Career Advice

Future-proofing your career - Charlie Ball

It's all going to change

The examples in my first paragraph help to illustrate the point. Some of the world's largest companies didn't exist 45 years ago.
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Communication is vital

What are the consequences of a world where everyone can network with everyone? Good communication skills will become even more vital.
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Information overload

The internet provides unparalleled access to an unimaginable amount of poor quality information. And some good stuff too. To parse any of this needs research skills.

Perverse Economic Incentives

Europe: The World’s Worst Dentist With the World’s Dullest Drill - Walter Russell Mead

The details change, but the underlying situation is the same. There are two games of chicken being played in Europe at the moment. One is the game between Greece and the rest of the eurozone. The Greeks believe, or at least they are doing their best to pretend to believe, that a Greek exit for the eurozone will be so catastrophic that in the end the EU will have no choice but to offer the Greeks substantially better terms than are now on offer. The eurozone authorities, on the other hand, believe, or at least they are doing their best to pretend to believe, that the consequences of a Greek exit can be managed for Europe as a whole, but that the devastation in Greece will be so great that the Greeks will have no choice in the end but to comply with the agreements they have already signed.

The other game of chicken is the contest between Germany and France. The Germans swear up and down that whatever happens they will never, never, never accept the ‘mutualization of eurozone debt’ or the ‘politicization of European monetary policy.’ They won’t bail out the debts of the Club Med countries and they won’t accept the classically Latin form of currency management in which the currency’s value is manipulated (generally downward) by the political elite. The French (politely and deferentially in the Sarkozy era and more confrontationally under Hollande) point out that this German policy will lead Europe into an interminable series of financial crises, and at each crisis point the Germans will have to accept new bail outs and new debt guarantees in order to stave off a general European financial collapse.

Property Rights and the Tragedy of the Commons - Jonathan H. Adler

One thing that Hardin overlooked is that the political process often replicates the same economic dynamic that encourages the tragedy of the commons -- a dynamic fostered by the ability to capture concentrated benefits while dispersing the costs. Like the herder who has an incentive to put out yet one more animal to graze, each interest group has every incentive to seek special benefits through the political process, while dispersing the costs of providing those benefits to the public at large. Just as no herder has adequate incentive to withhold from grazing one more animal, no interest group has adequate incentive to forego its turn to obtain concentrated benefits at public expense. No interest group has adequate incentive to put the interests of the whole ahead of the interests of the few. The logic of collective action discourages investments in sound public policy just as it discourages investments in sound ecological stewardship. This, in addition to the pervasiveness of special-interest rent seeking, explains many of the failings of centralized regulation. So despite the environmental gains of the past half-century, real challenges remain, and the tragedy of the commons is still with us.

College Costs

Sunday Reflection: What comes after the higher education bubble? - Glenn Reynolds

Conventional colleges may be overpriced and underperforming, but those 19th century methods of teaching and learning are being challenged by 21st century alternatives.

Case in point: the Harvard/MIT EdX model. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have announced they're putting 60 million dollars into an open-source online education program. A list of courses will be announced this summer and will be implemented in the fall, but the bottom line is that people all over the world will be able to study subjects taught at MIT and Harvard for free, and get "certification" -- though not an actual diploma (yet) -- if they pass certain tests.

This isn't the only such venture. Minerva University -- a new school that aims to be the online Ivy, with involvement by former Harvard President Larry Summers and former Senator (and New School President) Bob Kerrey -- just raised $25 million in startup capital.

'Investing' in College? It Pays to Think Like an Investor - Jack Hough

PayScale, a Seattle data firm, examines the links between pay and variables like colleges and majors. Its analysis, which also ignores dropouts but accounts for students who take longer to complete their degrees, finds an average yearly return of 4.4% for degrees from 853 schools. That assumes students get financial aid, as most do.

Returns vary sharply; they are negative for more than 100 schools and over 11% a year for ones like Harvey Mudd College in California, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Virginia. Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford and Princeton are over 10%, but so is Queens College in New York—where state residents pay just over $5,000 a year in tuition, versus about $41,000 for Stanford.

The worst returns tend to come from schools whose programs focus on nursing, criminal justice, sociology and education, says Katie Bardaro, an analyst at PayScale. The best returns are often from schools with strong engineering, computer science, economics and natural-science programs.

There's a flip side: "It's a lot harder to successfully graduate from those engineering programs," says Ms. Bardaro.

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The riskiest investment is a high-cost liberal-arts college that lacks a strong brand name and doesn't offer much aid, says Mr. Schneider. By contrast, a high-cost school with a strong brand and plenty of aid may be a "good buy."

PayScale's Ms. Bardaro says students should research carefully the pay they are likely to secure before deciding how much to spend on college. After all, tuition and fees have increased 184% in 20 years after accounting for inflation, but wages for college grads have risen just 9%, according to Labor Department data.

May Day 2012

Victims of Communism Day - Ilya Somin

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny.

Meanwhile, Zombie provides these excellent first-hand accounts of modern Leftist protests in Oakland, CA. A strange amalgamation of deadbeats, low-lifes, intellectual posers and earnest would-be revolutionaries are bent on tearing down the current order and replacing it with what? Zimbabwe?

Occupy Oakland May Day General Strike - Zombie

Decolonize Oakland May Day Occupy Rally - Zombie