What motivates people to contribute freely to Wikipedia? People find it gratifying to spend their free time telling others what they know about a given subject. And through an iterative process of people debating what they know about a subject, a definition is formed. When I first heard about Wikipedia a year ago, I was skeptical. But after ( Read more... )

Last year private consumption accounted for 70% of GDP (8745.5 billion/12487.1. billion) source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Americans generally tend to consume a lot, I have noticed that lots of people buy cars and computers every 3-4 years. Car leases help propel this. I tend to be loyal to my machines, and will wait and wait and wait. I ( Read more... )

Cross posted to the foreignaffairs community I recently read Joe Sacco's Palestine. It's an illustrated journalistic account of the few months he spent there in late 1991 and early 1992. I think he did a good job of depicting the attitudes on the ground there. In short, he depicts the Israeli troops and some settlers as ruthless, unsympathetic, ( Read more... )

cross posted to U.S. Dollar community
I periodically check in on the amount of U.S. bonds that are held by foreigners. Back in July of 2005, foreigners held 2,034 billion worth of U.S bonds which amounted to 44% of the outstanding debt held by public. The number has risen to 46% (2,187 billion/4,724 billion). Though, this number may start falling ( Read more... )

Cross posted to caringconsumer

When I heard Rod Dreher’s essay on Crunchy Conservatives on NPR ( Read more... )

I read an interesting book called “Women Don’t Ask”. It is one of those books that would have been better as an article. One of the studies highlighted in the book examined the wage offers of Carnegie Mellon Master’s graduates. Even though the Career Services offices at Carnegie Mellon advised all students to negotiate their salary, 57% men of ( Read more... )

cross posted to the economics community

My posts often harp on the size of our trade deficit or federal debt. For a change
I'll share some encouraging thoughts on the matter. First, this Business week
article makes a good point that our trade deficit does not account ( Read more... )

Cross-posted to be_bold and progressiveblogA poster displayed at one of the Moveon vigils against ( Read more... )

Cross posted to Economics community. This article provides some rather scary projections of the amount of money the U.S. government will end up paying for the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/deficit ( Read more... )

I get frustrated when some democrats offer such a weak response ( Read more... )