Outgrowing bad behavior?

A couple recent studies appear to show that bad behavior in the early grades of school are likely caused by delayed development issues instead of brain deficity issues. In other words, kids do typically outgrow this bad behavior in school, so test results showing attention problems at young ages are not very well correlated with poor academic performance later in life.

On the other hand, what does appear to be correlated with academic performance later in life is math scores!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/health/13kids.html?em&ex=1195102800&en=10574fa94fad2575&ei=5087%0A

What does the "billionaire list" tell us?

That most are Americans, that most have "earned" their way there, and that the richest are not as "rich" as a percentage of GDP as the Carnegies and other Gilded Age rich guys were.

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2007/11/billionairesbec.html

The problems of performance pay in business

Many of the performance packages are designed to promote risk-taking on the part of CEO's, but what this article points out is that CEO's typically get to keep their "winnings" but don't lose if their bets fail. As a consequence, they are unduly eager to "bet the farm," which is part of the reason for the recent sub-prime meltdown and the earlier stock-market collapse in 2001.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2007/11/12/071112ta_talk_surowiecki

Niche "sports" making school reputations

I've seen Christian schools trying to make their reputations as serious academic institutions by emphasizing debate and forensics. Here's an example of using chess for similar purposes.

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-11-07/rah-rah-block-that-rook

The "real" story about income inequality and income taxes?

The basic story has been that there's growing income inequality in the U.S. and elsewhere in the industrialized world, but that story is only partially correct as this article points out.

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/october-10-07/making-sense-of-income-inequality

There's a similar argument related to tax cuts supposedly making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Again, that story is only partially correct and misses much of the point.

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-december-magazine-contents/guess-who-really-pays-the-taxes

Conservative revolutionaries on health care?

I've done a fair amount of reading on the history of our American health care system, and Ponnuru's summary gets at the basic points pretty well. In the postwar period, the industrialized countries faced a choice over who would pay for health care, the individual (as we do with most insurance, such as for homes and cars) or the government (as we do for things like floods and other natural disasters). Most of the world chose "government" and ended up with universal, single-payer, government-run health care. But instead of going with "individuals," we went with "option C," employers, through a system of tax breaks. 50 years later, and that compromise is unraveling, so now we appear to be heading back to the "government or individuals" choice. What's interesting to me is that the Democrats are actually the "statist" group looking to continue most of the existing system with some drift toward the "government" answer. And it's the Republicans who have pretty much concluded that the existing system has to be scrapped completely and replaced with one that focuses on the individual. They have become on this issue, as with Social Security and many other government policies, "white revolutionaries" proposing radical change.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1682269,00.html

The Fall of the Wall

November 9 is a date that I always remember, having spent some time on both sides of the Wall, but it's quickly passing out of the public consciousness. I appreciated Ash's reminder of why we shouldn't let that happen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2206957,00.html