Chavez’s union jacket, Thomas Edison’s light bulb, and a copy of Elvis Presley’s first album. Its current exhibits […]
I thought I’d recommend a post that Oil Drum author Ianqui had guest posted at Ezra Klein’s blog. In it, the author covers the main energy requirements of modern agriculture. Some of these I’ve heard before and some, like transportation fuel, are obvious. But I wasn’t aware of the amount of energy used for fertilizer […]
Over at Health Care for All’s blog, John McDonough gripes about Mitt Romney’s policy approach:
I’m old fashioned — and I long for the days when gubernatorial initiatives were accompanied by legislation and detailed policy briefs that spelled out assumptions, numbers, and details. This governor accompanies his pronouncements with zero details, making it impossible […]
I still haven’t responded to the good (and tough) comments I got on my free-trade postings last week. To be clear, I wasn’t coming out with a ringing endorsement of CAFTA, which seems to be riddled with problems, but rather wondering why center-left Democrats were silent in defense of free trade principles. I still think […]
Bostonist looks at the proposed Loews-AMC film theatre merger and predicts the worst:
With a monopoly on 32 of Boston’s most popular screens not only with the new company be positioned to bargain with the movie studios but they will have little competition when showing feature films. Seeing a new release film in Boston could soon […]
I’m not sure why the Globe touts the "First in a series of occasional articles about blacks and Latinos living in metro Boston." But the feature on one local African-American woman and her diagnosis of Boston’s racial barriers is quite good. More than the falsely quantitative study of the Harvard Civil Rights Project that caused […]
If you’re not reading Daniel Gross’s weblog, you should. Like his articles in Slate, it’s fun and substantial at the same time. I particularly like his criticisms (here and here) of shoddy business journalism.
As an experiment, I thought I’d use the Reader Blogs feature at the new TPMCafe and yesterday posted an admittedly off the cuff piece questioning the rhetoric of “Safe, Legal and Rare.” The site was kind enough to elevate the post to the front page, where it’s generated a number of comments, most of them […]