Counterpoint to CJCS

In a counterpoint to out last post about the CJCS, Robert Goldich, former senior military manpower analyst for the Congressional Research service, thinks GEN Dempsey is a knuckle-dragger without vision:

I see official remarks and documents that seem to me to be nothing more than a stringing together of contemporary pop phrases in military-strategic affairs, dispensing conventional wisdom. There seems to me to be a lack of intellectual rigor in his published statements of policy. I found his first CJCS reading list to be amazingly puerile, filled with that most suspicious of categories of written material, best sellers on general booklists.

I think Goldich is an academic who's brain is getting in the way of his ability to see the world as it is.

Support for the 6 Killer Aps

Steven Levitt over at Freakonomics posted an interesting vignette from the ongoing internet freedom (SOPA) debate but that's not why I'm writing about it. Levitt's take on property rights and how they factor in:

I almost always believe in free markets as the solution to problems, but this one is tricky.  There are not a whole lot of things that I think governments are particularly good at doing, but protecting property rights is at or near the top of that list.

This reminded me of  Niall Ferguson's TED talk, The 6 Killer Aps of Prosperity: competition, the Scientific Revolution, property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society, and "the work ethic".

Do you think our legislators will refer to the lessons of human history when deciding the future of internet history?

Harvard Econ on Taxes

NY Times

Economist Greg Mankiw of Greg Mankiw's blog suggests four keys to a better tax system:

• Broaden the base and lower the rates
• Tax consumption
• Tax bads rather than goods
• Keep it simple 

Defense ≠ championships

This is according to  Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim and their post over at Freakonomics.

Income and Mobility

An interesting post from Freakonomics:

Is Higher Income Inequality Associated with Lower Intergenerational Mobility?

You are what you post

 I think the title of this article from The Atlantic is apropos: "Who you are on Facebook is probably pretty much who you are".
It is a variation on the idea that being drunk makes you more of who you are instead of a separate person.

Is guessing not attempting?

A post from our good friends at the Freakonomics blog describes a teacher who subtracts a 1/4 point for wrong answers, but gives 1/4 point for answering "I don't know" (full text below). I think I understand the reasoning but to me it feels like a reward for quiting. Do the benefits for knowing when to say IDK outweigh the confidence one can get from attempting and succeeding at something risky? I think no, but I don't know.

"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.
Part of why “I don’t know is so hard to say” stems from an education system based on attempting every single question, whether you know the answer or not.
P.S.: End-of-year student survey showed students strongly supported the +1/4 point IDK and -1/4 point wrong-answer system."