All my friends and family know which side of this issue I'm on.
But I'd like everyone to consider one little fact left out of the, uh, "equation" (so to speak): looking over campus as a whole, aren't these the faculties with the least overt committment to leftism and political correctness?
UPDATE: Let me explain. This can easily turn into a dispute between faculty in the "social" sciences and those in real science. If you prefer, you can have it as a dispute between faulty in the social sciences versus those in "real" science.
It doesn't matter where you put the scare quotes. Faculty in the real sciences can easily charge social science departments as lacking just as much political diversity as they (the real sciences) may lack gender diversity.
I am beginning to think widespread formation of "Conservative Studies" departments is the only practical answer to all this.
Money Magazine (which I don't read that often I'm afraid) is right on in this new little article:
From an economist’s point of view, we live in strange times. So strange they now have a snappy label: the Great Moderation. In the 13 years from 1970 to 1983, the U.S. went through four recessions. In the 24 years since, we’ve had two. The latest, which came around the time of 9/11, turned out to be quite mild. Interest rates, unemployment and inflation have all trended sharply down.
What happened?...[T]most obvious change is that the world became flat, to paraphrase Thomas Friedman...In the ’80s and ’90s, the Iron Curtain fell and market economics took hold in Eastern Europe and Asia. At home, the government deregulated banking and transportation. And all over the place, money and goods started moving faster and farther than ever before.
Moving from microeconomics to macro requires you start imagining the economy as passing "quantity" rather than strictly "price" information. The "Great Moderation" is, then, the increasing rapidity with which quantity information can now flow.
UPDATE: If you want to know where I've been and what I've been doing, go to this site and imagine how long it takes to learn sufficient 3d graphics techniques to do it mostly yourself without hiring others. (By the way, the community of 3D graphics folks is at one and the same time strange, wonderful, and slightly scary. Maybe we can talk more about this stuff in the future!)
