“Parties choose between nominating moderates, who are more viable, or partisans, who can energize the base and draw in new voters which helps win future elections. Only moderates can win in equilibrium and so the winning party fails to invest in its base and has a weaker future. Hence the longer a party is in power the more likely they are to lose, a pattern that finds strong support in the data.”
Anytime you think teacher union behavior is irrational, remember this post. When you can’t win in the current equilibrium, you have to create another.
2. The definition of outrageous
“One is a video of Board Member Leslie Ellison testifying before the Senate Labor and Industrial Relations Committee in 2012 about her refusal to sign a contract with the Louisiana Department of Education because it included a clause prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. She was testifying in support of a bill that would have allowed charter schools to discriminate against gays and lesbians.1 The other clip is from a July 2013 OPSB board meeting in which then-Board President Ira Thomas goes off on a racially-charged tirade against Interim Superintendent Stan Smith.”
A longer post on this would have been entitled: Local Control and the Nirvana Fallacy
3. The career prospect of over educated Americans
“Around 38% of the college graduates in the sample have higher education than the typical worker in their profession. Rather than transitory, the bulk of overeducation persists in the long run. Even if workers manage to transit to better jobs, they experience wage penalties similar to those after unemployment.”
4. The endlessly examined life
“My mental health file whirs to life in 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d recently left Opus Dei, the Catholic religious order to which I’d committed my young soul, and a major depression had followed. The records printed below are out of the mouths of my many caretakers; they chronicle my treatment at various medical offices and psychiatric clinics in the Boston area, from then until 2012.”