Joel E Lewis

Forget WWIII, the future is a delicate dance over mutually assured financial destruction. The New Republic has a great article (Peking Over Our Shoulder | The New Republic) about the issues and the way the game is playing be played.  It looks increasingly like if the US and CHina ever come to blows, it will [...]

This one is for you Mom… It turns out all those times I didn’t turn in my homework, I might not have been missing out on anything.
Homework does not improve children’s work habits, argues Kohn. It does not reinforce skills, and “isn’t even correlated with, much less responsible for, higher achievement before high school.”
Via: [...]

Note: The first publishing of this post was accidentally an unfinished draft.  This the corrected copy.
The Wall Street journal asks?
Was it surprising to investors that Merrill paid $3.6 billion in bonuses?
This figure leaned toward the low end of estimates that had appeared in the press, and it was significantly less than the $6.7 billion that [...]

I have an emerging view on markets, government, and what to do moving forward, and Better Regulate Than Never | The New Republic help my tie a lot of my thoughts together.
On Capitalism:
To understand the shape of our response to the crisis, we must understand the crisis itself. We have experienced a failure of capitalism–not [...]

While I have been critical of the Federal Reserve (especially the Greenspan years), my beef with them has been their judgment and decision-making process. Congress, on the other hand, is a whole different matter. Its not their judgment, but rather, the fact they are owned not by the American people, but by lobbyists, and corporate [...]

When everyone starts talking like a businessman, we are either in really good shape (because people are getting an education in how the world works) or really bad shape (because bad business cliche’s are spreading).
“If we can have our foot in that arena and understand that space…we’ll have a leg up when convergence actually does [...]

“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.” – Kurt Cobain
Of course, killing yourself is also a waste of the person you are, so take that with a grain of salt.
“I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what [...]

Is this what they mean when they talk about green job creation?
Marijuana growers, many believed to be affiliated with Mexican drug cartels, are aggressively expanding their illegal farming operations in the U.S., clearing land to plant pot in dozens of national forests from coast to coast.
Via Pot ‘Plantations’ on the Rise – WSJ.com.
The Mexicans even [...]

Portugal has decriminalized all drugs, and with some remarkable results:
Mr Greenwald claims that the data show that “decriminalisation has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal”, which “in numerous categories are now among the lowest in the European Union”. This came after some rises in the 1990s, before decriminalisation. The figures reveal [...]

For those of you who have not been swayed by emotional appeals to save the (insert cute cuddly creature here), some researchers may have an answer to quantifying what species are most important to each ecosystem, via ripping off Google pagerank:
“While several previous studies have looked at the robustness of food webs to a variety [...]