Yes. I shall.

Just to remind -- there is a big difference between the budget and the GDP. GDP in the U.S. captures private and public economic behavior whereas the budget is clearly only public spending.

That article irritated me. More preaching about how Mommies are doing it wrong (gender emphasis in the article) without data.

Based on the conversation here on the blog, it seems that hours of schooling per year is a more important indicator than days of schooling.

http://wrongingrights.blogspot.com/2009/09/wtf-hollywood-or-play-in-one-act-for.html

As I understand bj, Jody, Polanski is clearly to be excoriated for being a rapist/pedophile, but the media and the prosecutors are not acting as they are out of concern for the victim but rather for their own benefit.

I can't imagine that the U.S. really has been putting pressure on Europe for this one. Perhaps it was the affront of a lifetime achievement award for a convicted pedophile.

Hmm. Should I be surprised that Woody Allen is on that list?

Thanks for those cites, Amy P. I appreciate them.

Amy P., I'm curious, why do you think that housing inflation is going to disappear?

Jody, will you marry me?

Taking an even larger step back, there's a direct correlation between society prosperity and development and number of women in the workplace. Kristof (and co-author, whose name is escaping me) noted this relationship in a recent NYT magazine piece and in their book currently out. With women societally permitted to work, states have the ability to dramatically increase their economic growth and production. The collective best solution might be an ideal worker family (2 incomes/producers) rather than a 1 salary ideal worker family. It might be a kind of sad and tired observation, but it astounds me at how much is interlinked in economics. So much of this discussion seems to be trying to figure out the role of individual thrift, effort and work versus the structural frame the market provides.

What kind of jobs do you guys have that one salary goes to stuff like private schools, planes, and second homes? My public school professorial salary is absolutely necessary just to pay daycare, rent for my (incredibly modest) dwelling on a fast and busy street, and student loans. Although I admittedly live in one of the most expensive metro areas in the world (NJ life, NYC metro). The Warren book, as I understand it, looked at more than just upper-middle class folks. The majority of Americans have a family income much less than my husband and I.

Tell the boys that they are the, ahem, Track Masters.

Wow.

:) Touche on the whole tenure thing. I heard Warren on NPR. I have been meaning to read her book. It sounds very interesting. I do wonder about the limits of that argument, though. Two income families spend more money and generate inflation. It stands to reason some of the pressures two-income families face would be faced if the world were made up of single-income families. The idea that all the country's (or world's) two-income families restrict their spending to one income relies a great deal on a collective action that would never occur. That, and two-income families have costs (like child care) that single-income families may not have.

I'm kind of baffled by the implications of Warren's argument that dual income families should refrain from "buying the expensive house in a good school district." Does this mean that a family with a combined should necessarily opt to buy bad homes in bad school districts? I agree that the NYT piece didn't back up Bennetts' argument about the costs of re-entering the workplace for women's salaries. But this was part of Bennetts' argument for the DailyBeast piece. I was surprised that the NYT coverage seemed to imply the ease with which women were re-entering the workplace and becoming breadwinners. This flies in the face of much of the coverage of the recession (with unemployment at 9% -- above that in some places -- and with lags in job creation). I'm curious -- what sort of evidence exists about the changes in the approach of the business world, and any sense that this sort of change will last through today's economic climate? I read somewhere that the flexible work programs geared toward being family friend had diminished this year. Not that that's the same thing as new recruitment, but it could indicate murkier waters for women ahead.... (Come to think of it, NPR had some folks on marketplace noting that more women were getting hired than men, but mostly because women were cheaper to higher b/c they got paid less.)

Crap. I should have remembered that Steve and I had similar birthdates! Happy birthday to Steve! (Did you get enough Thomas cake?)

I dunno, Laura. This stuffs seems quite useful, although I wonder if we shouldn't teach them in college instead. Graduate school, even. I know that my grades would have suffered here: "Time Management - The capacity to estimate how much time one has and how to allocate it." Did you get your purse back?

I think the problem with globalization protests and discussions is that they're so... well.... global. That is, there's a great deal of generalized b@tching but very little specificity. The term is used so broadly that it is practically meaningless if it is not carefully circumscribed. This latter characteristic means that it is great fodder for angry mobilization, but is problematic for deep and specific analysis. Globalization, and the various factors that make up our basic understanding of the word, is a vast social, political, economic, and cultural frame that produces winners and losers. Sometimes the winners in one facet of globalization (Mexican truck drivers, for example, more employed after NAFTA) are the losers in others (they vulnerable to the collapse of the Mexican state due to the expansion of the drug trade). So, Laura, I see no contradiction in your seeming divergent views on organic foods and blogging.

As a good Southern girl myself, I want to confirm the complexity of the South as well. This is the land of William Faulkner, grits, wondrous sweetened iced tea, Truman Capote and Julia Roberts. Clearly they'e (we?) doing something right amidst all it seems they're (we?) doing wrong.

Amy P: "Mom, I'm not suffering! I'm staying happy!" Priceless.

MH -- point well made. I have lots of respect for COW. It is a indeed a useful tool.

No kidding. I'm not getting any work done, Doug, and it's all your fault. It's business hours in NJ. (Plus I can't help but observe that the Euro posts you referenced in the other post on book publishers do not, in fact, address problems of separatism in Russia and Georgia. Although they are indirectly linked to the subject matter.)

fair enough. it was attempting humor.