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The best part, I might add, is that there is nothing "better" about private schools except the mental image society collectively has. The only reason private school students do better is because they are selected for nice things more frequently because of their prestigious background. In fact, I would argue that private school teaching is probably inferior to public schools (at least in Canada); private school teachers are paid significantly less than public schools, and so public schools get their pick first.

The only reason private school students do better on standardized tests is because private schools pick all of the best students with supportive parents. If you have a class who can practically teach themselves, it doesn't matter if a monkey is teaching them, they're going to do better than the class of low income and disenfranchised students.

Can you cite any studies or well known facts to support these statements? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd just like to see something other than some anonymous person's assertions on a tech chatboard.

Private schools can and do kick out trouble-causing students, and there is a direct correlation between the presence of such children and the overall performance of a class. This is probably a larger factor than merely selecting the academic elite, who themselves may come from abusive or otherwise troubled homes and who may bring such problems into the classroom.

However, the academic elite by and large tend to follow their economic class's trends. In other words, affluent parents spend more on their children's education, give them better tools and more opportunities to do well, and effectively can buy a smoother pathway to the top with fewer obstacles. SAT scores are correlated with wealth.

To argue that private school teaching "is probably inferior to public schools" is a broad and unsubstantiated claim. Leaving aside the fact that some kids attend private school for non-academic reasons (their parent went there, it's smaller, it's more prestigious), we can ask--do private schools really help kids perform better? It's controversial, according to this Time blog, but a separate study shows that Catholic schools do a better job overall.

There are many excellent public schools in the U.S. and Canada; Montgomery County in MD for example, and Middlesex County in Massachusetts are superb--well funded, high academic standards, good support for the arts, and involved parents. The high performing schools in these districts, though, are in the affluent areas like Belmont and Newton and Lexington in Massachusetts. The lower income Middlesex schools in Waltham and Watertown are down a rung or two.

As for the quality of teachers, it's disputable that private schools hire inferior teachers at lower pay, at least in the U.S. This was more true decades ago, but in recent years private schools have had to compete for a shrinking pool of good teachers and they have raised salaries and benefits nearly to union scale. Nonetheless, private schools have remained a desirable destination because the students tend to be better behaved, the troublemakers are removed, and there tends to be more parental buy-in. This only makes sense; when you're paying $16,000 a year for your child, you tend to have more and stronger opinions about how the school is run.

Not tax breaks, exactly. Subsidies.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/08/us-fcc-internet-rural-idUSTRE71759V20110208
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9090.pdf

The telcos and other ISP's have taken money from the government, many times, mostly to aid in that "last mile" crap. And, the "last mile" just never materializes.

Although - the idea of tax breaks conferring partial ownership upon the government isn't a bad idea either. Tax breaks are, after all, just another form of subsidy.

There's just one problem with your theory: global inequality is falling. This is because there are many poorer people (especially in China and India) closing the gap with Europe and the U.S. Inequality feels like it's rising to you probably because you're only thinking of inequality inside of a single country.

We certainly had booms and busts well before we had a central bank (i.e. the Fed, which was established in 1913). As time has gone by, they've generally gotten better at central banking; the period from 1982 to 2007 is often called the "Great Moderation" for this quarter century of stable growth: two mild recessions and stable and low inflation; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Moderation . Also, take a look at the real GDP data from http://measuringworth.com/usgdp/ (put together by economic historians) and note the falling volatility over the last century (easiest seen in the log view). Finally check out http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html (from the people who officially date recessions) and note the increasing length of expansions and shorter recessions.

After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

A research paper noted that

we also demonstrate that the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores. Further evidence suggests that providing universal access to home computers and high-speed internet access would broaden, rather than narrow, math and reading achievement gaps.

A further NYTimes article noted that

Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers. “We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”

Professors are also banning laptops from their classes. All in all there doesn't seem to be any actual evidance that kids benefit from the use of laptops et al in class. That's not saying they don't benefit from the use of technology in the learning process, but the use of individual laptops and Ipads and all that has so far been shown to be somewhat counter-productive.

Late to the party, but I wanted to point out an interesting study done by a couple of Boston University economists which found that the all-in marginal tax rate of
every American is roughly 40%.

This means all the arguing over progressive income taxes is meaningless because state and local entities simply eat up the would-be tax savings of the lower quintiles.

References:
Summary article by Scott Burns
Study Abstract

-l

I am not sure where the idea that PXE boot files are limited to 32KB comes from, but we are booting FreeBSD 8.0 with a 240KB boot file with PXE and tftp and have not had to do anything special. We also boot Linux (Fedora 11) with a 4MB initrd over tftp and that has not posed any difficulties either. Our FreeBSD experience is documented at http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html - it works quite well for us. I looked at gPXE and it doesn't really solve any problems we have had. Actually, we have had only one problem - sometimes the OS boot code doesn't support the motherboard ethernet, and we have to add a different ethernet card for post-boot LAN access.

According the the National Bureau of Economic Research (the official arbiter of recessions) the current recession began in December 2007.

Reference (Sorry, I'd look for the reference on NBER's site but I'm at work and can't stay on /. THAT long!)

"A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S.A. A related point is that for this group the PhD salary premium is much higher [than it is for Americans], because it is based on BS-level pay in students' home nations versus PhD-level pay in the U.S.A... [If] doctoral studies are failing to appeal to a large (or growing) percentage of the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay... A number of [the Americans] will select alternative career paths... For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative." http://www.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html

"In fact, the actual data shows that newspapers almost always turn out to be very well matched in political slant to their readers. (As should be obvious, since if they weren't, they'd lose readers even faster than they now do.)" Hmmmm. And yet most large news papers are failing. Would this perhaps be some indication that *maybe* a certain type of political slant is not being represented well?

If it had been the case that particularly papers of "a certain type of political slant" that were failing, perhaps, but it's not.

But, more notably, it turns out that newspapers in general do tend to mirror the politics of their consistencies.

For data, here's a paper.
Here are the salient paragraphs from a summary: [from the data, it turned out that] "...the main driver of any slant was the newspaper's audience, not bias by the newspaper's owner. A comparison of circulation data (per capita) to the ratio of Republican to Democratic campaign contributions by ZIP code showed that circulation was strongly related to whether the newspaper matched the readers' own ideology... The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, "The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers' demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.""

Big problem with how those sources get their data. I'd suggest reading up on their methodology.

You may want to review these locations:

http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/book_grad_rates/
http://www.nber.org/reporter/2008number1/heckman.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/education/20graduation.html

There is no need to physically destroy a drive to prevent data from being read. The claims of Gutmann that it was possible to read overwritten sectors were never sustained by his sources. I investigated this years ago and reported in Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data that he was very much overwrought. I see he has gone on to tilt at other windmills since he propagated that myth.

In 1986, EU pharmaceutical R&D exceeded U.S. R&D by about 24 percent, but by 2004, EU R&D trailed U.S. R&D by about 15 percent. During these 19 years, U.S. R&D spending grew at a real annual compound rate of 8.8 percent, while EU R&D spending grew at a real 5.4 percent rate.

The US spends 15% more on pharmaceutical R&D than the EU. Other regions also invest in medical R&D. The USA is certainly not paying for the entire world's pharmaceutical R&D.

This is a really good point. We should be at least as skeptical of economic models as of climate models. But if you do want to pay attention to economic models, you should know that they don't always predict that serious action on climate will cause "severe economic consequences." The CBO, for example, predicts that the cost of Waxman-Markey are fairly modest.. A study by MIT also found that cap-and-trade would not be very expensive

FACT of the matter (and it is a FACT), is that the U.S. has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. It's no surprise that companies choose to do business elsewhere

Oh, i love guys like you.
The Fact is that while USA has the second highest corporate tax rates, an abolition of CIT (corporate income tax) and replacing it with VAT will increase additional investment only by 1.5% (source: NBER )
while it increases corporate cash flow by $5.2 Billion. And that is in 1969 dollars.
The FACT, as you love to put it is that Federal corporate tax has decreased steadily from 52% in 1955 to 30% in 1967 only to rise up to 33.8% in 1968 (in response to Vietnam) and dropped to 28% in 1977 and again to rise and fall to 16% in 1984 (the begining of the Reagan Era of freedom and corporate irresponsibility).
And no, am NOT quoting these stats from my a$$. You can check it up at NBER.
So you were sayin???

And by that you mean, like, 30 seconds a week, right? :)

And you only get that much until you're married.

I realize you're joking, but still, this meme just isn't true. Married people have significantly more sex than others. See, e.g., Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study. (Money required, but I was able to get it e-mailed for free by providing my college e-mail address.) For instance, the chart on page 20 indicates that 44% of the general population has sex on at least a weekly basis, 56% of married people, and 43% of people who have never married. One of the authors' findings is "unmarried people say they have much less sex than those who are married".

Of course, usual disclaimers about self-reporting apply. Strangely, if you add up all the heterosexual males' reported sexual activity, it ends up being much higher than the sum of the heterosexual females' reported sexual activity . . . but still, there seems to be no reason to doubt this specific point.

The "Great Zero Challenge" isn't the only one out there looking. The National Bureau of Economic Research (that tiny organization no one has ever heard of who just provide the authoritative figures for business cycle dates, among thousands of other economic pieces of data) looked into this several years ago, and also couldn't find a single data recovery service who could recover overwritten data.

There's ample opportunity and motivation and reward for someone who can do this to come out of the woodwork and announce it. The fact that they haven't amply demonstrates crisco's point.

I took that test a ways back. Came out basically the same for both.

One question about said test, though, it would seem to me that if you are more familiar with one type of face (whites for whites, blacks for blacks) then you would have a faster time of decision with the more familiar than with the less familiar. Just a thought.

Not gaming data, movie data but has to do with violence in an entertainment form: http://www.nber.org/papers/w13718

Violent movies with large audiences is good for a reduction in crime during the movie and an even greater reduction later that night.

I had something derogatory to say about your gut feeling about the "subjugation of women" but opted not to do so for fear of derailing something that might actually be interesting, unlike a flame war (unless it is vi vs emacs).

They've gathered all the flamebaits in a large pile and lit it on fire. They burn quite nicely.
Then, they roasted some trolls on those flames.
That was probably the only thing that got them through the winter.

Of course, they would have all died from cancer later from eating all that charred troll-meat but hey... it was 1700s.
Life expectancy was around 37 years anyway back then.

In other words, racism in its current form didn't exist before a few centuries ago.

the races were much more localized back then, almost to a tribe level, but still the same idea and actions as today

I still believe it is different today. Back then, they didn't have elaborate appeals to science or religion to justify why one race was better than another. Organized genocide also seems to be a common feature today with a major genocide every couple of decades (and that's in the relatively peaceful time of the Pax Atomica age). And you certainly didn't have affirmative action back then.

No, at this point in time, the average white male is still more likely to get the job because he's white.Every study done on this indicates that, for equally qualified applicants, people tend to hire those most like them. Since most companies are headed by white males, they are the ones most likely to get hired. There were even studies where "Shanequa" and "Jill" sent in similar resumes and "Jill" received more calls for interviews. Why? Because white people are more likely to be hired for being white, in the absence of external pressure. AA is an attempt to get external pressure to even that score, not to give unqualified black people jobs while qualified whites end up homeless.

Well, I dug up the report in question and you appear to be quite right. Given that it was performed in 2003, this indicates a significant problem. It doesn't illuminate why they are racist though. For example, is it the elaborate nature of the African American sounding names? Would "Shanequa 'Shane' Smith" appear more personable to an employer than "Shanequa Smith"? Or is there real risk associated with interviewing ethnic groups protected by affirmative action? For example, am I more likely to get sued, if I interview someone with an African American sounding name than someone with a more European American sounding name? It is worth noting that rejecting a few resumes is a very safe way to avoid the penalties of the Civil Rights Act.

To determine properly whether hiring biases are occuring, it strikes me that the best way is simply to compare the qualifications of people who actually get hired. It is possible, for example, that African Americans get interviewed less often, but hired more often. I don't really think that is the case any more, but I could be wrong again.

However, I cannot deny that you are right. There is something very wrong here and I'd have to say that I was wrong here. What I am concerned about here though is what effect affirmative action has here. Is it helping or aggravating the situation? Elevated resume rejection is IMHO definitely a sign of attempts to bypass the law. But the motives for doing so are unclear.

I've worked and learned in places with token black people, that is people hired to meet mandated ethnic quotas.

Then they are violating the law. Quotas are explicitly illegal. To claim that AA is bad because of quotas is another indication you have no idea what the laws say, nor what they are intended to do.

Reading around, it appears that Wikipedia is accurate if somewhat biased on the issue. Government organizations including public universities cannot have explicit racial hiring or enrollment quotas (unless mandated by a court as a remedial measure for extreme racial hiring preferences). However, some sort of action is mandated by affirmative action and private organizations can employ explicit racial hiring quotas to meet the conditions of the Civil Rights Act. So quotas aren't mandated but they are legal for private organizations. I don't know if colleges partly funded with US government funds (which would be virtually all of them) would lose that funding if they had explicit racial quotas for hiring or enrollment.

Ult

The source of the claim seems Gutmann's 1996 article: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sec96/full_papers/gutmann/index.html where he says: "Data overwritten once or twice may be recovered by subtracting what is expected to be read from a storage location from what is actually read. Data which is overwritten an arbitrarily large number of times can still be recovered provided that the new data isn't written to the same location as the original data (for magnetic media), or that the recovery attempt is carried out fairly soon after the new data was written (for RAM)." It was challenged already in 2003 http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html where Feenberg writes: "Surveying all the references, I conclude that Gutmann's claim belongs in the category of urban legend." As usual, this story shows that individual claims have to be checked by independent parties. Even the claim that it can not be done.

The government has to be the entity that says we are in a recession after 2 consecutive quarters of economic shrinkage. There is nothing for the media to report if the gov't economists don't say anything.

Actually the group that makes that call is the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private think-tank. It's not related to any government agency.

What started in 2007 it wasn't "bad" for the ordinary Joe

The decline in employment in every month since December 2007 hasn't been good for the ordinary Joe. Nor has the decline in per-capita GDP in Q4 '07, the approximately flat per capita GDP in Q1 '08, the weak growth in Q2 '08, and the decline again in per-capita GDP in Q3 '08. So, I'd disagree with that claim about the ordinary Joe.

Now that it's the 2 quarters of negative growth thing, it's a real recession.

There were two quarters of negative measured GDP growth so far in the current recession, but not two consecutive quarters as the popular rule of thumb goes (it was Q4 '07 and Q3 '08), and the quarters of negative GDP growth, while factors, were not the sole basis of the declaration.

The popular two-consecutive-quarters thing is a rule of thumb, not the definition of a recession used by the NBER. See the official announcement for more on what NBER defines a recession as, and how the conditions from December 2007 forward were determined to meet that definition.

But the definition of a recession is two quarters of negative growth, which we haven't had yet.

No, its not.

That's a common rule of thumb regarding recessions, not "the definition of a recession".

See the NBER FAQ and the NBER's announcement of the current recession for further discussion on why this popular rule of thumb is not used by the NBER.

(Also note that the BEA GDI measure, which is a different measurement mechanism than the BEA GDP measurement, but which attempts measure a quantity which is by definition identical to the GDP, did show two consecutive quarters of decline in Q4 '07 and Q1 '08, one quarter of weak growth in Q2 '08, and decline again in Q3 '08.)

So then why have we heard constant talk about how the US is in a recession for over a year now?

Because other economists who look at the same indicators that the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee looks at, but that do project (which NBER doesn't) and which do give educated, informed opinions of current conditions rather than waiting until a rock solid peak date can be announced (unlike NBER's BCDC which won't announce a recession until not only is the recession itself clear, but they've got a pretty firm peak date, which is why they've never revised a dating since the BCDC was formed) look at the indicators and say, looking at this, its pretty likely we are currently heading for or in a recession.

Answer: political opportunism, plain and simple. If you can make people believe we're in a recession and that the party of the current president caused it, in the midst of a presidential campaign, that bodes very well for the opposing party.

It wasn't just Democrats (much less partisan Democrats) that were stating that it appeared we were in a recession.

It was pretty much anyone who had half a clue about the economy.

When McCain said, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," (emphasis mine) he was -- and still is -- 100% correct.

There might be some bizarre definition of "fundamentals" under which that is correct (certainly, the McCain campaign trotted out a few after he was widely criticized), but under any normal, reasonable definition, it was completely false.

How long do you have to hear things are terrible before you believe they are, and start making changes in your own life?

One of the indicators the NBER BCDC considered in declaring the recession is that every month since December 2007 showed declining employment.

My guess is that that's a bigger factor in popular perceptions of the economy, since people feel it directly, than media talk. People know when they are out of a job, or people they know are out of jobs.

And then start feeling the effects of millions of other people making those changes, and people losing jobs, and businesses closing, and this vicious cycle causing a downward spiral?

Except that the people losing their jobs, the business closing, etc., all were going on before the recession talk started and caused the talk, not the other way around.

Disclaimer:

1. I didn't vote for Bush.

2. I voted for Obama.

Anyone can claim that, and its absolutely unprovable. Acting as if that adds weight to your argument is rather silly.

So assuming I'm a die-hard Republican because I'm saying something you likely disagree with isn't going to work.

What your saying is downright ignorant on its key points (definition of recession, order of events in the recent economic downturn, etc.), regardless of your actual, much less your claimed, political affiliation.

But the definition of a recession is two quarters of negative growth, which we haven't had yet.

No, its not.

That's a common rule of thumb regarding recessions, not "the definition of a recession".

See the NBER FAQ and the NBER's announcement of the current recession for further discussion on why this popular rule of thumb is not used by the NBER.

(Also note that the BEA GDI measure, which is a different measurement mechanism than the BEA GDP measurement, but which attempts measure a quantity which is by definition identical to the GDP, did show two consecutive quarters of decline in Q4 '07 and Q1 '08, one quarter of weak growth in Q2 '08, and decline again in Q3 '08.)

So then why have we heard constant talk about how the US is in a recession for over a year now?

Because other economists who look at the same indicators that the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee looks at, but that do project (which NBER doesn't) and which do give educated, informed opinions of current conditions rather than waiting until a rock solid peak date can be announced (unlike NBER's BCDC which won't announce a recession until not only is the recession itself clear, but they've got a pretty firm peak date, which is why they've never revised a dating since the BCDC was formed) look at the indicators and say, looking at this, its pretty likely we are currently heading for or in a recession.

Answer: political opportunism, plain and simple. If you can make people believe we're in a recession and that the party of the current president caused it, in the midst of a presidential campaign, that bodes very well for the opposing party.

It wasn't just Democrats (much less partisan Democrats) that were stating that it appeared we were in a recession.

It was pretty much anyone who had half a clue about the economy.

When McCain said, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," (emphasis mine) he was -- and still is -- 100% correct.

There might be some bizarre definition of "fundamentals" under which that is correct (certainly, the McCain campaign trotted out a few after he was widely criticized), but under any normal, reasonable definition, it was completely false.

How long do you have to hear things are terrible before you believe they are, and start making changes in your own life?

One of the indicators the NBER BCDC considered in declaring the recession is that every month since December 2007 showed declining employment.

My guess is that that's a bigger factor in popular perceptions of the economy, since people feel it directly, than media talk. People know when they are out of a job, or people they know are out of jobs.

And then start feeling the effects of millions of other people making those changes, and people losing jobs, and businesses closing, and this vicious cycle causing a downward spiral?

Except that the people losing their jobs, the business closing, etc., all were going on before the recession talk started and caused the talk, not the other way around.

Disclaimer:

1. I didn't vote for Bush.

2. I voted for Obama.

Anyone can claim that, and its absolutely unprovable. Acting as if that adds weight to your argument is rather silly.

So assuming I'm a die-hard Republican because I'm saying something you likely disagree with isn't going to work.

What your saying is downright ignorant on its key points (definition of recession, order of events in the recent economic downturn, etc.), regardless of your actual, much less your claimed, political affiliation.

A long-standing rule of thumb for "recession" is that it is defined as contraction in the GDP for at least two consecutive quarters (six months).

True. This is a common rule of thumb regarding recessions.

By that long-accepted definition of recession, the US is not even yet in a recession.

A rule of thumb is not a definition. It is a simple, easy-to-apply approximate guideline.

The US GDP decreased for the first time in recent history only in the third (most recent) quarter, by 0.3%.

If you define "recent history" particularly narrowly, that is as "history starting with Jan. 1, 2008", this is approximately true (it actually didn't decrease by 0.3%, it decreased at a 0.5% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate, that was initially announced as a 0.3% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate prior to revision; similarly, the 2.8% growth in Q2 2008 is a 2.8% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate, not a 2.8% increase in Q2 GDP over Q1 GDP.) But if the definition of recent extends beyond Jan. 1, 2008, then you should note that Q4 2007 saw GDP decline at a 0.2% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate (and, for completeness, Q1 2008 saw a GDP increase at a 0.9% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate.)

While the two-consecutive quarter GDP decline rule of thumb is decent as rules of thumb go, it does not reflect a "definition" of a recession so much as describes circumstances that will almost always indicate a recession, and which will usually, but not always, occur in a recession.

NBER, whose pronouncements are the official definition of recession in the US, defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators" that "begins when the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends when the economy reaches its trough". They look at more than just the GDP reports from the BEA in making this determination (including employment, which has declined every month from December 2007, and Gross Domestic Income, a different measure that measures a quantity that by definition should be identical to the GDP, but because measurements of both are imperfect, varies from the measured GDP -- and this GDI declined in Q4 '07, Q1 '08, and Q3 '08.) From the official announcement of the December 2007 peak:

Because a recession is a broad contraction of the economy, not confined to one sector, the committee emphasizes economy-wide measures of economic activity. The committee believes that domestic production and employment are the primary conceptual measures of economic activity.

The committee views the payroll employment measure, which is based on a large survey of employers, as the most reliable comprehensive estimate of employment. This series reached a peak in December 2007 and has declined every month since then.

The committee believes that the two most reliable comprehensive estimates of aggregate domestic production are normally the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Product and the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Income, both produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In concept, the two should be the same, because sales of products generate income for producers and workers equal to the value of the sales. However, because the measurement on the product and income sides proceeds somewhat independently, the two actual measures differ by a statistical discrepancy. The product-side estimates fell slightly in 2007Q4, rose slightly in 2008Q1, rose again in 2008Q2, and fell slightly in 2008Q3. The income-side estimates reached their peak in 2007Q3, fell slightly in 2007Q4 and 2008Q1, rose slightly in 2008Q2 to a level below its

I'm not entirely sure how this was modded informative since it's wrong. A recession happens whenever the National Bureau of Economic Research says it happens. Here is what they said and their reasons for calling the recession. In it you will note these tidbits: Q: The financial press often states the definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. How does that relate to the NBER's recession dating procedure? A: Most of the recessions identified by our procedures do consist of two or more quarters of declining real GDP, but not all of them. As an example, the last recession, in 2001, did not include two consecutive quarters of decline. As of the date of the committee's meeting, the economy had not yet experienced two consecutive quarters of decline. Q: Why doesn't the committee accept the two-quarter definition? A: The committee's procedure for identifying turning points differs from the two-quarter rule in a number of ways. First, we do not identify economic activity solely with real GDP, but use a range of indicators. Second, we place considerable emphasis on monthly indicators in arriving at a monthly chronology. Third, we consider the depth of the decline in economic activity. Recall that our definition includes the phrase, "a significant decline in activity." Fourth, in examining the behavior of domestic production, we consider not only the conventional product-side GDP estimates, but also the conceptually equivalent income-side GDI estimates. The differences between these two sets of estimates were particularly evident in 2007 and 2008. Q: Isn't a recession a period of diminished economic activity? A: It's more accurate to say that a recession--the way we use the word--is a period of diminishing activity rather than diminished (emphasis theirs) activity. We identify a month when the economy reached a peak of activity and a later month when the economy reached a trough. The time in between is a recession, a period when economic activity is contracting. The following period is an expansion.

Unfortunately, your understanding of the figures is a little off.

Growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was negative in 2007:Q4, slightly positive in 2008:Q1 and 2008:Q2, and again negative in 2008:Q3.

Growth in Gross Domestic Income (GDI), which is logically identical to GDP but is measured differently and so can come up with slightly different figures, was negative in 2007:Q4 and 2008:Q1, slightly positive in 2008:Q2 and negative again in 2008:Q3.

Even more telling, payroll (i.e. employment) figures peaked in December 2007.

You can see all of this in the NBER business cycle dating committee's report here .

It's probably reasonable to assume that the small and temporary blip up back into positive territory in the middle of 2008 was a result of the first fiscal stimulus. It's also reasonable to assume that whatever caused it, that temporary respite saved the NBER and the Republican Party from an enormous headache. If the 2008:Q2 figures had been even slightly negative, there would have been significant (and reasonable) pressure for them to declare the recession in the middle of the campaign.

It's a recession when NBER says it's a recession, and that's where all those graphs with recession start/end points take their cue from. NBER says:

Q: The financial press often states the definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. How does that relate to the NBER's recession dating procedure?

A: Most of the recessions identified by our procedures do consist of two or more quarters of declining real GDP, but not all of them. As an example, the last recession, in 2001, did not include two consecutive quarters of decline. As of the date of the committee's meeting, the economy had not yet experienced two consecutive quarters of decline.

Question Recession: How is that defined? Answer In general usage, the word recession connotes a marked slippage in economic activity. While gross domestic product (GDP) is the broadest measure of economic activity, the often-cited identification of a recession with two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth is not an official designation. The designation of a recession is the province of a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private non-profit research organization that focuses on understanding the U.S. economy. The NBER recession is a monthly concept that takes account of a number of monthly indicatorsâ"such as employment, personal income, and industrial productionâ"as well as quarterly GDP growth. Therefore, while negative GDP growth and recessions closely track each other, the consideration by the NBER of the monthly indicators, especially employment, means that the identification of a recession with two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth does not always hold. For information on recession, or business-cycle, dating, see: http://www.nber.org/cycles/jan08bcdc_memo.html.

Something I've never understood is how the government got the money to pay for the war machines, bombs, and bullets. I mean, you hear all the time how that got us out of the depression, but it just doesn't add up.

The Implications of WWII Spending for Local Economic Activity, 1939-1958

"Studies of the development of local economies often point to large-scale World War II military spending as a source of long-term economic growth, even though the spending declined sharply after the demobilization. We examine the longer term impact of the temporary war spending on county economies using a variety of measures of socioeconomic activity: including per capita retail sales, the extent of manufacturing, population growth, the share of women in the work force, housing values and ownership, and per capita savings over the period 1940-1950. We find that in the longer term counties receiving more war spending per capita during the war experienced extensive growth due to increases in population but not intensive growth, as the war spending had very small impacts on per capita measures of economic activity."

So if it wasn't that, what caused the "Great Escape" from the Great Depression?

Here is one theory:

"In 1945 the death of Roosevelt
and the succession of Harry S Truman and his administration completed the
shift from a political regime investors perceived as full of uncertainty to one in
which they felt much more confident about the security of their private prop-
erty rights. Sufficiently sanguine for the first time since 1929, and finally
freed from government restraints on private investment for civilian purposes,
investors set in motion the postwar investment boom that powered the
economy's return to sustained prosperity notwithstanding the drastic reduc-
tion of federal government spending from its extraordinarily elevated war-
time levels."

Just because I hate making blanket assertions:
From coverage of a Ben Bernanke talk last year.
Original stats from NBER

Recessions of the 20th Century
Date Range & Duration (In months)
Sept. 1902-Aug. 1904 23
May 1907-June 1908 13
Jan. 1910-Jan. 1912 24
Jan. 1913-Dec. 1914 23
Aug. 1918-March 1919 7
Jan. 1920-July 1921 18
May 1923-July 1924 14
Oct. 1926-Nov. 1927 13
Aug. 1929-March 1933 43
May 1937-June 1938 13
Feb. 1945-Oct. 1945 8
Nov. 1948-Oct. 1949 11
July 1953-May 1954 10
Aug. 1957-April 1958 8
April 1960-Feb. 1961 10
Dec. 1969-Nov. 1970 11
Nov. 1973-March 1975 16
Jan. 1980-July 1980 6
July 1981-Nov. 1982 16
July 1990-March 1991 8
March 2001-Nov. 2001 8

Makes sense in a kind of "can't do any harm" sort of way. But does it really do any good?

No drive has ever been "recovered" with STM. The claims by Guttman and others that claim this is routine are simply overwrought. Data recovery firms can find overwritten files, since overwriting a file only removes the name and some links. They can't retrieve overwritten data sectors.

I have posted some background at nber.org

See also http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html

Well this article is a response to Gutmann's Usenix paper where apparently everyone got the idea that STM could be used in a cleanroom to get data off a drive that has been overwritten. The response is written by someone at the National Bureau of Economic Research so who knows what qualifies them to write about this, but if you read it he does seem to have done his homework. He claims that Gutmann's paper isn't true and it's evidence doesn't pan out. I'm not really qualified to tell and I'm not sure how much drive technology which you mention changes the issue from 1996 when Gutmann wrote his paper.

In any case this Bureau of economic research guy claims no one can do EFM recovery so that's his opinion on the title question above. And you and the GP post both make good points that this is certainly extreme paranoid level even if someone could do that type of recovery. You'd have to have some awfully important data to protect. So even though the contest is indeed a farce as others have pointed out, they do make a good point that dd'ing zeros is good enough for anything but extremely important data.

Q: The financial press often states the definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. How does that relate to the NBER's recession dating procedure?

A: Most of the recessions identified by our procedures do consist of two or more quarters of declining real GDP, but not all of them. Our procedure differs from the two-quarter rule in a number of ways. First, we consider the depth as well as the duration of the decline in economic activity. Recall that our definition includes the phrase, "a significant decline in economic activity." Second, we use a broader array of indicators than just real GDP. One reason for this is that the GDP data are subject to considerable revision. Third, we use monthly indicators to arrive at a monthly chronology.

Q: Isn't a recession a period of diminished economic activity?

A: It's more accurate to say that a recession-the way we use the word-is a period of diminishing activity rather than diminished activity. We identify a month when the economy reached a peak of activity and a later month when the economy reached a trough. The time in between is a recession, a period when the economy is contracting. The following period is an expansion. Economic activity is below normal or diminished for some part of the recession and for some part of the following expansion as well. Some call the period of diminished activity a slump.

The big plus of Nexenta for me is that it is based on APT, whereas OpenSolaris (the distro) has invented yet another new package system (IPS). APT just works so well on Debian and Ubuntu that I don't want to use anything else, and for end users there are nice tools like Synaptic and Ubuntu's Add/Remove tool (which shows popularity ratings for packages as well). At least PCLinuxOS adopted APT while still using RPM as the package format...

My only real interest in Solaris is to use ZFS on a home NAS - having all that checksumming looks a lot more attractive now that disk sizes are getting so huge that, according to some, RAID 5 will stop being useful in 2009, due to the scenario of one disk failing and another one having an unrecoverable read error (URE) during the rebuild - see http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162. Without proactive scanning of the disk media for read errors before any failure, and checksumming that can hopefully correct some such errors, RAID 5 rebuilds after failed disks will increasingly fail due to UREs. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html as well for a much more technical view of the issues with RAID 5.

James Besen and Eric Maskin, Sequential Innovation, patents and imitation. It was on the web some years ago as an MIT working paper.

Bronwyn H. Hall and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The Patent Paradox Revisited: Determinants of Patenting in the US Semiconductor Industry, 1980-94

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=158610

drafts of both that and this:

Bronwyn H. Hall and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The effects of strengthening patent rights on firms engaged in cumulative innovation: insights from the semiconductor industry.

from here:

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/bhhall/bhpapers.html

Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)

http://www.nber.org/papers/W7552.pdf

Technically, the NBER decide when/if a recession occurred, and it's generally well and truly after the fact. As an example, (from their explanation of business cycle timing):

"On July 16, 2003, the committee determined that a trough in economic activity occurred in November 2001." http://www.nber.org/cycles/recessions.html

I believe you're quoting from the Maskin paper, not the Yao paper I'm referring to.

http://www.nber.org/~confer/2005/IPEs05/yao.pdf

Sure, there are just as many pro patent as anti patent studies, most are in the middle.

Here is one that is more of a pro patent study that references the paper that is the subject of this post:

Policy Implications of Weak Patent Rights

I used to think this. As I said in another comment, the reason there is so much starvation in, say, Africa has to do more with the legacy of European colonization destroying a hunter/gatherer and substance agriculture lifestyles (including by head taxers -- pay the tax or they'll kill or enslave you basically, and the only way to get money to pay the tax is to work all year on some European plantation).

Also, food aid via imported food destroys indigenous agricultural systems economically -- an Ethiopian example:
    "Does International Food Aid Harm the Poor?"
    http://www.nber.org/digest/mar05/w11048.html
"To carry out their study, Levinsohn and McMillan merge data from two nationally representative surveys and create a data set of 8,212 urban and 8,308 rural Ethiopian households. ... Levinsohn and McMillan estimate that, in the absence of food aid, the price of wheat in Ethiopia would be $295 per metric ton, compared to an actual price of $193 per metric ton in 1999. On average, the authors conclude, "the loss in consumer surplus works out to roughly 37 US dollars per household per year for households that consume wheat and the gain in producer surplus works out to roughly 157 US dollars per household per year for households that sell wheat." In a nation such as Ethiopia, where the poverty line is about $132 per year, the impact is therefore substantial."

You're right through that changes in population technology have big effects -- including driving people to change their lifestyles to continue to produce enough food for everyone. I hope that as we continue to invent cheaper solar panels and cheaper and more versatile 3D printers that we'll be able to eliminate a lot of "work"
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
and have a lifestyle which uses technology but feels a lot more like the best of hunter/gatherer society. See the ending of this story called "Manna":
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Also, we could support trillions of people in space habitats built out of asteroidal ore and powered by sunlight.
    http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/settle.htm

The current P/E of NASDAQ is 24. That's a tad high; with bond yields around 5%, a P/E more than 20 must be based on growth speculation. I could reasonably see the NASDAQ losing 20% of its value in one shot. However, during the bubble, the P/E of the NASDAQ was over 100.

It's hard to overemphasize the difference between these two numbers. Look at the ratios between the NASDAQ P/E numbers and bond yields. Our current ratio is 1.2, which is 20% "too high". The bubble ratio was over 5.8, which 480% too high. The two situations are not even comparable.

If the NASDAQ actually lost over 75% of its value, like it did when the dot-com bubble burst, I'd be buying as much of QQQQ as I could get my hands on.

Your entire argument is an oft-repeated one, but still has very little bearing on reality. Studies show that entrepreneurs value factors like time-to-market, trademark recognition and actual innovation much higher than patent protection (Mazzoleni and Nelson, 1998; Cohen et al., 2000). Besides, the actual copycat threat comes from low-wage countries like China who basically doesn't give a rat's ass about US patent protection in the first place.

There's an anecdote from a local (to me) innovation and manufacturing company making tilt-rotors for excavators. They have at least one major copycat competitor and they *love* the competition. It seems they copycats are very low quality and doesn't really cut into the innovator's sales since the ones buying the copy would not be getting the innovator's product anyway. That is, until after they tried the copycat's product, got hooked on the functionality and got tired of adding new hydralic fluid every week (the copies apparently leak like sieves). Having a copycat is like free marketing to a whole new market segment, a bit like how the fashion industry works - the copycats are what drives innovation and new looks.

---
Mazzolini, R. and R.R. Nelson, The Benefits and Costs of Strong Patent Protection: A Contribution to the Current Debate , Research Policy 27 (3), p. 273-284, 1998.

Cohen, W., R.R. Nelson and J. P. Walsh, Protecting their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not), Working Paper 7552, Cambridge, National Bureau of Economic Research (available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7552), 2000.

Finally, our model implies that it is very hard to claim that immigration has been a significant determinant in the deterioration of wage distribution during the 1990's and 2000's. Only one eight of the sub-average wage performance of high-school dropouts in the 1990-2004 period can be attributed to immigration, while immigration helped wages of high school graduates (the second worst performers of the period). As 30% of U.S. workers are in the group of high school graduates (vis-a-vis only 10% in the High school dropout group) it may be reasonable to consider the college-high school wage premium as the most meaningful measure of wage dispersion. In this case immigration actually worked to reduce that wage gap in the 1990-2004 period.

Of course. Here's a starter list:

Basalla, G., The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1988.
Canadian Intellectual Property Office, A Guide to Patents, Ottawa, Publications Centre Communications Branch, Industry Canada, 1994.
Carter, H.D., If You Want to Invent, New York, The Vanguard Press, 1939.
Cohen, W., R.R. Nelson and J. P. Walsh, Protecting their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not), Working Paper 7552, Cambridge, National Bureau of Economic Research (available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7552), 2000.
De Gregori, T.R., A Theory of Technology: Continuity and Change in Human Development, Ames, Iowa State University Press, 1985.
Desrochers, P., De l'influence d'une ville diversifiée sur la combinaison de techniques: Typologie et analyse de processus, Ph.D. dissertation (Geography), Université de Montréal, 2000.
Hounshell, D., From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Kinsella, N.S., Is Intellectual Property Legitimate? , Paper presented at the Austrian Scholars Conference 6, Auburn, Alabama, March 25, 2000.
Mazzolini, R. and R.R. Nelson, The Benefits and Costs of Strong Patent Protection: A Contribution to the Current Debate , Research Policy 27 (3), p. 273-284, 1998.
Petroski, H., The Evolution of Useful Thing, New York, Random House, 1992.
Rosegger, G., The Economics of Production and Innovation: An Industrial Perspective, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1986.
Scherer, F.M., Comment on R.E. Evenson International Invention: Implications for Technology Market Analysis , In Zvi Griliches, ed. R&D, Patents, and Productivity, Chicago, University of Chicago and National Bureau of Economic Research, p. 123-126, 1987.

Let me know when you want more.

I'm a strong proponent of copyrights -- just the 1790 version of 14+14 years.

I'm sure a lot of people share your schoolyard mentality, though, and will use the lawlessness of our governments as an excuse to commit all sorts of crime. I look forward to observe the sociological impact of our governments' actions over the next few decades.

Heh, my economics degree sits unused as I work for a living (little joke there).

However, there is some reading available for those with time.

Here is a paper that talks about some of the problems with picking firm employment/inflation ratios:
http://www.nber.org/papers/W6518

And here is (IMO) the best model of what is going on, though clearly there isn't consensus about this that I have found in the economic community:
http://papers.nber.org/papers/w5735

With specific regard to the wurbles problem as a metaphore for skilled employment in the US Market, you are holding all kinds of micro-level variables constant. For example, you can't just bump the wage of employees arbitrarily and assume that the same number of positions will be available. Wurble manufacturers are facing a real labor market with its own supply and demand, different elasticities and inefficiencies. Then, assuming infinitely elastic supply of employment and infinitely inelastic demand of employment, you make assumptions about the market pricing of wurbles (namely, that demand of wurbles is infinitely inelastic, and 100% of the wage increase is pushed into price).

Like I said, all of this is fine- a universal wage increase will very likely lead to some inflation (though not necessarily 100% of the wage increase will be translated). But it is not necessarily true, and people who haven't studied the results of relaxing assumptions of models can be easily mislead. A more relevant question would be "will raising the current minimum wage yeild an increase in inflation in the current American economy?"... I tend to think not, both because of the relative size of the minimum wage labor pool vs. size of the national labor pool, and the guess that the current labor market for the minimum wage segment is highly inefficient (this is a topic about economic migration of all things).

Your username suggests you are interested in econ, and I suspect classicly trained, so I'm sure you are aware of all of this.