The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by clew:

There's a lot of middle ground between nosy-free-babysitters and "Well, I'll save your kid if I'm facing that way" that 'it takes a village' should be used to cover, but I rarely see the arguments. For instance, street layout rules; the ones most common now are optimized for, oh, people speeding to the mall in a large car, but are terrible for encouraging kids to walk to school.

I just read and summarized a statistical analysis of two fifteen-year-long, nationally representative work-and-education surverys of the US; one started in 1966, one in 1979: Divergent Paths. Shortest form: bad jobs are getting worse-paid, less reliable, and much harder to get out of. The return on education has dropped, especially for anything less than a finished four-year degree. Only finance, real estate, insurance, and "some professional services" (IS? S&M?) are doing better than their cohort of thirteen years earlier. Much statistical cogitation on why; mostly, that firms are intentionally deskilling, breaking up natural routes to promotion from within (or even good pay for the expertise of experience).

And I just trotted through some of the introductory-calculus-model for demand and supply curves, in which one works out that at a given price some consumers are "ahead" - the ones who would have paid much more for the same product - and some suppliers are "ahead" - the ones who could have sold the product cheaper and stayed in business. These curves are supposed to intersect at the place most beneficial to the whole society, if we're all consumers and producers in balance. I'm surely wondering if the intermediaries, of which Wal*Mart is the widest and the financiers the highest, aren't bollixing up that intersection.

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