The Empty Seat
Empty seats at a student concert and at Belmont basketball sent me back to what I learned watching my wife. People come where someone is expecting them, and anyone can be that someone.
The Math Was Right. The Coin Was Wrong
A viral post did the math on MIT’s admissions by sex and got it right. The trouble is what the math assumed. Who applies tells you who was interested, not who was qualified. The fair test is how a class was chosen.
How to Manufacture Poverty
Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham explained how to earn a billion dollars. Here is the opposite recipe, the one a rich country runs on itself by refusing to look at the math.
What “Only 5 Percent” Really Means
“Only 5 percent” sounds like a small slice of a paycheck. Proposition 40 would take 5 percent of a fortune. Here is that bill in the units most of us use, what it would be paid with, and what it can and can’t fix.
What a Fair Race Looks Like
At the first USAFacts debate, the moderator said kids born rich mostly stay there. The slide’s own numbers said the opposite. Six in ten children born into the top fifth fall out of it, and the pattern is close to what a fair race produces when runners start at different places on the track.
They Can’t Both Be Right
The system says a bachelor’s degree means $1.2 million more in median lifetime earnings. A New York Times essay says business school, one of the biggest parts of higher education, should be abolished. They can’t both be right. They can both be wrong, in the same way: each reads research from too high up, and the student at the margin stands to pay for a finding about someone else.