Thinking Inside the Box
The Nobel Prize winning physicist and genius quantum mechanic Niels Bohr once pointed out that "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- a fact that he demonstrated empirically with respect...
“No Power in the Market and No Voice in the System”
Bill Gates' Harvard commencement address is being circulated widely in Silicon Valley -- and with good reason. He gave an outstanding speech (rather, he wrote an outstanding speech -- he cannot...
The Democrat’s Smartest Conservative
Quick, which presidential candidate recently called for a huge expansion of the American military so that it can "stay on the offense" and then spelled out a plan to expand our...
Protect Income, not Industries, Companies, or Jobs
What if, in order to protect workers, we made it illegal for an employer to fire any employee for any reason? This would not be an especially controversial idea in some...
Great Teachers
Our National Report Card, the so-called National Assessment of Educational Progress, was released yesterday. Our kids are flunking and it is very serious. Nearly 40% of high-school seniors scored below basic level...
Angels in Disguise
Cities concentrate people, wealth, culture, and memories. In New York this week, I walked by an Indian restaurant and recalled a lunch almost twenty years earlier with friends who tried to...
American Oracle: Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman died this week at age 92. Seems like he was just getting started.
Friedman was easily one of the dozen most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He was a...
China After 32 years
Thanks to a series of peculiar accidents, I was granted a visa and allowed to visit China under government supervision for 25 days in November of 1974. Nixon had opened the...
Competition Forever
When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength...
Honor Labor
If your teacher was like mine, she told you that Labor Day is our how we honor the American worker. True enough, but it is also a holiday that commemorates the...
Are We Richer Than the Data Say We Are?
The always-interesting Virginia Postrel celebrates the ten year anniversary of Clinton's welfare reform by asking why people often believe that things are getting worse, when they are actually improving? Postrel notes...
Make Unskilled Immigrants Customers as Well as Workers
The New York Times ran an excellent article on immigrant assimilation last weekend. They framed the article as a debate between Harvard’s Cuban born Economist George Borjas and Berkeley’s Canadian-born David...
Longer Tails — and Taller Heads
This is the question of the season for two reasons: Dead Man's Chest, the recent installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, which launched last night, and The Long Tail the much-blogged,...
Sexism, the Subsidy
There is a reason that I love teachers. My mom was a schoolteacher. Her mom was a schoolteacher who married the son of a schoolteacher whose sisters were schoolteachers. I married...
Heroes of the written word: David Remnick
There are a few writers whose work I have learned to seek out and read, regardless of the subject. Christopher Hitchens, our national pugilist and probably our Orwell, is one. The...