I recently sat down with Tyler VanderWeele, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Harvard School of Public Health. He's also the director of the Human Flourishing Program, which was the subject of our recording. What is human flourishing? What is the state of it in society today? What can we do to improve our own personal flourishing? We discuss these and other questions in our podcast. If the audio player doesn't display for you, click over to listen on … [Read more...]
US Colleges Diverging Into Winners and Losers, Shakeout Coming
The Wall Street Journal has been doing great work digging into the pending crisis hitting may colleges, particularly small non-selective liberal arts schools. In today's paper they have a piece on colleges sorting into winners and losers: The diverging fortunes help explain how U.S. higher education is shifting. For generations, a swelling population of college-age students, rising enrollment rates and generous student loans helped all schools, even mediocre ones, to flourish. Those days are ending. According to an analysis of 20 years of … [Read more...]
Another Look Back at Global Squeeze
Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis for First-World Nations Richard C. Longworth McGraw-Hill 1998 [ I recently posted part one of a look back at Richard Longworth's 1998 book Global Squeeze, which correctly predicted massive job displacement from China’s entry into the global trading system, describes how developing world countries would move up the value chain, predicts the erosion of middle-class standards of living, the rise of the gig economy, and the deterioration in race relations. He puts his finger on the nationalism vs. globalism … [Read more...]
How Richard Longworth Predicted 20 Years Ago That Globalization Would Cause a Social Crisis
Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis for First-World Nations Richard C. Longworth McGraw-Hill 1998 Whenever we see the reality of momentous shifts in society, it's always good to go back and take a look at the people who saw it coming far away. Generally speaking, there were usually people who understood what was happening in advance. For example, Daniel Bell wrote his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in 1976. There were probably even other earlier books touting the same theme. One person who clearly saw the challenges that … [Read more...]
A Window Into the World of Working Class Collapse
Some time back my brother recommended I watch the documentary film Medora, about a high school basketball team from rural Southern Indiana. I finally got around to doing it. Someone described this film as an "inverse Hoosiers", which is an apt description. Hoosiers is a fictional retelling of the Milan Miracle, the legendary story of how tiny Milan High School (enrollment 161) won the state's then single-class basketball championship in 1954. There's no such happy ending in prospect in Medora (available on Netflix). The town's basketball … [Read more...]
Moving Beyond Resilience
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb I had never read any books by Nassim Taleb of "black swan" fame until some hilarious retweets from his Twitter account caused me to start following him. Taleb is a witty and opinionated fellow. He's lately been hating on what he labels the "Intellectual Yet Idiot" class. Here's a recent Facebook post of his on the topic that went viral. What's a IYI? Intellectual Yet Idiot: semi-erudite bureaucrat who thinks he is an erudite; pathologizes others for doing things he … [Read more...]