Tag Archives: Education

Prof. Joel Eissenberg, Upfront Blog For Christmas 2021, Linda gave me a copy of “The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland” by Mark Kruger. The title certainly grabbed my attention. Having read it, there’s somewhat less than meets the eye here. The reason I never heard of this before is that the “commune” was very brief and poorly organized, and the history has been mostly ignored, since the historical impact on St. Louis...

Alan Collinge’s Student Loan Justice Facebook page. I keep talking about how the consolidation fees, late fees, forbearance interest, etc. and the interest on the previous adds up over time. Pretty soon, it surpasses the original loan balance. There are probably worse examples of this occurring. As it is, the non-principal payments are more than twice the original principal. The original loan was $105,000. As you can see there is ~$81,000 in...

Paul Samuelson On Knut Wicksell  Something I have been doing for several years now is serving as Senior Coeditor of the Fourth Edition of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, with the original one published back in 1894 in London (my coeditors are Matias Vernengo and Esteban Perez). As part of this effort, a multi-year project, I have been reading cover-to-cover, the entire Third Edition, co-edited by Steve Durlauf and Larry Blume, which came...

If Barkley is writing about it, it warrants space on AB. RIP Sharon L. O’Hare, Econospeak, Barley Rosser I know, I know, my part of this blog is increasingly resembling an obituary column. But, heck, people I know who are conneted to econ keep dying, although this one was not as well known as others. Sharon Lyn O’Hare was a former student of mine 40 years ago at James Madison University, and while she never finished her PhD at Boston...

This topic is blowing up in the news. Politicians claiming recipients are laying out cash for drugs and other unneeded things. Funny thing, they didn’t give a damn when 20 million hydrocodone and oxycodone tabs showed up at five pharmacies in 4 small towns having a total population of ~22000 in 2016. Gotta keep those pharma contributions rolling into their campaign funds. I featured this in a 2018 post, if you read it . . . How are Low Income...

I am mainly linking to this fairly important article by Dan Diamond in The Washington Post. Diamond quotes many people arguing that the US really should do more to get everyone in the world who is willing to take the vaccine vaccinated. I am going to move on quickly to how this could be done, because I think it is obvious that it should be done. I think I will try to get a few silly things out of the way. What about other rich countries ? Is it...

There is an interesting discussion about a topic where I know especially little: K-12 education. Within it, there is a narrow discussion about whether it makes sense to try to teach statistics to people who don’t know calculus. This is a clear question. However, it seems that the people who discuss it skip a much more basic question which is why mathematical statistics should be taught to high school students, and an even more basic question which...

Last night, Professor Heather Cox Richardson discusses the undermining of a citizen’s civil rights by SCOTUS in support of a state law which allows state citizens to infringe upon the rights of other citizens, female citizens within the state even though the actions of the later cause no harm to the former. It is appearing to be a matter of control supported by a court having known religious beliefs restricting a citizen’s actions in particular...

Surely someone, not something, must be to blame, must be responsible for whatever catastrophe that may have just occurred. Even CNN knows this. Blaming an event on someone obviates the need to fully explain, to seek a cause; relieves us of the responsibility to understand, to acknowledge the true cause. Seems it is somehow better if someone started the forest fire; not lightning or the effects of Climate Change. Blaming someone is different than...

Blogger and Commenter Professor Joel Essenberg addresses Covid variants being called mutations. As a geneticist, I am troubled by the promiscuous use of the word “mutation” to describe amino acid or nucleotide differences from a reference sequence. In nearly all cases, there is no known functional significance attached to these differences. Accordingly, the differences are best referred to as “variants,” not mutations. I’ve had my genome...