Last week, we noted that India is poised to become the global leader in MOOCs over the next few years. The country has all the characteristics that would drive people into the arms of MOOCs: lots of English speakers, a large number of young people with internet access looking for jobs, and a dearth of […]

Yesterday Colorado’s Public Employees’ Retirement Association voted to scale back its expected rate of return on investments from 8 percent to 7.5 percent. Miami Herald: The Denver Post reports that the fund has $23 billion in unfunded liability. That’s money it owes to current and future retirees over the next 30 years but does not have […]

The bad consequences of the President’s ACA “fix” just keep getting clearer. The Christian Science Monitor has a good summary of the stunned reactions from industry experts to Obama’s announcement that insurance companies will now be able to extend pre-existing plans for another year, if they choose to do so: In blue Washington State, where, unlike HealthCare.gov, the […]

WRM’s latest column in the WSJ is about the competition between Europe and Russia to win Ukraine. As the piece argues, the stakes for this contest are very high indeed: the outcome could decide whether Vladimir Putin’s strategic plan for Russia succeeds for fails. More: There is no doubt that, psychologically and practically, the crown jewel […]

Pundits across the spectrum were enraged this week by a consulting firm that teaches nannies to cook quinoa. The NYT published a piece Wednesday profiling Stephanie Johnson and Dan Yashiv, a couple who hired a “nanny consulting firm” to teach their nanny to cook more “refined” meals for their daughter. Matt Yglesias has a good roundup of […]

GMOs get a bad rap, as much for their perceived violation of what is “natural” as for misinformed fears over their safety. But drought-and pest-resistant crops also get a bum rap because of the company that holds so many of the patents for their seeds: Monsanto. Just saying the company’s name will send an environmentalist’s […]

Nuclear power is a forbidding energy source, both for its spectacular failures in places like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, and for its general incomprehensibility. It’s (relatively) easy to understand how burning oil, gas, or coal produce energy, but most of us can’t fathom what goes on inside those monolithic concrete cooling towers and […]

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) gave a speech this week to the Heritage Foundation’s anti-poverty forum that has the right pretty excited. In both his rhetoric—he called for a “new, bold, and heroic offensive in the War on Poverty”—and his policy proposals, Lee struck a markedly different tone than we’re used to hearing from Republicans like, say, Romney […]

Environmentalists love to hate him, but Bjørn Lomborg is consistently one of the smartest green thinkers out there, and he’s proven that again with a new piece exposing the rampant inefficiencies in Europe’s green policies. Lomborg writes for Project Syndicate: [T]he only peer-reviewed overview of EU climate policy estimates that it can avoid climate-related damage of about $10 billion per […]

In an effort to make MOOCs a more serious credential, providers are looking to create the kinds of for-credit courses that employers will take seriously, and LinkedIn wants in. Yesterday LinkedIn reported that it is partnering with Coursera, Udacity and EdX, along with some lesser-known MOOC platforms, to create “Direct-to-Profile certifications,” which appear as an official credential […]