[y66]

From How to reform today’s rigged capitalism by Martin Wolfe at FT:

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“It is clear then that . . . those states in which the middle element is large, and stronger if possible than the other two [wealthy and poor] together, or at any rate stronger than either of them alone, have every chance of having a well-run constitution.” Thus did Aristotle summarise his analysis of the Greek city states. The stability of what we would now call “constitutional democracy” depended on the size of its middle class. It is no accident that the US and UK, long-stable democracies today succumbing to demagogy, are the most unequal of the western high-income countries. Aristotle, we are learning, was right.

My September analysis of “rigged capitalism” concluded that “we need a dynamic capitalist economy that gives everybody a justified belief that they can share in the benefits. What we increasingly seem to have instead is an unstable rentier capitalism, weakened competition, feeble productivity growth, high inequality and, not coincidentally, an increasingly degraded democracy.” So what is to be done?

The answer is not to overthrow the market economy, undo globalisation or halt technological change. It is to do what has been done many times in the past: reform capitalism. That is the argument I made in a recent debate with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on whether liberal capitalism should be saved. I argued, in effect, that “if we want everything to stay the same, everything must change”, as the Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote. If we want to preserve our freedom and democracy we need to embrace change. Here are five policy areas that need to be addressed.

First, competition. Thomas Philippon’s wonderful book, The Great Reversal, demonstrates how far competition has weakened in the US. This is not the result of inevitable forces, but of policy choices, especially abandonment of an active competition policy. US markets have become less competitive: concentration is high, leaders are entrenched and profit rates are excessive. Moreover, this lack of competition has hurt US consumers and workers: it has led to higher prices, lower investment and lower productivity growth. In a paper on reducing inequalities, in an invaluable collection on “Beyond Brexit: A Programme for UK Economic Reform”, Russell Jones and John Llewellyn argue that concentration and mark-ups have also risen in the UK.

In the past decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft combined have made over 400 acquisitions globally. Dominant companies should not be given a free hand to buy potential rivals. Such market and political power is unacceptable. A refurbishment of competition policy should start from the assumption that mergers and acquisitions need to be properly justified.

Second, finance. One of Prof Philippon’s most striking conclusions is that the unit cost of financial intermediation has not fallen in the US over 140 years, despite technological advances. This stagnation in costs has, alas, not meant financial stability. There is also evidence that there is now simply too much credit and debt. Radical solutions exist here, too: raise the capital requirements of banking intermediaries substantially, while reducing prescriptive interventions; and, crucially, eliminate the tax-deductibility of interest, so putting debt finance on a par with equity.

Third, the corporation. The limited liability joint stock corporation was a great invention, but it is also a highly privileged entity. The narrow focus on maximising shareholder value has exacerbated the bad side-effects. As the British Academy’s “Principles for Purposeful Business” report argues, “the purpose of business is to solve the problems of people and planet profitably, and not profit from causing problems”. That is self-evident. It is also hopeless to rely on regulation alone to save us from the consequences of myopic business behaviour, particularly when business uses its vast resources to lobby on the other side. The US Business Roundtable has recognised this. We need new laws, to effect required changes.

Fourth, inequality. As Aristotle warned, beyond a certain point, in­equality is corrosive. It makes politics far more fractious, undermines social mobility; weakens aggregate demand and slows economic growth. Heather Boushey’s Unbound spells all this out in convincing detail. To tackle it will require a combination of policies: proactive competition policy; attacks on tax avoidance and evasion; a fairer sharing of the tax burden than in many democracies today; more spending on education, especially for the very young; and active labour market policies, combined with decent minimum wages and tax credits. The US has poor labour force participation of prime-aged adults, despite unregulated labour markets and a minimal welfare state. It is possible to have far better outcomes.

Finally, our democracies need refurbishing. Probably, the most important concerns are over the role of money in politics and the way the media works. Money buys politicians. This is plutocracy, not democracy. The malign impact of fake news (which is the opposite of what the US president means by the term) is also clear. We need public funding of parties, complete transparency of private funding and also far greater use of consultative forums.

Without political reform, little of what we need elsewhere will happen. If things then stay as they are, economic and political performance is likely to get worse, until our system of democratic capitalism collapses, in whole or in part. The cause then is great. So is the urgency. We must not accept the status quo. It does not work and has to change.

[Winstonm]

Max Planck’s thoughts about the advancement of science. He said that science advances one funeral at a time. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

[y66]

From Columbia will give full scholarships to refugees and other displaced students by Susan Svriuga at WaPo:

Quote

When Warda Sahtout was helping children in Syria during that country’s civil war, she asked them to draw their dreams, what they hoped to be when they grew up. Almost every child sketched weapons, she said, and military uniforms and blood: They could only imagine being fighters.

She wasn’t sure what her own future would hold; she had a degree in economics but turned to field work to help because of the devastation around her. With daily worries about water, food, electricity and gas, it was hard to think far ahead. And the need was so intense and so overwhelming she couldn’t see how to have an impact.

A full scholarship to Columbia University changed that. She is studying for a master’s degree in economic political development, with a concentration in conflict resolution. She wants to work for the United Nations, to help children scarred by war.

“I needed this time to be outside — to see the conflict from outside,” she said.

On Wednesday, Columbia announced a global effort to help people like Sahtout — refugees and students displaced by wars and natural disasters. The Columbia University Scholarship for Displaced Students, underwritten with a commitment of up to $6 million a year, is the first of its kind in the world, university officials said. As many as 30 students a year who are admitted to any of the university’s undergraduate or graduate programs will have all of their education and living expenses covered.

There are more than 70 million people displaced, living as refugees or seeking asylum, according to the U.N., a historic figure that compelled the university to take action.

“The program sends a powerful message about the role that colleges and universities should be playing to help young people whose educations have been disrupted because they have been forced to flee violence and persecution in their home countries,” Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, said in a written statement. Bollinger led the creation of the initiative with Safwan M. Masri, executive vice president of Columbia Global Centers.

The university had been working with refugees around the world, Masri said, and decided to provide opportunities for outstanding students whose lives had been upended.

Participants in a pilot program that preceded the global initiative include Sahtout and six other Syrian students, including one who said he was detained and tortured. Masri said he hopes their desire to give back might have a ripple effect in their communities. “Every drop in the ocean matters,” he said.

A Harvard freshman says he was denied entry to the U.S. over social media posts made by his friends

Sahtout lived in Douma, a city near Damascus where people have endured violence, chaos and a reported chemical attack. She watched a bomb fall next to her house just after she stepped outside. She has been displaced 11 times.

Her mother left school when she was about 12 years old, and her father had not many more years of education, but Sahtout persisted with college classes despite the danger, and sought scholarships for graduate work.

When she arrived in New York in 2018 — her first time out of Syria, her first time traveling alone — she was frightened by loud noises from planes, construction, trucks.

After a few months, she came to realize, “I am in a safe place — I should not worry about this.”

She marveled at the city. “That’s really amazing for me, how people are from different backgrounds, different countries, and we are just living together peacefully.”

At Columbia, she has honed her studies and her internships to determine how to have an impact at home. In Syria, she could have eventually continued her study of economics, she said, but not with the humanitarian focus driving her now.

She can look back and see how traumatized she was in her first few months in the city. “Now, I have more of a clear mind to think about my education, to think about what I want to do,” she said. She misses working in the field, getting hugged by children happy to see her again. But she feels certain that when she goes back, she will have more ways to help them.

There are so many things she has learned at Columbia, she said, not least this: “Now, I know myself much better.”

[y66]

For Mr. Rogers fans: https://www.theparis..._eid=cda01666e9

We saw the movie last week. Tom Hanks' was reliably superb as Fred Rogers. Chris Cooper was unforgettable as the prodigal father.

[y66]

From Cindy Boren at WaPo:

Quote

The red shirts probably should have been a tipoff that what was to come was, as Phil Mickelson tweeted, “a display of great golf and heart.”

The United States’ Presidents Cup team, sporting the color made famous on Sundays by team captain and player Tiger Woods, came roaring back from a two-point deficit to beat the International team 16-14 Sunday, and win the Cup for the eighth straight time. Woods sparked the win with his leadership and, more importantly, with his play, going 3-0 at the Royal Melbourne course.

The victory was the 11th in 13 Presidents Cups for the U.S., but this one was more emotional than usual, with Woods personally closing out a 2019 season that began with his 15th major victory at the Masters and the U.S. team having to rally to win. He was in tears afterward, fiercely clutching and hugging players as they finished.

“We relied on one another as a team, and we did it — together,” Woods said after wiping away his tears. “This Cup wasn’t going to be given to us. We had to go earn it. And we did.”

The experience, he said, was sweet as both a captain and a player and he played like a man savoring a second chance personally and professionally. As a player, though, he was a flash of the Tiger Woods who has won 82 PGA events. When Abraham Ancer was quoted last month as saying he wanted to go head-to-head with Woods at Presidents Cup, Woods cracked after his 3 and 2 win Sunday, “Abe wanted it. He got it."

And asked if he was aware of Ancer’s earlier comment, he replied with a crisp, “Yes,” and a killer grin. Shades of the old Tiger Woods.

Woods was the first player-captain in 25 years and he was first off the tee Sunday, setting the tone and then watching as his players won again and again. His squad was so fired up that none of the six singles victories went the full 18 holes and the last two matches were halved. The 8-4 margin was the largest since the 8-4 win by the U.S. in the first Presidents Cup in 1994.

The clincher came from Matt Kuchar, a 5-foot birdie putt that gave him a halve against Louis Oosthuizen, delivering the 15½ points the U.S. needed to retain the Cup it had easily won two years ago at Liberty National.

Mickelson, watching from home, called the finale “one of the most exciting days in Presidents Cup history. What a display of great golf and heart.”

[y66]

From Tyler Cowen's conversation with Esther Duflo:

Quote

TYLER COWEN: Today I am very honored to be here with Esther Duflo, who recently has won a Nobel Prize in economics, the youngest economics winner ever. And today, our date of recording, is also, I believe, the publication date for her new book with Abhijit Banerjee, and that is called Good Economics for Hard Times. Esther, welcome.

ESTHER DUFLO: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

COWEN: My first question has to do with what, I think, is maybe your most important paper. And that’s the 2015 paper in Science with Abhijit, Dean Karlan, and some other coauthors. There you show that a cash transfer to the very poor, combined with training and coaching, has super-high rates of return. Why don’t people study that more? It seems to be the most potent intervention we have to fight poverty, other than migration.

DUFLO: I think it has been studied a lot. It has also been adopted as policy after this original study and other studies. The original project comes from Bangladesh, and there actually has been a study and a long-run study in Bangladesh by Robin Burgess and others who are now looking at households 10 years hence. And you continue to see large differences between the households who got the transfer.

And they have a recent paper that they just released to say that they continue to study it, where they are really putting a lot of theory into it to look at the data through the lens of asking, actually, is there a poverty trap in which some of these households have fallen?

They show that, in fact, there is such a thing with a threshold of wealth above which — if households can go above — they can grow to a point where they are significantly better off. And if they are below it, they go back to wherever they came from. I think that’s a very important paper that is making a big splash and show people continue.

In our case, the part of the study that I was most involved with was in West Bengal. We also continued to study them after 10 years. We are studying their children as well. We are studying the impact on migration to go through not just, “Oh, wait, there is an effect,” but how all of these effects are building on each other.

COWEN: As I understand the paper, there’s a cost-benefit ratio of 133 percent to 433 percent across six countries. That’s enormous. What exactly about the mentor makes the difference as opposed to just giving people cash? What is the mentor or the coach actually teaching?

DUFLO: Just from this particular experiment, it would be hard to tell because one could say, “Well, you should try to do cash only, and then we can see.” But subsequently Abhijit and Dean Karlan were involved in an experiment in Ghana where they just gave goats. They call it a goat drop paper. Just goats were given, without the coaching. And there, they find very clearly that the coaching makes a big difference, that people who you give just assets to have more assets, but it doesn’t serve as a springboard for more activities.

So descriptively, what the coach does is two things. Number one is avoid the temptation of liquidating the assets quite early. If you give people cows and they don’t feel confident using them, then the easiest thing to do is to sell them. And then they have cash, but they don’t have the productive asset anymore.

The second thing is to provide the complementary human capital for taking care of your assets. For example, when people are given cash — some people are given cash to start a petit business — but have no idea even how to go to the market because the poorest person in a village is also excluded from productive activities. They have not really been working. Or if they have been working, it’s in very local circumstances. They really have no idea.

So the coaches are physically taking them to the market. This is how you take the bus, this is where you buy the trinkets that you’re going to sell in the village, and this is how you bargain for your trinkets and then come back with the trinkets and sell them. So there is an amount of technical skills, if you will.

The third component, which is harder to quantify but probably very important as well, is confidence training. They are meeting in groups. Those are people who have not been involved in productive activities, often are living off alms or very petit works. They are making them confident that they can do it.

COWEN: How scalable is the coaching in your opinion?

DUFLO: That’s a good question, to which we should have an answer soonish because there is now scale-up of these programs in various countries, and in particular in India. Some state governments in India are scaling this up as part of their program.
So they are mainstreaming it as part of their program, still with the support of the original microfinance institutions that have been running this program, but hiring many, many, many people. So you will be able to see whether you could do this with the best NGO worker of the country, and you only have a hundred of those, and then that’s done. Or whether this is something that can be spread.

What is encouraging in this respect is that in Bangladesh, the program is huge as it is. It’s enormous. It reaches hundreds of thousands of families as it is. So to some extent, we already have the answer to how scalable it is because it’s already scaled.
And even the evaluation by Robin Burgess and others was done on a quite large scale.

COWEN: Have you ever thought you should just spend the rest of your career working on this intervention, and 5 percent of the economics profession should just work on this, with possible rates of return so high for the world’s biggest problem, which is poverty, right? Why don’t we do much, much more of working on this problem, on this study?

DUFLO: One should certainly continue to do more working on this study and working on the questions you were asking about the scale-up and working on how various modalities of it want. Already, the study you mention in Science was already a sign that there is at least some interest in the economics profession to focus on this question because it was the second paper on this. The first paper was the evaluation of the mothership program in Bangladesh.

People didn’t say, “Oh, that’s a nice program. Let’s go and study something new.” Instead, Dean Karlan led a group of people to replicate this same evaluation in seven different countries, which was a very major undertaking involving lots and lots of researchers and NGOs. So the fact that people were willing to do that, to write a 12-page paper in Science at the end of it, suggests that there is already recognition that it’s a very important topic.

Now, should everybody do that? I guess there are probably diminishing returns to effort on the particular problems, and there are other interesting problems to look at. So I’m glad that people continue working on this. And I think the work is only going to deepen, both in understanding the mechanism better, understanding variations around it, and understanding how to make it adopted as policy — because I completely agree with you that of everything that I’ve done, studied in my life, that this is one with the most important, spectacular results.

[y66]

From A Simple App to Teach Regression by Luke M. Froeb

Quote

This paper introduces an online app for teaching regression that “inverts” the usual pedagogy. Rather than teaching students how to run regressions on data, it asks them to create data to achieve a given outcome, like a statistically significant line. Exercises are designed to give students an intuitive feel for the relationship between data and regression, and to show them how regression is used. It teaches both simple and multiple regression using built-in exercises that “test” student answers. It is accessible by anyone who can point and click. The pedagogy is experimental, and we welcome suggestions to improve it.

This sounds like it might also be a useful approach for teaching bridge.

[Winstonm]

Free-market capitalism is going to kill all of us: NYT

Quote

At a time when germs are growing more resistant to common antibiotics, many companies that are developing new versions of the drugs are hemorrhaging money and going out of business, gravely undermining efforts to contain the spread of deadly, drug-resistant bacteria.

Antibiotic start-ups like Achaogen and Aradigm have gone belly up in recent months, pharmaceutical behemoths like Novartis and Allergan have abandoned the sector and many of the remaining American antibiotic companies are teetering toward insolvency. One of the biggest developers of antibiotics, Melinta Therapeutics, recently warned regulators it was running out of cash.

Experts say the grim financial outlook for the few companies still committed to antibiotic research is driving away investors and threatening to strangle the development of new lifesaving drugs at a time when they are urgently needed.

“This is a crisis that should alarm everyone,” said Dr. Helen Boucher, an infectious disease specialist at Tufts Medical Center and a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria.

[y66]

From Mark Perry at AEI:

[kenberg]

y66, on 2020-January-01, 22:22, said:

From Mark Perry at AEI:

I will try to comment coherently on this. My first reaction before looking at the details was "Oh, another stupid statistical study showing the problems girls are facing". But then I realized that it is a stupid statistical study showing the problems boys face.

I will take the first item. For every 100 girls taking an AP course in Art/Music there are 54 boys who take such a course. Back in ancient times, the 1950s, there were no AP courses but there were art and music courses. I did not take them . Otoh, in the summer between my junior and senior year, I was 16, I drove over to the university and sat in on a course in physics. Of course this would not make the list, because I was not registered. I asked the prof if it would be ok and he said yes. I bought the text, I read it, I worked the problems.


So: I was not interested in an art course or a music course, I was interested in physics so I attended and studied a physics course. I did not feel then, and I do not feel now, that someone should have been watching out for me and made sure I took an art course. At the end of my sophomore year my academic adviser did suggest that I, next year, take a course in metal shop. I took his suggestion and enjoyed the course. So maybe I would have enjoyed an art course, but I doubt it.. There is nothing on the list about boys and girls who take metal shop..


Statistics such as this are useless unless they are combined with a study where they interview 30 year-olds and see how many say "Oh my, I really made a mistake back when I was 16 and did not take the AP Art course that was offered."


A young person should have opportunity. It was very important to me that I also had choice. Physics and metal shop yes, art no, those who felt otherwise could take the courses that they believed to be right for them. People who like statistical charts can worry if they like.

[cherdano]

This table has a clear omission - many more boys than girls waste their time playing bridge. Surely just a stepping stone to being a homicide victim or spending life behind bars, based on this data?

[y66]

Perhaps he should also publish this statistic:

For every male idiot who posted that chart in the BBO water cooler, at least 3 male posters did not get taken in.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2020-January-08, 11:44, said:

Perhaps he should also publish this statistic:

For every male idiot who posted that chart in the BBO water cooler, at least 3 male posters did not get taken in.

It's one more expression of my skepticism of statistics. It is not that the numbers are wrong, they probably are right, but often the numbers are not enough. Sample question: How can we get more boys to take an AP/Honors course in Art/Music? My answer: We can't. But we can provide the opportunity and then we can ask ourselves why they do not take advantage of it. Of course no one takes advantage of every opportunity, choices have to be made, but we can ask why some seem uninterested in their future at all.

There are aspects of adolescence today that, to me, are incomprehensible. I'll give a couple of non-academic examples that perhaps reflect on academic matters as well.

Adolescent males today are often in no hurry to get a driver's license. How can that be? My birthday is Jan 1 so the DMV was closed, but on Jan 2 I got my permit, in March I got my license, in April I bought a car. This was not at all an oddity.

I started dating when I was 14. It was very important to me that the money I spent on a date was money that I had earned myself. Again, not odd at all. A guy earned some money, called a girl, asked her out, and he did not then ask his parents for money to pay for this.

How does this apply to academics? By mid-adolescence I was choosing the girl I wanted to ask out, I was choosing the car I wanted to buy, I was paying for it all myself, in short, I was making my own choices. Why on earth would I be asking someone whether I should be taking Honors Art? I wouldn't. But I did have interests, and I was thinking about my future. And so were others.

I am thinking that the two questions "Why are boys slipping academically/' and "Why are boys uninterested in getting a driver's license?" are two sides of the same coin. I don't know the answer, but I also don't need a statistical table to recognize a problem..

In some cases, there is a lack of opportunity. This can be addressed. Then some will, and some won't, take advantage of the opportunity. Fixing that is much harder. Something about horses and water comes to mind. But we do need to work on providing opportunity.

[y66]

The guy who compiled an earlier version of those stats in 2011, Thomas G. Mortenson, is a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education which "conducts and disseminates research and policy analysis to encourage policymakers, educators, and the public to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for low-income, first-generation, and disabled college students". From what I've read, which is not much, he appears genuinely interested in understanding problems of equal access to educational opportunity regardless of sex, race or income.

The guy who posted the updated chart for a subset of Mortenson's categories, Mark Perry at AEI, clearly has an ax to grind.

For spamming readers of this thread again, I plan to read Tyler Cowen's interview with Camille Puglia and post highlights.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2020-January-09, 09:15, said:

The guy who compiled an earlier version of those stats in 2011, Thomas G. Mortenson, is a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education which "conducts and disseminates research and policy analysis to encourage policymakers, educators, and the public to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for low-income, first-generation, and disabled college students". From what I've read, which is not much, he appears genuinely interested in understanding problems of equal access to educational opportunity regardless of sex, race or income.

The guy who posted the updated chart for a subset of Mortenson's categories, Mark Perry at AEI, clearly has an ax to grind.

For spamming readers of this thread again, I plan to read Tyler Cowen's interview with Camille Puglia and post highlights.

I have been concerned about just what is up with the 21st century male. adolescent. I am not all that interested in a statistical comparison of boys with girls. Statistically speaking, I was probably weird but so what. I hope that a 16 year old, boy pr girl, has some idea of his/her options and preferences. Some do, of course, but it seems many don't, especially the boys. I am skeptical of statistics and I am very skeptical of ideology as being of much use, but I can listen. And maybe I am just wrong, maybe all is fine, but I don't think so.

[y66]

The New York Times posts occasional interactive geography quizzes for students.

[y66]

kenberg, on 2020-January-10, 06:25, said:

I have been concerned about just what is up with the 21st century male adolescent.

Alan Patton, the author, was very interested in a similar topic in the 1930s and 40s when he was the head of a reform school for boys in South Africa. He wondered what distinguished boys who were always getting into trouble from boys who got into trouble and then got out. A big part of it, he decided, was that boys who did not have long running conversations with parental figures were more likely to get in trouble. That sounds obvious but then how do you help boys who aren't getting what they need. In his school, he established a system that rewarded trustworthy behavior that had some success. In Too Late The Phalarope, he tells the story of a family in which the father and son aren't able to talk about stuff that's going on in the son's life which, if they had, might have changed everything.

I attended a conference at Brookings last year where a professor from Harvard claimed that teenagers who learn how to have adult conversations in high school tend to do better in college relative to their peers. That seems obvious too but how do you help kids learn this when their parents never figured this out?

[kenberg]

y66, on 2020-January-11, 20:16, said:

Alan Patton, the author, was very interested in a similar topic in the 1930s and 40s when he was the head of a reform school for boys in South Africa. He wondered what distinguished boys who were always getting into trouble from boys who got into trouble and then got out. A big part of it, he decided, was that boys who did not have long running conversations with parental figures were more likely to get in trouble. That sounds obvious but then how do you help boys who aren't getting what they need. In his school, he established a system that rewarded trustworthy behavior that had some success. In Too Late The Phalarope, he tells the story of a family in which the father and son aren't able to talk about stuff that's going on in the son's life which, if they had, might have changed everything.

I attended a conference at Brookings last year where a professor from Harvard claimed that teenagers who learn how to have adult conversations in high school tend to do better in college relative to their peers. That seems obvious too but how do you help kids learn this when their parents never figured this out?

When I think of my own youth the answer to "how do you help" is both simple and complex; Have something useful to say. I listened to adults, but I chose which adults.

[y66]

You've talked about tutoring kids. Chief Justice Roberts mentioned in his annual report that Merrick Garland has been doing this for some time and that some of his court colleagues have joined in. I've never thought about tutoring. It's a lot of responsibility. I'll ask my daughter-in-law who teaches 4th grade what it takes to be a successful tutor.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2020-January-12, 10:40, said:

You've talked about tutoring kids. Chief Justice Roberts mentioned in his annual report that Merrick Garland has been doing this for some time and that some of his court colleagues have joined in. I've never thought about tutoring. It's a lot of responsibility. I'll ask my daughter-in-law who teaches 4th grade what it takes to be a successful tutor.

I've tutored. including tutoring my father when i was 14. It can be a good thing, Mostly I now help grandkids when asked, and I am not much asked.

My thinking was along a different line, perhaps illustrated by a recent story in WaPo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/10/january-2020-jobs-report/

The idea is that the number of jobs has been increasing, but not so much in jobs traditionally held by males. What's a guy to do? Complain? Blame women? Vote for Trump? Or maybe give some thought to options? This last, give some thought to options, is the path most likely to lead to success.

When I was young I liked working on cars, I liked mathematics, I chose mathematics. Probably, for me, a good choice. That's the sort of thing I am trying to get at. There seems to be a lot of lost boys out there. I am not so sure that this has to be.