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Once upon a time, New York contemplated draining the entire Hudson River so that it could be connected to New Jersey.
(via humanscalecities)
“Political scientists John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California, Berkeley, hypothesized in a working paper that supplying Americans, who typically overestimate the number of immigrants and illegal immigrants among them, with correct numbers would reduce the perceived threat of immigration and change their views.”
—
Americans Stumble on Math of Big Issues - WSJ.com
Which only goes to prove how out-of-touch political scientists can be. Not only are people naturally innumerate, but more generally you can’t argue people out of positions that they weren’t argued into.
(via felixsalmon)
(via felixsalmon)
“Brooklyn’s story, then, doesn’t lend itself to a simple happy ending. Instead, the borough is a microcosm of the nation’s “hourglass economy.” At the top, the college-educated are doing interesting, motivating work during the day and bicycling home to enjoy gourmet beer and grass-fed beef after hours. At the bottom, matters are very different. Almost a quarter of Brooklyn’s 2.5 million residents live below the poverty line—in the housing projects of East New York, in the tenements of Brownsville, or in “transitional” parts of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, all places where single-mother poverty has become an intergenerational way of life. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of the area’s population on welfare did decline markedly, but the number of Medicaid recipients almost tripled, to nearly 750,000. About 40 percent of Brooklyn’s total population receives some kind of public assistance today, up from 23 percent a decade ago.”
— the city journal on growth in brooklyn (via cacioppo)
(via cacioppo)
“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
— Henry Ford (via azspot)
(via quotingthecrisis)
To bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs is to bemoan economic progress. Not asked enough of those with rose-colored visions of a not so glamorous manufacturing past is what advanced economic society anywhere in the world has gotten that way by way of clinging to days gone by. In the U.S. we can point to Michigan as a state stuck in the past, and the result is massive unemployment in concert with the outflow of the state’s best and brightest citizens.
…
In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton warned his readers about falling for the “deceitful dream of a golden age.” Manufacturing is just that. Once the employer of many at high wages, those days are long past, so to dream of a manufacturing future for the United States is to pine for excruciating poverty.
John Tamy at RealClearMarkets.
