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Hoover at Stanford’s Stephen Kotkin on Stalin’s Tyranny, WWII, & the Cold WarApril 24, 2024 - 12:33 pm
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Massachusetts’ Workforce Growing Older and More Diverse, Remains Highly EducatedApril 18, 2024 - 9:26 am
Johns Hopkins’ Ashley Berner on Educational Pluralism & DemocracyApril 17, 2024 - 2:53 pm
Why the secrecy? Pioneer Calls for Open Meetings Dealing with Steward’s Impact on Patient Care.April 16, 2024 - 1:59 pm
Industrial Policy Reimaged: Can Government Improve Free MarketsApril 16, 2024 - 12:34 pm
Some ugly numbers on deficient bridges
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, Economic Opportunity, News /byThe Reason Foundation has posted up some data on the number of deficient bridges across the nation. The feds track this stuff for obvious reasons (mobility across states, an understanding as to how states are doing and what they are doing with fed money, and also because bridges that are rated ‘deficient’ become eligible for federal funding for repair. Overall, Reason notes that The condition of the nation’s highway bridges continued to improve from 2004 to 2005. Of the 596,980 highway bridges in the current National Bridge Inventory, 147,913—about 24.52 percent—were reported deficient for 2005 (see table), a slight improvement from 2004. In 1998 about 29.0 percent were rated deficient. However, progress is slow; at the current rate of improvement, […]
Thoreau, he most certainly is not
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /by Liam DayThis is priceless. David Wasserman, a Madison, Wisconsin middle-school teacher, recently refused to administer the state assessment to his students. It appears he was protesting No Child Left Behind’s mandatory testing requirements. As the controversial law’s first “conscientious objector” he received a fair amount of press coverage. In fact, he recently gave Newsweek Web an interview in which, when asked why he took his stand, he responded: I feel that the tests assess academic achievement in biased ways, with a challenging and confusing format of questions and answers. Shoot. I just hate that confusing question and answer format.
People v Place
/0 Comments/in Blog, Economic Opportunity, News /byIn the High Court of Common Sense, the people will always win. Consider Youngstown or Buffalo. Both have seen a complete collapse in their populations. Youngstown is half the city it once was in terms of population. As Ed Glaeser points out in the Autumn 2007 City Journal, Buffalo hit a ceiling of 580,000 in the 1920s and has gone to 300,000. Noting the “billions upon billions” spent by the feds since the 50s on Buffalo and other failed “middle cities”, Ed lists out the usual suspects–Urban Renewal funds, HUD money, and lots of dough for the metropolitan rail system, even as ridership went down, down, down, as people left, left, left. Ed’s money quotes: All this spending aimed at […]
To gas tax or not to gas tax
/1 Comment/in Better Government, Blog, News /byKathleen Hunter’s piece, The Long and Taxing Road, in the July 2007 Governing magazine has some good information on Oregon’s experiment to understand the ability to replace or supplement the gas tax with technology (also a big theme here at Pioneer, see the transcript from our 2006 event Creating Mobility). Hunter notes: Every time [motorists’ odometers] blipped up by a mile, they owed the state of Oregon a tax of exactly 1.2 cents. The trip to Eugene from Portland, a 100-mile journey on Interstate 5, would cost $1.20. And that’s not counting for gas. The technology in place outside Portland counts miles traveled, avoids counting roads outside of Oregon, and can charge different amounts based on where in Oregon the […]
Too much house
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byI’ve heard people comment that there must not be a market for modestly sized single-family homes, or they would be built. Easton Developer Nick Mirrione does not see it that way. He is trying to build cottage homes in Easton, and he’s been knocking on doors to recruit supporters. In a presentation he did for us at Pioneer, he noted that for the first time in history, more than half of the households in the U.S. are not married couple households. He would like to build homes for the more than 50% of MA households that either do not have children or are single parents with children. The McMansion is often too much house for this demographic. Try as he […]