Tag: commented

United workers of the world | The Economist

Unbalanced skill levels could make the world more unequal

McKinsey estimates that over the next decade rich countries and China will need 40m more college-educated workers than they will be able to produce. At the same time, employers across the world may find themselves with 90m more low-skilled workers than they need.

Source: United workers of the world | The Economist

 

What do you do with 90M unemployed, working-age people possessing only a primary/elementary or sometimes secondary/high school education?

The Secret Consensus Among Economists – Freakonomics Freakonomics

If you follow the economic policy debate in the popular press, you would be excused for missing one of our best-kept secrets: There’s remarkable agreement among economists on most policy questions.

I’ve never seen the disjunction between the political debate about economics and the consensus of economists be as large as it is today.

Source: The Secret Consensus Among Economists – Freakonomics Freakonomics

 

From comments:

For what it’s worth, I do agree with the main point of the article – that public commentary about economics is studiously uninformed and caricatured. Generally economics takes a backseat to ‘sexier’ social issues, which is certainly a problem. But the fact that there is a consensus amongst economists despite a huge number of questions about the nature of economic arrangements across the globe which cannot be answered by neoclassical economic theory should indeed be a matter for concern – about the academic discipline, as well as about the public discourse.

In the 1970’s, there was a healthy debate between a great number of economic schools – Austrian, neoclassical, Marxist and the various flavours of Keynesian. Long story short, the neoclassicals (and a few Austrians) essentially rent-sought their way to pre-eminence, and have been doing their best to hold barred the academy doors against the quantitative alternatives (ecological economics, post-Keynesianism and chartalism, distributism) for near-on three decades now. The consensus is an imposed one, and the debate within mainstream economics now is essentially a quibbling over minutiae between straight-up neoclassicals and neoclassicals masquerading as Keynesians. That should probably raise a few red flags, given the trenchant empirical criticisms of many of the assumptions made by neoclassicals about human behaviour and rationality, about the nature of resource consumption, about the role of institutions and so on. These aren’t ‘squawking heads’ on television making these criticisms; more often than not these are serious scientists and statisticians (Herman Daly, Dean Baker, Dan Ariely, EF Schumacher and his followers).

— anonymous

Is Algebra Necessary? – The New York Times

As American students wrestle with algebra, geometry and calculus — often losing that contest — the requirement of higher mathematics comes into question.

Source: Is Algebra Necessary? – The New York Times

 

The main issue I’d take with targeting mid-level math in general is that each piece provides an important insight into how reality, in all her cold, unforgiving stubbornness, operates. Theorem proofs show that there exist things which can be conclusively proven in totality without room for opinion or shades of grey, and that the bar for such a proof is extremely high. Logic and discrete mathematics show how every argument can be boiled down to math and, used correctly, leads to better discussion by separating assumptions (shared and unilateral) from facts from opinions and moral goals, and can facilitate compromise.

Cisco locks customers out of their own routers, only lets them back in if they agree to being spied upon and monetized / Boing Boing

Cisco locks customers out of their own routers, only lets them back in if they agree to being spied upon and monetized

Source: Cisco locks customers out of their own routers, only lets them back in if they agree to being spied upon and monetized / Boing Boing

 

Is it good for society (i.e. all consumers) to have individuals (corporate or otherwise) who repackage goods (things you can own) into services (ethereal and ephemeral) in order to acquire power through control of said services?