A former Chinese finance minister suggested Friday that local governments across China may be disguising how much debt they are sitting on. Bloomberg reports: [Former Finance Minister] Xiang [Huaicheng]’s estimate for provincial and city government borrowings is almost double the 10.7 trillion-yuan figure that the National Audit Office gave for such debt in a 2011 […]

The UK could have enough shale gas to heat its homes for the next millenium, as the British Geological Survey (BGS) plans to report this month. The Telegraph has the story on what is expected to be a hefty windfall: Industry insiders say the BGS could report between 1,200 trillion and 1,800 trillion cubic feet of gas […]

The first rule of the meritocratic elite is: you don’t talk about the meritocratic elite.In a recent letter in the daily Princeton, Susan Patton, a Princeton mother, argued that women should use their time on campus to find a husband. For various reasons, the piece angered or annoyed many pundits across the blogosphere (we discussed it here). […]

The Huffington Post conducted an online poll of a varied group of Americans to see how many people in our country want to establish an official religion at the national level or in their state. There are a couple things you should keep in mind as you check out the results.Established religion does not mean a […]

Related to our earlier post on the bifurcated job market, here are two Saturday reads for you to ponder:1) Megan McArdle, writing in the Daily Beast last week, suggested that a kind of fundamental shift is underway in our society: “Skilled workers with higher degrees are increasingly ending up in lower-skilled jobs that don’t really require […]

A recent Gallup Poll shows that 55 percent of American adults think the US should defend South Korea with US military forces if it’s attacked by North Korea, while only 34 percent said we shouldn’t. What’s more, only 28 percent of those polled think it’s likely that North Korea will directly attack the US in […]

In light of yesterday’s underwhelming jobs report, we present the following two charts care of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (h/t Zero Hedge).Here’s the younger cohort broken out a bit more finely. Of the under-55 set, only the 25-34 age bracket has seen any kind of job growth since the start of 2009. And it’s […]

More than 200,000 retired Teamsters are now facing serious problems with their pensions. Central States Fund, a Teamsters pension plan founded by former union head Jimmy Hoffa, is only 60 percent funded and is now in “critical” status, as the WSJ reports. Despite efforts to make up the difference with big bets in the stock market, […]

Students, meet your robot professor. EdX, an educational consortium founded by Harvard and MIT we’ve written about before, has just released new software that grades student papers automatically. The NYT reports: The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of […]

Republicans and Democrats finally agree on something: making health care more expensive for seniors. Currently, seniors who are insured through Medicare usually pay for some of their treatment out of their own pocket. But not all payments are the same. When their care is from a hospital, they pay one kind of deductible; when it […]