Blogs have realised that old wisecracking twist on an Andy Warhol aphorism: that, someday, everyone will be famous for 15 people.

Blog haters, raging

Claims that homeownership is beneficial to both owners and society have not been examined empirically. This article explores evidence from the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Families and Households, supple­mented by data from the American National Election Studies and several small but highly relevant researches, to determine whether owners and renters differ in a variety of ways.

Strong differences in demographics were found. Small differences were found in some respects: Owners tended to be higher in life satisfaction and self­ esteem and more likely to be members of community improvement groups. On a wide variety of social issues---from political partisanship to ethnocentric views---owners and renters were essentially alike. Thus, it appears that the claims for some social and individual benefits from homeownership are supported, but only weakly. Recognizing that the exploratory analyses pre­sented are not definitive, several strategies for more definitive future research are recommended.

The Social Benefits of Homeownership: Empirical Evidence

Damn that innovation!

The ratio of total household debt to aggregate personal income in the United States has risen from an average of 0.6 in the 1980s to an average of 1.0 so far this decade.

In this paper we explore the causes and consequences of this dramatic increase.

Demographic shifts, house price increases, and financial innovation all appear to have contributed to the rise. Households have become more exposed to shocks to asset prices through the greater leverage in their balance sheets, and more exposed to unexpected changes in income and interest rates because of higher debt payments relative to income. At the same time, an increase in access to credit and higher levels of assets should give households, on average, a greater ability to smooth through shocks.

We conclude by discussing some of the risks associated with some households having become very highly indebted relative to their assets.

The Rise in US Household Indebtedness: Causes and Consequences | FRB

It occurs to me that with a sufficient number of people bookmarking an article and selecting a short passage from it, I have a useful way to figure out what statement(s) most resonated with those readers (and possibly a much larger audience). It's almost like a human powered version of Microsoft Word's document summarization feature.

Welcome to MemeStreams.

Using del.icio.us as a writing summarization tool (by Jeremy Zawodny)

How well does the MIT system work?

It should work pretty well. We have some of the best and most energetic lecturers in the US.

Lectures are generally kept to 50 minutes (more than double the limit established by education researchers). The lectures are demanding; if you tune out for 5 minutes, you will have a lot of trouble catching up. Professors do not put up PowerPoints and read them bullet by bullet. Homework assignments are weekly in most courses and are extremely demanding.

The students are among the most able and best-prepared in the US. Yet when you ask graduates in CS what percentage of their classmates are capable of programming and what percentage they would enjoy working with, the answer is usually 25-30 percent.

People who studied poetry, physics, or civil engineering are often better software engineers than an MIT CS graduate (contrast with medicine; not too many good doctors out there who skipped med school).

A MIT student graduates ready to work for an engineer, not to be an engineer. Not too impressive considering the near-$200,000 cost and the abilities of the incoming students. (And the problem is not always fixed on the first job; companies tend to give junior engineers a tiny piece of a big problem, not a small problem to solve by themselves).

Improving Undergraduate Computer Science Education

About three percent of the world's population lived outside their country of birth in 2005.

Here's a look at the flow of people around the globe.

Snapshot: Global Migration

It’s rude to tell other people what to believe, but it can also be derelict, even cruel, not to challenge ridiculous beliefs.

Intellectuals like to think that ideas are what matter most, but listen to what average murderers say.

When scientists absolutely reject God, we leave behind only a simpler and more dangerous God.

Jaron’s World: Peace through God

A new paper from Barabasi and colleagues from Notre Dame and the Kennedy School.

Economies grow by upgrading the products they produce and export. The technology, capital, institutions, and skills needed to make newer products are more easily adapted from some products than from others. Here, we study this network of relatedness between products, or "product space," finding that more-sophisticated products are located in a densely connected core whereas less-sophisticated products occupy a less-connected periphery. Empirically, countries move through the product space by developing goods close to those they currently produce. Most countries can reach the core only by traversing empirically infrequent distances, which may help explain why poor countries have trouble developing more competitive exports and fail to converge to the income levels of rich countries.

Supplementary materials are available.

Tim Harford covered it for Slate:

One very plausible account of why at least some poor countries are poor is that there is no smooth progression from where they are to where they would be when rich. For instance, to move from drilling oil to making silicon chips might require simultaneous investments in education, transport infrastructure, electricity, and many other things. The gap may be too far for private enterprise to bridge without some sort of coordinating effort from government—a "big push."

The Product Space and the Wealth of Nations

It has lately become clear that nothing burdens a life like an email account. It’s the old story: the new efficient technology ends up costing far more time than it ever saves, because it breeds new expectations of what a person can possibly do. So commuters in their fast cars spend hours each day in slow traffic, and then at the office they read and send email.

... You ask polite questions to which you pray there will never come an answer. Oh, but there will.

This link will last, but soon it will fail to point to the quoted content, which appears in n+1, Number Five, Winter 2007.

Against Email

Was such skulduggery worth it? Did the extra security for the United States outweigh the immediate human cost, the frequently perverse geopolitical consequences and the moral damage to American ideals? Doubters repeatedly warned presidents that on balance the CIA's foreign buccaneering did more harm than good. Mr Weiner has dug out devastating official assessments of covert operations from the 60 years he covers suggesting that many were not worth it. The sceptics were not peaceniks or bleeding hearts but hard-headed advisers at high levels of government.

See also, The dazzler that dimmed:

It is possible that a future historian will see Ms Rice more favourably. But, as her current job draws to an end, the prospects do not look good.

But I bet she is still good at piano:

"Before I leave this earth, I'm somehow going to learn the Brahms Second Piano Concerto," she said, "which is the most beautiful piece of music." It is also dauntingly hard.

Whether Condoleezza Rice some day becomes commissioner of the National Football League, president of Stanford or president of whatever is anyone's guess. But don't bet against her learning Brahms's Second Concerto.

The CIA | On top of everything else, not very good at its job