, June 25, 2014
Daily Bafflements
Just let us know who wins the argument . . . / Photo by Chris Moncus
• In case you missed it yesterday, David Leonhardt at the New York Times wrote about a Brookings Institution study that declared that the student debt crisis in America was not actually that bad, so stop whining. Mike Konczal at The New Republic argued that the long-term impact of student debt is more important than the short-term, and so yes, it is that bad. Choire Sicha at The Awl was a bit more blunt, declaring the Brookings numbers and Leonhardt’s conclusions to be a pile of garbage. Matt Phillips wrote an article for Quartz entitled “Why elites hate it when you say giant student debts aren’t the problem,” in which “elites” are defined as the “vocal, college-aged group [that] dominates the mediascape,” and which cited exactly and only one such “elite” critic of the Brookings study, Choire Sicha, who by the way didn’t go to college. Baffling! Just let us know who comes out on top, guys; in the meantime we’ll just be over here paying our loan bills.
• Today in Dangerous Ideas: Man proposes that an economic system that allows a CEO’s salary to be a thousand times more than his or her employees’ salaries is based on rather arbitrary rules and practices, and that from time to time in a nation’s history it may be a good idea for that nation to examine and perhaps adjust those arbitrary rules and practices; Internet inevitably explodes with readers’ wrath.
• When is aggregation akin to plagiarism? When you forget to cite or link to what you’re aggregating. Be careful out there, kids.
• “I know this is Silicon Valley, where words have no meaning, but it takes a special brand of Ayn Rand–spouting nincompoop to try to pass off the unilateral privatization and scalping of public services as a new form of ‘sharing.’”—Slate’s Will Oremus on MonkeyParking, the new app that lets drivers literally sell their parking spaces to the highest bidder before they vacate them.