President Obama’s State of the Union speech was surprisingly bullish on reviving manufacturing, prompting one very clever person on Twitter to say something along the lines of: “Democrats want the economy of the 1950s, while Republicans just want to live there.”
It got me thinking: What did the economy look like in the 1950s? If you could organize all the jobs into buckets and compare the paper-shuffling professional services bucket to the manufacturing bucket, what would they look like around 1950, and how has the picture changed in the last 60 years? Read more.
[Image: Brian McGill and Peter Bell/National Journal]
The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he’s a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.
I want to build my own city,” he said. The settlement, he explained, would be built on a 4,000-acre cotton farm in South Carolina he had his eye on. The citizens would be “all my family members. They gonna have their own businesses, companies that will feed off of my company. I want to build my own Walmart-style store. I want to build my own hospital and school system. I’ll take all the people where I’m from in Coney Island and tell them to leave everything they got inside their homes and move into our new homes. We’ll have all the people sign up to be Starbury employees before they move. This is my vision of what I want to do if this thing really pops off the way I think it will if we continue to stay on the path.
Except, of course, there is. Somehow, what troubles people isn’t so much being average as settling for it. Everyone knows that averageness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matters—looks, money, tennis—we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child’s pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we expect averageness to be resisted.
For years the NBA Hall of Famer has claimed that his high school coach underestimated his talent as a sophomore. Clifton (Pop) Herring, whose life has been a struggle since then, tells a different story
In my classroom, students lose 1/4 point for wrong answers on quizzes. But for writing “I don’t know,” they get 1/4 point. (A correct answer is 1 point). The rationale is that if someone is in a medical emergency, and someone asks me what should be done, the answer “I don’t know” is much preferable to a guess. “I don’t know” leads the questioner to ask someone who hopefully is knowledgeable.
I remember one of the soldiers saying to me, You know, if I wasn’t a terrorist before I came to this place, I would be by the time I leave it. That’s a guard who said that to me.
Americans would go back to school if it were free. Judging by how many think the U.S. population is a billion, more schooling is probably a good idea.
we have had a string of presidents where most people would agree, “yeah I would like to grab a drink with him or have dinner with him.” they are interesting people. for some reason mitt romney does not pass that test. he just seems like a douchebag. he made a comment about worrying about his job at a top tier consulting firm. as someone who has worked at those firms, this is not a real concern as you can easily find other jobs very quickly no matter the economy. am I off base here?
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Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph
President Obama’s State of the Union speech was surprisingly bullish on reviving manufacturing, prompting one very clever person on Twitter to say something along the lines of: “Democrats want the economy of the 1950s, while Republicans just want to live there.”
It got me thinking: What did the economy look like in the 1950s? If you could organize all the jobs into buckets and compare the paper-shuffling professional services bucket to the manufacturing bucket, what would they look like around 1950, and how has the picture changed in the last 60 years? Read more.
[Image: Brian McGill and Peter Bell/National Journal]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyfd35PcEC1qcokc4o1_500.png)
