The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press is over.

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

If America is now circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain.

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rearview mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Free is just another price.

Sometimes the best way to understand the present is to look at it from the past.