by Art Woolf
My weekly look at interesting sites, economic and otherwise, on the web.
1. An animated video, from the US Department of Energy, showing the rapid evolution of oil and gas wells in the Baaken formation in North Dakota and Montana. Be sure to click on the arrow and watch. North Dakota, by the way, will be the second largest oil producer in the U.S. within a few months. It produces more oil than Iraq or Venezuela and will soon produce more than Nigeria.
2. President Obama has declared war, sort of, on the escalating cost of higher education. Marc Eisner, a political scientist at Wesleyan College, tries to explain one of the reasons tuitions are rising by comparing his college life in the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin, with college life today:
I never saw an advisor. The course catalog would be delivered in bulk to Memorial Union (and other locations) and the university assumed that their adult students could make their own decisions about courses, the coherence of their schedules, and the number of courses they wanted to take in any given semester (if it took you longer to graduate than the standard four years, it was your problem). The one year I lived in university housing (a cooperative), I slept in a bunk bed in a cement block room with one window. The food was rather bland—lots of starch, little in the way of protein—and you had your choice of milk or water (things were a little better in the dorms, but not much). Since no one owned televisions, if you wanted to watch TV you went to a commons area or hit a bar. If you wanted to exercise, you went to a gym that was equipped with an assortment of old steel benches, iron weights, punching bags, and stationary bikes.
...In short, the college experience today is far different than in was a generation ago. Whether it is a net improvement depends on your perspective, I suppose (I am skeptical, and tend to embrace the more Spartan days of the past when students were treated like adults instead of infantilized and resources were lavished on the library instead of the co-curriculum).
There is a lot of truth to that.
3. Allen Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago, gives his thoughts on how numbers can be used to manipulate conclusions. Examples:
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