I reviewed Charles C. Mann's 1493, a follow-on to his 1491. Both changed the way I looked at whole swaths of history, and I have reread them since. Sometimes I repent of my excitement for a book or article because I get swept away in its argument, which I later decide has holes. I still recommend these. Because of how quickly new archaeological information comes out, both already have claims that have been superseded. Those are still minor. May 2014
The Future of Us All. A discussion of changes in jobs and changes in the economy - what will it mean going forward. Good links. Good comments. I still like my own points fairly well. January 2012
Lumosity. Well, it might be true. I discuss why we should be suspicious. I suspect the traffic for this post is driven by people search for opinions about Lumosity. I hope mine helped. August 2012.
The (Not-Very) Good Old Days of Education - Part 1. I submitted the entire series over at Chicago Boyz recently, where it was not well received. The complaint was that I had not made the case all that well that prior education was all that bad, and even less had made the point that current education is just about as good. Perhaps so, I went on at length without making my point at times. Yet I am still chalking it up to simple resistance to an idea that conservatives love. School used to be abusive, both physically and in humiliating children. Much of what was taught was useless. Anecdotes to the contrary are more likely to mislead than to inform. WRT today, whatever crap they are teaching and bad attitudes they are encouraging - and they are - America still leads the world, all the way through school. This is disguised by the apples-and-oranges research that always shows us 27th in the world, behind Namibia or whatever, that media sources love to report on every year. It's not true. June 2012. The rest of the series Part II. What's Wrong With The Schools? Not part of the series, but humorous and related. English Public (private) Schools. Part III.
Father's Day Sermon Just me grousing. Some fun comments from those at liturgical/lectionary churches. June 2011.
1 comment:
Re employment: despite all the panic about robots and AI, the real-life productivity numbers don't show any kind of sharp upward break in productivity. Much of the low-hanging productivity fruit was consumed years, decades, or centuries ago...power loom, automated flour milling circa 1790, numerically-controlled machine tools circa 1960...and a lot of present-day jobs are harder to automate than they look from the outside.
Note also that with rising productivity and wages, there would be at least several million women (and some men) who would choose to stay home with their children during their early years, removing that supply from the labor market.
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