Richard D. Kahlenburg urges Barack Obama to propose ending race-based affirmative action, substituting class-based affirmative action in its place—mostly as a political ploy to move “beyond race” while still channeling mopst fo the program’s benefits to minorities. Commenters give some arguments that Kahlenburg’s political analysis leaves out:
There’s no conflict between academic merit and the [...]
Read Full Post »
Megan McArdle writes disapprovingly of the minimum wage:
Both at Crooked Timber, and in my own beloved comment threads, the suggestion has been made that the minimum wage is really swell because it gets rid of low-productivity jobs that only pay the minimum wage.
This sounds lovely–if you are the kind of person who has the skills [...]
Read Full Post »
I wrote earlier about Pew research findings that Republicans are happier than Democrats, and, generally, conservatives are happier than liberals. Here was my explanation:
I think it’s likely that happy people are more likely to be Republicans, while unhappy people are more likely to be Democrats, for unhappiness gives one an incentive to seek change, [...]
Read Full Post »
Arnold Kling reflects on the fact that the Clintons made $109 million over the past seven years. (Maybe John Edwards is on to something with that “Two Americas” thing.) What’s remarkable is not the amount of private wealth, however, but the amount of wealth and power that government officials control:
Montgomery County, Maryland, has [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in Equality, justice, tagged Obama, race on April 5, 2008 | No Comments »
Juan Williams contrasts the views of Barack Obama and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Read Full Post »
Michael Goldfarb points out how amazing our current situation is:
What if I told you in 2004 that the Democratic party would run an African American candidate for president in 2008? I tell you National Journal will officially label this candidate the most liberal member of the United States Senate. This candidate will also have served [...]
Read Full Post »
The National Association of Scholars has published a report on schools of social work throughout the country, finding that most are committed to ideological indoctrination rather than unbiased research: “Social work education is a national academic scandal.” Stephen Balch, NAS Director:
Defenders of the American university claim that the seriousness of the problem of [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in Equality, tagged discrimination, Islam, medicine on February 26, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Muslim medical workers in Great Britain are refusing to sanitize their forearms for religious reasons. To wash according to guidelines, some Muslim women say, forces them to bare their forearms up to the elbow, which, they think, is forbidden by Islam. (HT: Lydia McGrew) Dr. Semmelweis discovered the significance of sanitizing hands [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in Education, Equality, tagged Education, Equality on February 21, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I couldn’t help but be struck by the oddity of Megan McArdle’s chief worry about inequality:
But in America, money buys access to things, particularly education, but also opportunities like unpaid internships, that make it easier to get a high-paying job. This may be more worrisome than big wealth concentrations. Wealth is eroded over time, either [...]
Read Full Post »
I recently attended a talk by Hadley Arkes on jurisprudence in which, among other things, he criticized the reasoning of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case from 1954. The Court declared the unconstitutionality of segregation on the basis of Kenneth Clark’s social science research on the [...]
Read Full Post »
