Report Card

 “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” O'Rourke


Went to the Osher welcome last night. Back at school. Funny. The students are the same.

Republicans lost in Ky and Va. Lot of angles but one is that Trump is wearing on people. 
Another is the national relentless lying in D.C. and in the Press. It may be working. When did anyone in America think that secret hearings would be ok?



Our wants and desires keep growing, evidently without end, and therefore so do our economies. But our use of the earth’s resources does not. With the help of innovation and new technologies, economic growth in America and other rich countries — growth in all of the wants and needs that we spend money on — has become decoupled from resource consumption. This is a recent development and a profound one.--McAffee


Another affront to social justice: A person whose looks are one standard deviation above average attains 0.4 years more schooling than an otherwise identical average-looking individual. Enter the Bureau of Scarring.

Ideology has become all-encompassing. We are interested only in concepts. Practical economic problems, like how to structure the electric utilities in California to maximum efficiency, are never discussed. Maybe there's not enough outrage potential in them.

Paul Krugman has written, “All that matters for the gains from trade are the prices at which you trade — it makes absolutely no difference what forces lie behind those prices.” Is that true?

Roberts on Talleyrand: 'Talleyrand flees the Reign of Terror, goes to England and then to America, returns to France in 1796 and manages to become foreign minister within a year.

And stays foreign minister or in the diplomatic sphere in some way or another for the rest of his life. He thereby met almost all the important people in Europe and was at the table when all the great decisions were made. He was born an aristocrat and was later an unfrocked bishop. He had a lame foot rather like Byron and Goebbels which apparently turns you into a sex maniac; he turned his niece into his mistress which I think today would have him defenestrated but, nonetheless, no one seemed to hold that against him either.'

“There is no greater threat to humankind,” Liz Plank announces on the first page of her book For the Love of Men, “Than our current definitions of masculinity.” A bold claim. “Toxic masculinity,” Plank claims, underpins vast amounts of suffering across the globe.

U.S. charges that Saudi Arabia used Twitter Inc. employees to spy on social-media users are the latest allegations that authorities in the kingdom have used the platform’s popularity to crack down on critics. (wsj)

From Brian:



                               Report Card

This week, the Department of Education released the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment results, often called the Nation’s Report Card. For a nation obsessed with education, willing to pay almost anything for it and committed to the teachers and the union that control it, it should be a startling, worrisome document. It won't be.

Some points:
Scores were up a fraction in 4th-grade math but dropped in 4th-grade reading, 8th-grade reading, and 8th-grade math. Indeed, the drop in 8th-grade reading was very big — more than 3 scale points. It was the largest change in scores ever seen for that test.
While there were some test score gains (particularly in math) between 2000 and 2010, NAEP performance has stagnated since that time, with the 2015 results showing the first widespread declines in NAEP. The bulk of the declines are coming from the lowest-scoring students. In 4th-grade reading and in 8th-grade reading and math, declines are larger for lower-performing students.