Essay
Fresh on the heals of more murders in one Providence neighborhood, residents in another provided an example of one way to cut down on crime: The suspects fled empty-handed from the house … and found a gathering crowd, said Randy Figueroa, 20, one of the neighbors. One of the suspects pulled out a gun and…
After months of hearing from various sources, notably URI economist Len Lardaro, that official jobs reports for Rhode Island were inaccurately gloomy, I was thrilled, yesterday, to see Governor Chafee authorize the state Department of Labor and Training (DLT) to release new estimates. Basically, there is a substantial lag before the federal Bureau of Labor…
The family and I recently spent a long weekend in Washington, D.C. and we visited the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The “America on the Move” exhibition included a 1939 Dodge school bus from Martinsburg, Indiana, which served as a platform for explaining how technology (the bus) affected education. In rural areas, the introduction of…
Let me preface this post by saying that I applaud Attorney General Peter Kilmartin for moving to have Rhode Island participate in the Secure Communities Program. He had to be correct in that regard because it earned him a dubious rating on the (smirk) “Truth”-O-Meter. In late September of last year, the RI Board of…
The Stephen Hopkins Center for Civil Rights’ panel discussion on the event of Milton Friedman’s hundredth birthday offset “liberaltarian” Brown professor John Tomasi with June Speakman, a Roger Williams professor more inclined to agree with the prefix of the coinage. The panel would have benefited from the inclusion of an unabridged conservative who agreed with…
What makes politics and policy fun is that people of good will and honest intentions can disagree and strive to change each other’s mind. Starting from one’s essential worldview, myriad stages of decisions must be made without the possibility of complete information — that is, subjectively — so persuading and being persuaded are distinct possibilities.…
For a quick diversion from the immediately relevant tasks of quantifying legislator votes and charting the ebbs and flows of Rhode Island civilization, I can’t resist commenting on Andrew Hacker’s New York Times question, “Is Algebra Necessary?“: My question extends beyond algebra and applies more broadly to the usual mathematics sequence, from geometry through calculus.…
We hear people talking about “throw ’em all out” and actually, I’m ok with throwing out the good with the bad, because we have so many more of the bad. But it’s interesting when you can actually see first-hand just how bad it can be and the odds that are stacked against those that are…
In his Saturday column, Ted Nesi makes a point that I’d been thinking about as the week came to a close, related to a proposed $40 million infrastructure bond in Providence: Governments should borrow to fund long-term infrastructure projects that have a higher rate of return than the interest on the bonds, but [in Providence’s…
It’s intriguing to observe the telescoping nature of the “context” to which folks are referring when discussing President Obama’s infamous Friday the 13th Roanoake speech. The damning two sentences continue to be: If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The inferred meaning is that somebody else should…