The Unbroken Window

Or should I say Broken Olympic Rings? During last night’s Opening Ceremonies for the 29th Summer Olympic Games, I heard that the Chinese government spent something like $40-$50 billion on the games. The opening ceremony, which was awesome, cost around $100 million.

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Superlatives are risky. When Benjamin B. Bolger declared himself the most credentialed person in modern history (The Chronicle, June 20), he was wrong. Mr. Bolger holds 11 advanced degrees. But Michael W. Nicholson has 24. From today’s Chronicle of Higher Education (gated, alas). Is this life’s noblest pursuit of knowledge or knowledge’s pursuit of life? If [...]

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  That was the question I received in an e-mail from an organization I support, the Nature Conservancy. The e-mail included the following: Check out our new Everyday Environmentalist tips from Nature Conservancy staff on how to make personal, science-based choices (my emphasis added) to help save the planet – from raising your own chickens [...]

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I just read that the average income of readers of Sierra Magazine is double the income of the average American. And this on the heels of a paper that shows the income elasticity of demand for environmental quality far exceeds one. In laymen’s terms, what these mean is that a little richer is a heck [...]

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Is of course, the government, right? Here is Michael Crichton analyzing the “end of the world market failure du jour 1999″ Y2K problem:

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Tired of driving your car around to see how far you wish to run? The secrets of adulthood? Should they lose their “High Life” privileges? One reason to NOT worry about the safety of nuclear power plants. Lego album covers.

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Arnold Kling wondered aloud what the relationship would be between measures of a school district’s poverty level and performance on standardized Math exams.

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