The Unbroken Window

How’s this for a howler. Government K12 schools spend about twice per student per year than the average American health care expenditures.

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According to the National Research Council of Canada: LEED buildings used 18-39% less energy per floor area than their conventional counterparts.  However, 28-35% of LEED buildings used more energy than their conventional counterparts. I am sure that LEED building standards are favored by the construction and contractor lobbies as such standards raisethe cost of construction. By the [...]

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EMF-22 climate models are used to estimate the social cost of carbon … out to the year 2300.

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From tomorrow’s WSJ, the line of the month: When it was first conceived, the shuttle was supposed to be a kind of space truck, going into orbit 50 to 75 times a year and carrying large payloads at a cost of $54 million a launch in 2011 dollars. It didn’t work out that way. The [...]

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In Finding Higher Ground: Adaptation in the Age of Warming, the author, Amy Seidl, tells us that: in 2007 twenty million environmental emigres fled unsuitable environmental conditions in their homelands, outnumbering, for the first time, refugees fleeing from war. In the endnotes she suggests that she obtained that estimate from this article, but I cannot [...]

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According to an old piece I read, the United States is the only country on record that has never had a famine since it became a nation. I suppose that rules out some recently formed nations.

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The National Association of State Budget Officers is a great repository of data on state revenues and expenditures. I think looking at state spending and state tax burdens is a nice way to contrast what happens in government as compared to the private sector. Many people (rightly) are bummed out that private sector wages have [...]

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The Albany Times Union reported three years ago that 690 public school retirees and 899 state and local government retirees received lifetime pensions of at least $100,000 per year. Many, including the most lavish recipient of public pensions, George Philip, get to go back to work even after receiving their pensions and double dip. Mr. [...]

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In the North, unlike in the South prior to the Civil Rights movement, black children could attend school and their parents had some choice in the work they did. Here is some data comparing 1900 to 1930: In 1900, 45% of blacks were illiterate. By 1930, only 16.4%. (it was 70% in 1880) Some other [...]

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Arguably my best student here at Rochester (in the most complete sense of the term student) has a 3.81 GPA in two of the more difficult majors on campus, and this puts him barely in the top quarter of the GPA distribution of our school. And Rochester is not famous for grade inflation. What does [...]

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