1. Clash of cultures: blue collar, white collar, and school reform
“Whether you approve of it or not, Carmen Farina’s restoration clearly represents the return of the repressed culture of relationship and apprenticeship. ”
2. On reading and building knowledge
“But this morning it finally crystallized for me that perhaps we struggle so much to build the knowledge that turns our students into readers not only because of what we choose to read but because of our habits of questioning, which often don’t value building knowledge or teach students how to do it.”
3. Spending more money won’t fix our schools
“Of course, we’re richer than many of our peers, so maybe we should spend more. If you look at spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, we’re no longer the highest, we’re just average.”
4. Trying to solve the great wage slowdown
“Whatever you think about any one of these, I’d argue that the crucial point is the broader one: Middle-class stagnation is not preordained. No country has found a magic bullet, but many are doing some things better than the United States – and have the better results to show for it.”
5. Elon musks donates 10M to reduce threat of one existential risk (AI)
“The plan is to award the majority of the grant funds to AI researchers, and the remainder to AI-related research involving other fields such as economics, law, ethics and policy (a detailed list of examples can be found here).”
Note: I remain concerned that some existential threat risks get way more attention than others.
6. Are all terrorists muslims?
“In fact in 2013, it was actually more likely Americans would be killed by a toddler than a terrorist.”
I thought The Great Wage Slowdown was an interesting compliment to your early clipping on the Bash Brothers (how outsourcing and technology have greatly wounded the middle class). It begins to note the big difference between the U.S. and Canada/Australia and then, unfortunately, jumps away – it’s education. The only way out of this is economic growth and a population that can help propel it (ie, participate in the leverage), rather than marginal labor. History hasn’t demonstrated any long term successful economies where prices/incomes are inflated above the marginal value of that service. It’s hard to see how our economy evolves back to a place like the 1950s-1970s (limited technology, no outsourcing, high rebuilding and consumer demand with first world competitors in a post-war shambles). So to be truly successful in an organic way we need a workforce that can take advantage of this evolution – literate (English and math) and critical thinking. So changing the education game and raising expectations is not just a civil rights cause but an imperative for a broadly successful economy.
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