A lot of what they're concerned with is violent street crimes like assault, murder, rape. For those crimes, the victims frequently end up in the hospital (or morgue). That means you can use those institutions' records to see trends, independent of artifacts introduced by observer bias in police statistics.

Proving causation is pretty difficult, as there are a lot of other variables going into crime rates, but allegedly NYC has had some success with similar approaches.

nothing wrong or hypocritical about playing by the rules as they exist, while simultaneously saying the rules are stupid and should be reformed.

Otherwise, all of us who bitch about the national debt would be hypocrites for not voluntarily paying extra on our tax bill every year, to help the obvious problem that the government spends more than it takes in.

It would be insane. But it's a false choice to say "default or take on more debt". We have enough cash flow to pay our debt payments in full, along with much of the federal government. The only way we will default is if the Treasury Secretary, in a fit of anger, decides that if he doesn't get his way on the debt limit, he'll refuse to pay creditors rather than fund various government programs.

His threats of default are just FUD. The Administration is not politically stupid. They spread the FUD because they don't want to be the ones deciding which 40% of spending gets cut. That's a political nightmare. They want Congress to do it, which is Congress's job, after all.

You could literally confiscate every dime the wealthy earned last year, and still be nowhere near closing our yearly deficits.

The simple fact is the US already taxes high-earners very progressively. More so than many other developed countries. The law of diminishing returns is going to prevent us from solving this problem primarily by soaking the rich - there just aren't enough high-earners to tax. We will no doubt squeeze the last bit we can out of them, but it will not be enough. Attempting to fix the deficit via tax increases will thus primarily hit the middle class, because in aggregate that's where the money is.

Fixating on the wealthy is simply a red herring deployed by politicians to mask the real choice at hand, which are tough choices and votes on whose sacred cow spending gets cut.

How much do we cut defense? Does it make sense to be waging 3 wars of dubious strategic value when we're broke?
How much do we cut entitlements? In an era of aging populations and financial trouble, does it make sense to expect young workers, struggling to build careers and families, to pay an ever-increasing tax burden so that perfectly able older, wealthier people can enjoy taxpayer-financed retirement and health care for 20 or 30 years?
How much do we cut the countless other government programs, which grew dramatically under Bush, but which each have a dedicated special interest to defend them?

Nobody likes those questions, because they mean everybody does not get everything they want. But it's the unfortunate financial reality.

Well, when the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency in 2010, they failed to pass a budget. The Tea Party didn't have any power to stop them back then.

The Tea Party wants a budget - they just want it to be balanced, rather than simply pile on more and more unsustainable debt.

if you want to talk about not understanding economics, you look no further than this idea that if an entity has taken on too much debt, the solution is... take on even more debt. The idea that limiting the debt would raise interest rates makes no sense - rates rise if creditors think you are unable to pay your bills. Having less debt makes you MORE likely to pay your bills. Even in the current recession (and resulting low tax revenues), the US has plenty of cash flow with which to pay its creditors and for major entitlement programs, so stopping the endless stream of debt increases will not cause default, unless the Treasury Secretary decides it is politically expedient to do so rather than anger various special interests whose gravy trains may otherwise be reduced.

These claims of dire effects from living within our means are mostly FUD by those who want to borrow and spend more, rather than finally prioritize what spending is essential and what is not.

That said, there is a valid argument that aligning our spending habits with reality would be easier to take if phased in over a couple of years. That would involve a small debt limit increase, but the debate has not progressed to that degree of maturity yet. We're still in the denial phase, in which most of the politicians insist on continuing the status quo, in which they avoid making a choice that any given individual or company doesn't need another government program, another taxpayer subsidy, etc. Trying to please everybody is impossible, and is how we got a $14 trillion debt to begin with.

I suspect what you're seeing is not a disdain for knowledge itself (anti-intellectualism), but instead three things:

1. A disdain for the arrogance with which certain "experts" conduct themselves, specifically an over-reliance on appeals to authority. Experts should be able to make appears to logic, by providing the relevant facts they gained from their expertise. Routine reliance on "I have degree X, therefore you must do Y" is a sign of intellectual decay. It's the sort of thing you expect to hear from religious zealots, not scientific experts. Don't get me wrong - I place a lot of weight in the authority, of, say, my physician. But if he simply told me "take this drug" without explaining himself, I'd find a new doctor. Ditto for experts in other fields.

2. A disdain for experts whose expertise in their narrow field is not matched by an awareness of, and good judgment in, the broader world. These are the folks always coming up with some new Grand Scheme, based on some narrow concern, and blissfully ignorant of all the hell that will break loose if you actually inflict that scheme on the world. This usually boils down to a lack of understanding of economics or systems thinking in general. There are no free lunches and every solution will involve tradeoffs.

3. Many tradeoffs of public concern involve multiple disciplines, while expertise is increasingly focused on small niches. As humanity's knowledge base expands, this becomes somewhat inevitable. But it makes expertise in one field insufficient for the expert to have much of a leg up on generalists, when it comes to deciding What To Do. That's not disrespect for expertise, it's acknowledging that there's a lot more expertise required than one practitioner will have.

For example, a climate scientist can model the likely effects of CO2 emissions on the temperature. Concerned, he proposes some strict cap on CO2 emissions. But can he tell me how that proposal will play out? Probably not better than other generally educated people. He's not an expert on economics. He's not an expert on the various energy industries or the technologies behind the alternatives. He's not an expert on the legislative process. So his guess is as good as anyone's, when it comes to what the effect of his policy idea would be. Will it hurt economic growth, and if so, by how much? Is that a short-term effect or long-term problem? What alternative technologies are likely to be required for a lower-carbon energy future? Do they cause environmental problems themselves? If we screw things up, how long will it take us to fix it? Just look at the ethanol-as-fuel boondoggle. "Experts" thought that was a great idea. The government mandated it, in part on those recommendations. Eventually everyone realized that it's actually worse for the environment, economically inefficent, and drives up food prices too. But the US government still subsidizes it, years later. When folks get invested in a potential "solution", sometimes they confuse others' frustration with their inability to assess tradeoffs as anti-intellectualism. It's not. It's just a recognition that some things are hard problems.

Of course it can. But there are many ways to learn, some more costly than others, so if your objective is to maximize your learning, you may well decide college is not the right forum for learning certain things, while it is for others. For example:

1. A lot of learning is both pleasurable and economically rewarding. For example, much of engineering, mathematics, and the sciences offer economic returns as well as intellectual ones.

2. For pleasurable learning that is not economically rewarding, there are often less expensive ways than college to obtain it. For example, you don't need to pay thousands of dollars just to read the classics. They're readily available at the bookstore for far less. So you have to ask yourself, how much is the classroom experience worth to you, for a specific type of learning? Is it worth tens of thousands of dollars a year more? Maybe - if you want to teach literature at university someday, or have a huge passion for the subject. Maybe not, if you're just learning for pleasure's sake.

3. What different learning could that same amount of money buy you? Is it worth thousands of dollars to take a class about a foreign country, when for the same sum you could actually visit that country? Maybe, maybe not, depending on your goals and opportunity costs.

The real issue with the "become better rounded" argument for college is not with being rounded, per se. A liberal education is great. It's that the argument is often made by folks who do not know where they are trying to go in life, make an enormous life decision without putting serious thought into it, and then graduate and complain how unfair life is that they have six-figure debts and no career prospects. These people are known as "fools", but pretend to be "intellectuals" because admitting foolishness is a blow to one's ego.

On the other hand, if you make a college decision with your eyes wide open, and are willing to trade off your future material well-being for the intellectual rewards of, say, an art history degree, I salute you. That's not foolish, that's having values and living up to them.

It says most of our K-12 education system is a government-run monopoly. Being a monopoly, there is little incentive in the system for schools to compete for teacher talent. Why pay a great teacher $100k, if having that teacher (rather than a mediocre one you can pay less) doesn't bring the school the extra revenue needed to pay that high salary? And if you don't pay well, many of the most talented people will look to other careers where they can be better rewarded for their brains and creativity. It's a vicious cycle, in which we systematically discourage good teaching and good teachers.

Not good for our future, unless we fix the system.

Maybe there are a few wealthy folks who are willing and able to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to "broaden" themselves, but most folks cannot afford that luxury. Don't get me wrong - broadening your horizons is important - but you can do that outside the university for a far more affordable price. Which is why most people expect a degree will "influence their earnings" - it's the only way attending a university these days makes any economic sense.

I really don't understand why we would insist on labeling those who want their education to have real-world applicability as having a "trade-school mentality". There seems to be this idea that pragmatically-motivated learning is inferior to learning for the sake of learning. Or that learning broadly is something that can only be done by learning useless crap. I don't believe either is true. Recognizing that your time is a scarce resource and should not be squandered is a sign of maturity. Reading the classics is great, not because the priesthood of academia declared it so, but because you can learn much about human nature and your own relationships. But if someone doesn't understand the value of reading a book some dead guy wrote hundreds of years ago, instead of selling them on the real value of it, we act as if they're intellectually deficient. This is not the way to create a broadly educated populace... unless discouraging the masses from joining the ranks of the "college-educated" is in fact the point? College degrees aren't the status symbols they used to be...

I also suspect that if you didn't know how to learn before you got to the university, you will not do well at the university.

I don't think anyone's arguing for the notion that the sole goal in life is to make money. Most people make money so that they can have a decent lifestyle. Like to travel? Costs money. Like a comfortable home? Costs money. Want your kids to have music lessons? Costs money. Etc.

If you have a passion for a career that doesn't pay well, that may be worth pursuing, if the pleasure you get from it outweighs the worry that comes with not having money. But a lot of folks do not have some burning passion for a particular career, they have a passion for their social life - friends, family, etc. They might as well pick something that pays well.

You're making an assumption about these folks' motives that may not be correct.

Some of them may be voting out of self-interest, not because they think they're going to be "rich" (however you define that), but because they know the economy is an ecosystem, and their ability to make a living is intertwined with the prospects of the businesspeople that employ them, and the prospects of the people who want to buy the products they make, whether it's TVs or boats or houses or restaurants or whatever. Taking money from any of those groups is going to hurt more than just the person you take it from. There's no free lunch when it comes to generating tax revenue, much though politicians try to sell that fantasy to us.

I don't think that the news organizations were any more responsible in the past, they just had an ideological and information-distribution monopoly, so the holes in their storytelling were less likely to be noticed. The habit has long been to print sensational stories on page 1, and when it turns out to be untrue, print the correction a week later on page A19. Getting caught is just easier and faster these days, with ideologically opposed news outlets ready to call BS on them (and vice versa), and word of said BS spreads more easily on the Internet.

News people talk about the "narrative" for a reason - they're spinning us a story. Sometimes the story's a reasonable approximation of truth, sometimes it's not, but it's always got a point of view. Losing the ability to dictate the point of view applied to a given event is what's really gotten under the skin of media outlets used to being the only bard in town.

I find it frustrating to watch television news of any ideological stripe, because everytime I try, the reporting is terrible. Political and economic issues can be a bit complicated, but rather than get someone to give a decent explanation, they turn it into some vapid, low-information Red vs Blue horse race. If your reason for watching the news is to feel good about your preferred religion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hparty, OK, but if you want to actually understand an issue, the news rarely delivers. Jon Stewart's comedy show gives a more intellectually credible coverage of the news than the "real" news shows do (I don't share his politics, but respect his committment to providing well-informed, intellectually honest coverage in an otherwise vapid media world). What does that say about the news, that a comic does their job better than they do?

The worry about Chinese espionage is not prejudice.

First, nobody's presuming dishonorability. They're presuming that nation-states will do what they have always done, whether from the West or East, which is espionage. There's a long history, even among supposed Western allies like the French and the US, or the US and Israel, of spying on each other. The spying isn't always for strictly "national security" concerns either, it has also included economic espionage performed to advantage companies from the spying country.

Second, if you consider espionage dishonorable; given that every nation does it, that would make all nations "dishonorable", in which case worrying about it isn't prejudice against any particular player, it's just reality.

Re: the Chinese in particular... if countries where industry is privately-owned do economic espionage, do we really expect that a country where the major industries are state-owned would not? Especially given the enormous advantage it would provide over having to invent technologies the hard way? Do we think the Chinese would worry less about their national security concerns than we do about ours? Would not backdoors in foreign equipment be a potent countermeasure in the event of military conflict?

Do the Chinese get a disproportionate share of media attention for espionage? Probably - it's not like the other world powers have stopped doing these sorts of things. Media attention tends to go in fads, and the incredible rate of economic growth the Chinese have had in recent years has brought a lot of attention. But it doesn't mean the threat isn't real.

They won't call it that. It will be "disruptive behavior" or "disciplinary problems" or some such thing. But really, if a teacher and a student are trading insults, it's a sign the teacher has no more maturity than the student, and thus should not be a teacher.

I don't see what good thing the kids are going to learn from this episode, other than that their teacher lacks maturity. If they didn't respect her before, they sure as hell won't now. By throwing a public temper tantrum, this woman has utterly undermined any authority she may have had with the kids. Good luck getting them to learn anything from her now.

Being "compliance sheep" isn't the only possible bad outcome. The kids could also turn into self-absorbed twits with an unjustified sense of entitlement. Seems to me her rant just makes bad outcome B more likely than bad outcome A, rather than doing anything to improve the kids' learning or emotional skills.