I took a day of vacation from vacation (a.k.a. a day of work) when I was out in California to drive down to the Central Valley metropolis of Merced, which is by several measures (foreclosures, average price decline) the worst real estate market in America. I figured I might …

This morning’s New York Times has a story about the “$250 billion war chest” amassed to finance a “tidal wave of infrastructure projects in the United States and overseas.” Big banks and funds want to buy your roads, bridges and airports, America—and since Congress won’t put on its big-boy pants and pay for infrastructure improvements, …

Journalists who write about the housing meltdown occasionally get taken to task for not laying enough blame at the feet of the individual homeowners who were signing up for mortgages they should have known they couldn’t afford. I, myself, have been accused of this. So in the interest of blaming homeowners their fair share, let me present …

So far today we’ve learned that:

1) The decline in housing prices slowed in June, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller data.

2) Average income in 2006, as reported by the IRS, finally topped the 2000 level (in 2001-2005 it hadn’t).

3) The number of Americans without health insurance declined in 2007, the first such drop since …

This blog is mostly going to ignore the Great Mile-High Non-News Event (as it will the Great Twin-Citian Non-News Event). There’s other folks that can take care of that.

But listening to Teddy Kennedy talk like a Kennedy tonight reminded me of the 1967 novelty hit (it rose to No. 20 on the pop charts; I think I must have first heard it …

I’m back in New York. And while I’d really prefer to be back in bed as well, I figure I ought to signal my return with this shot of the sun setting on the Sweetwater Mountains (they’re on the California-Nevada border north of Mono Lake, we were one range to the west). When Barbara’s in charge you get well-reasoned posts on important …

In response to my post yesterday about why it’s a bad idea for schools to pay kids to get good grades, a commenter named yeah man raised a great point. He wrote:

If the social norms in place were working there would have been no need for this program in the first place.

This morning I was reading the October issue of the Journal of …

I have a piece in this week’s magazine (Obama on the cover). It starts:

Stuart Katz and Jeff Kovack met at Ohio State. They quickly hit it off. The pair joined the same fraternity, and after graduation, both moved to Baltimore, where they became roommates. Then a year ago in April, the 25-year-olds took the next step: they bought a

…

I cringed this morning when I read the piece in the Wall Street Journal about schools paying students to get good grades. The writer points out that such programs have had mixed results, and hangs his story on a new study of a 12-year-old Texas program. He writes:

In Texas, high-school students enrolled in Advanced Placement classes who

…

Some folks from the Port of Long Beach stopped by this afternoon as part of an East Coast PR kick. They threw some pretty interesting stats my way, including this one: over a 24-hour period, a single cargo ship sitting at Long Beach with its engines running throws off more emissions than all the passenger car traffic in the Los Angeles …

Like most run-of-the-mill consumers, I did a little jig this morning when I read that the FTC would be banning prerecorded sales calls. I don’t care if advances in call-center telephony boost American productivity, picking up the receiver and being confronted with a prerecorded message is annoying.

Sure, there are exceptions, the same …

That’s one of the findings in a new piece of research out from the U.S. Census. The headline news from Fertility of American Women: 2006 is that 20% of women aged 40 to 44 have no children, twice the level of 30 years ago.

But what was really surprising to me was that of the women still having kids, those in the Midwest are more likely …