Notes in the Margins: Competition, longer lives and the skills shortage

Higher education linked to longer life, CDC report shows Education may not only improve a person's finances, it is also linked to better health habits and a longer life. (USA Today)

Skills Shortage: Fact or Fiction Do we really have a skills gap or is it that employers just aren’t willing to pay market value for quality workers (and thus the workers decide to find employment in other sectors)? (economicmodeling.com)

How Reliable Are the Social Sciences? How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention. But this is hardly a reasonable view.  There is considerable distance between, say, the confidence we should place in astronomers’ calculations of eclipses and a small marketing study suggesting that consumers prefer laundry soap in blue boxes. (The New York Times)

Stanford Dean Saloner on Teaching Innovation Garth Saloner, dean of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, discusses the three elements of innovation that the school tries to nurture in its students. (The Wall Street Journal)

How Competition Is Killing Higher Education In higher education, competition often discourages risk taking, leads to overly cautious short-term decisions, produces a mediocre product for the price, and promotes excessive spending on physical plants and bureaucracies. (Bloomberg via University Business)

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