- Do high heels cause schizophrenia? In Scared Senseless, Ronald Bailey reviews Geoffrey C. Kabat's recent book entitled Hyping Health Risks, in which this and other, more influential health scares such as electromagnetic fields, cancer clusters, radon gas, passive smoking exposure, cell phones, flu shots and the like are analyzed in the context of the economics and incentives of current science research practice and funding. Dr. Kabat, who found himself in the midst of heated controversy over the funding of his own smoking research, provides a knowledgeable window into the conjunction of science, the public health media, and law.
- Can a 100 year old book long sunk into obscurity, once heralded as a landmark study of American political society, offer a fresh insight into our political culture? The current New Yorker provides a fresh assessment of Arthur Fisher Bentley's TheProcess of Government: A Study of Social Pressures and asks the important question, does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics - or constitute it? The article takes on Thomas Frank's latest attempt to tell the benighted U.S. electorate that they don't know what they are doing.
- What does that Harvard MBA actually teach you? More importantly, what do its possessors do to our markets? In what is described as a "horrifying and very funny memoir," Ahead of the Curve, Philip Delves Broughton immerses himself in the weird culture of entitlement, decadence and fatuous therapeutics including "bonding games," "personal development exercises" and other biz school antics. The review closes with:
"this wonderful bit of data from a study by a banking analyst who tried to track the American equity markets in relation to the number of HBS graduates who chose to go to work in finance each year. If the figure was less than 10%, the market went up not long after. More than 30% and the market was headed for a crash. In 2006, Mr. Broughton reports, 42% of the HBS grads went to work in finance. Right on schedule."
- Ask yourself, would you design a system of higher education like this?:
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."Charles Murray proposes a new way of thinking about higher education that tuition-strapped parents and loan-laden students might want to do some hard thinking about before blindly chasing today's prohibitively expensive and increasingly devalued bachelor's degree.