Ed Cottrell

  • More on Inequality

    On the heels of my post on upward mobility comes an insightful post by Cato’s Michael Tanner. Two key quotations: In the end, however, one has to ask a more basic question. Why do we care about inequality at all? Poverty, of course, is a bad thing. But is inequality? After all, if we doubled…

  • Fascinating Use of Web-Based Collaboration

    I just read about Duolingo on CNN. The concept is fascinating: teach people foreign languages for free, by feeding them text to learn and/or translate, some of which comes from real websites. In the end, you end up translating the entire web—the real goal. Some of the gotchas are obvious: getting enough participation to succeed…

  • Ron Paul, Former Republican

    Say what you want about Ron Paul—and there is a lot to say—this is perhaps the best one-sentence commentary on his candidacy to date: It is quite remarkable that a man who renounced his membership in the Republican Party because he so despised the Ronald Reagan administration could now be running for the GOP nomination…

  • Upward Mobility

    I read an interesting article on economic mobility in National Review Online, which got me thinking. The article is good in that it points out some of the statistical challenges in measuring upward mobility. For example, who counts as poor? Who counts as middle class? Are we measuring intergenerational or intragenerational mobility? In acknowledging these…

  • Follow me on Twitter

    Follow me at @EdInHouston. Not everything on here will necessarily be on there, and vice versa.