http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/gladwell

The numbers also reveal that business social network LinkedIn, which may or may not be aiming for a billion-dollar valuation, is still growing rapidly, pulling in 361 percent more unique users than it did a year ago. Facebook is growing more slowly, with 56 percent more visitors[…]

Teach for America teachers may be new to the profession, but they are generally more effective than their experienced colleagues, finds a new Urban Institute analysis. On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers’ effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience.

The study, "Making a Difference? The Effects of Teach for America in High School," is the first investigation of the impact of TFA in high schools.  The report’s authors, Zeyu Xu, Jane Hannaway, and Colin Taylor, analyzed North Carolina high school data produced between 2000 and 2006, including test scores, teacher characteristics, and student demographics.

Teach for America recruits and selects high-achieving college graduates, many of whom have no prior experience or coursework in education, and places them in needy schools after short but intensive training. Xu, Hannaway, and Taylor found that TFA corps members serving in North Carolina tended to have graduated from more selective colleges and universities and to have scored higher on the Praxis, a teacher-licensing exam.

These data warrant the attention of education policymakers concerned with teacher quality, says Jane Hannaway, director of the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center and the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER).

"School systems working to improve their neediest schools may find that focusing on teacher selection has a greater payoff in high schools than focusing on teacher retention," she says. "In our study, we don’t know whether it was the strong academic credentials of TFA corps members or some kind of special motivation that came with being a TFA teacher that made the difference, but the results were clear: students performed better when they had an inexperienced TFA teacher than when they had a veteran educator at the blackboard."

"Making a Difference? The Effects of Teach for America in High School" is a working paper produced by the Urban Institute’s National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) and funded by the Steven L. Merrill Family Foundation and the Institute for Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.  The working paper is available at http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=411642.

According to a new study, up to 20 percent of long-term relationships begin when one or both partners are involved with others. Evolutionary psychologists call this "mate poaching." This figure holds steady across age groups and among couples who are married, living together or dating, according to psychologists who polled some 16,000 individuals in 53 countries as part of the International Sexuality Description Project. Most surprising to researchers: Sweetheart-stealing is prevalent across continents and cultures, although it is notably less common in East Asia.

In North America, 62 percent of men and 40 percent of women say they’ve attempted to entice another’s mate for a short-term fling. Some 47 percent of men and 32 percent of women say they’ve succumbed to such attempts. The more sexual equality in a culture, the closer women come to matching men in the number of poaching attempts. The study appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

That males seek multiple partners is standard Darwinian theory, borne out in studies across the animal kingdom. But researchers say it is becoming increasingly clear that in humans, women are equally hardwired for infidelity. David Schmitt, lead researcher and psychology professor at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, says studies show women, just like men, are designed to be unfaithful and promiscuous at times. "It’s usually around ovulation," says Schmitt.

…Schmitt has found that certain personality traits are more common among poachers and poachees, regardless of whether they are Estonian, Brazilian or Moroccan. The most prolific mate thieves—both male and female—describe themselves as open to new experiences, sexually attractive and willing to talk about sex. Men and women who have received the most poaching attempts also tend to have these traits. And the people who are most willing to be poached? "It’s not a pretty picture," says Schmitt. They tend to have high self-esteem but rate low on altruism, trust, straight-forwardness and modesty. "One of the key ways that poaching seems to happen," says Schmitt, "is that you get two people together who are open to talking about their sexual feelings. It’s a slippery slope."

While his friends scramble for jobs flipping burgers or bagging groceries this summer, 18-year-old Mike Everest will be working as a trader in the fantasy Web world of Entropia Universe, buying and selling virtual animal skins and weapons. His goods exist only online, but his earnings are real. In the past four years, he’s made $35,000.

…Entropia Universe boasts 722,000 players and allows money earned online to be withdrawn from brick-and-mortar banks with an Entropia ATM card. On a typical day, Second Life players spend close to $1.5 million on virtual clothes, jewelry, homes, cars and real estate. The site’s roughly 1.2 million active players use their credit cards to purchase Second Life currency called Lindens, which are pegged to the dollar at about 270 Lindens to $1. Virtual merchants can convert their profits into dollars through a money exchange run by Linden Lab, the company that operates Second Life. Linden Lab pays out proceeds with real-life checks or through PayPal accounts.

Any crisis now accelerates the trend toward greater public laxity, private excess and central bank secrecy. A crisis, real or manufactured, is most useful to increase the amount of public money clandestinely extended and diminish public oversight and administrative review of outcomes. This has been the pattern for at least 25 years, and may continue for some time to come before a taxpayer or creditor revolt ends the American spiral downwards towards bankruptcy and corporate tyranny.

It used to be the realm of conspiracy theorists to assert that policy makers in Washington were aligned with the military-intelligence complex in promoting international conflicts for profit or that the Federal Reserve was the tool of Wall Street banks in promoting irresponsible bubbles. Now it is accepted policy, defended openly in the media as right and inevitable, as providing an efficient means for America to meet the “threats” to security and financial stability in a changing world.

What percentage of your ancestors were men?

No, it’s not 50 percent, as I’ll explain shortly. But first let me credit the source, Roy F. Baumeister, who answered that question – and a lot of other ones – in an address on Friday at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco. I recommend reading the whole speech: “Is There Anything Good About Men?”

…The “single most underappreciated fact about gender,” he said, is the ratio of our male to female ancestors. While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.

ADAM SMITH observed in 1776 that economies work best when governments keep their clumsy thumbs off the free market’s "invisible hand." Two generations later, in 1817, the British economist David Ricardo extended Smiths insights to global trade. Just as market forces lead to the right price and quantity of products domestically, Ricardo argued, free foreign trade optimizes economic outcomes internationally.

Reading Adam Smith in Copenhagen–the center of the small, open, and highly successful Danish economy–is a kind of out-of-body experience. On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders. They score well in the ratings constructed by pro-market organizations. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland. Denmark’s financial markets are clean and transparent, its barriers to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industrial policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent the second lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP on public outlays and has the world’s second-highest tax rate, after Sweden; strong trade unions; and one of the world’s most equal income distributions. For the half of GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment compensation that typically covers around 95 percent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world’s most creative system of worker retraining.

Does Denmark have some secret formula that combines the best of Adam Smith with the best of the welfare state? Is there something culturally unique about the open-minded Danes? Can a model like the Danish one survive as a social democratic island in a turbulent sea of globalization, where unregulated markets tend to swamp mixed economic systems? What does Denmark have to teach the rest of the industrial world?

These questions brought me to Copenhagen for a series of interviews in 2007 for a book I am writing on globalization and the welfare state. The answers are complex and often counterintuitive. With appropriate caveats, Danish ideas can indeed be instructive for other nations grappling with the enduring dilemma of how to reconcile market dynamism with social and personal security. Yet Denmark’s social compact is the result of a century of political conflict and accommodation that produced a consensual style of problem solving that is uniquely Danish. It cannot be understood merely as a technical policy fix to be swallowed whole in a different cultural or political context. Those who would learn from Denmark must first appreciate that social models have to grow in their own political soil.

COMPASSIONATE CAPITALISM 

AT THE CENTER of the current Danish model is a labor-market strategy known as flexicurity. The idea is to reconcile job flexibility with employment security. The welfare state is often associated with rigid job protections: laws and union contracts making it illegal or prohibitively expensive to lay off workers. In much of the rest of Europe, labor-market rigidities have been blamed for high unemployment rates and for a welfare state of "insiders and outsiders," in which the well employed fiercely protect their jobs at the expense of those with little or nothing. It is here that Denmark offers its most ingenious blend of free markets and social democracy: despite heavy unionization, there are no regulations against laying off workers other than the requirement of advance notice.

In fact, Denmark has Europe’s highest rate of labor turnover. What is more, much of it is voluntary. A 2005 Eurobarometer poll found that over 70 percent of Danes think it is a good thing to change jobs frequently, compared with less than 30 percent in neighboring Germany. Danish respondents reported that they had changed employers an average of six times, the highest figure in the European Union (EU). One in three Danes changes jobs every year. And with employers free to deploy workers as they wish and all Danes eligible for generous social benefits, there is no inferior "temp" industry, because there is no need for one. As precarious short-term contract employment has grown in most other countries, the number of Danes in temporary contracts has decreased since the mid-1980s. Where most other OECD nations have a knot of middle-aged people stuck in long-term unemployment, in Denmark, the vast majority of the unemployed return to work within six months, and the number of long-term unemployed is vanishingly small.

What makes the flexicurity model both attractive to workers and dynamic for society are five key features: full employment; strong unions recognized as social partners; fairly equal wages among different sectors, so that a shift from manufacturing to service-sector work does not typically entail a pay cut; a comprehensive income floor; and a set of labor-market programs that spend an astonishing 4.5 percent of Danish GDP on initiatives such as transitional unemployment assistance, wage subsidies, and highly customized retraining.

In return for such spending, the unions actively support both employer flexibility and a set of tough rules to weed out welfare chiselers; workers are understood to have duties as well as rights. Professor Per Kongshøj Madsen, director of the Center for Labor Market Research at Aalborg University, observes that the income security guaranteed by the Danish state, as well as the good prospects for reemployment, enables Danes to comfortably take risks with new jobs.

For the United States, 4.5 percent of GDP would be about $600 billion a year. Current U.S. spending on all forms of government labor-market subsidies–of which meager and strictly time-limited unemployment compensation makes up the most part–is about 0.3 percent of GDP, less than $50 billion. The dynamic U.S. economy, in other words, has plenty of flexibility but little security. Denmark suggests that a different path is possible.

The Danish model squares another circle by reconciling free trade with economic security. This is not an easy feat. In a global system, corporations can move around in search of low taxes, cheap labor, and scant social regulation. Yet in Denmark, even trade unionists are passionate free traders. One of my more startling interviews was with Marina Hoffmann, chief economist of the Danish Metalworkers Union and former senior economic adviser to the most recent Social Democratic prime minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. "We need to convince Danish industry to do more outsourcing," this trade union leader improbably told me. "We are a small country and we survive by exporting … If a Danish multinational manufacturing corporation can be more competitive by outsourcing components, we will be more competitive as a nation." In other words, hiving off routine production jobs and moving them to China and eastern Europe can help keep higher-end, knowledge-based design and engineering jobs in Denmark. And as manufacturing becomes more automated, a national policy of professionalizing service-sector jobs takes up much of the slack. A nursing-home worker in Denmark, for example, gets far more training, status, and pay than one in the United States.

I encountered an equally surprising set of enthusiasms when I interviewed the director of the Confederation of Danish Employers, Henrik Bach Mortensen, whose support for union-management partnerships would be most unwelcome at, say, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Employers value the system, said Mortensen, both for its absence of industrial conflict and for its supply of good workers. The collaborative vocational training system, he noted, is essential for Danish competitiveness. This view was confirmed in an extensive survey of Danish employers conducted by Professor Cathie Jo Martin, of Boston University. Companies, she found, support the model because it brings them tangible benefits in the form of skilled and adaptive employees.

The productive work force helps both large and specialized Danish export industries thrive. Denmark is a global leader in such niche exports as hearing-aid production (through world-class companies such as Oticon), consumer electronics (Bang & Olufsen), insulin (Novo Nordisk), environmental technology, and finely engineered plumbing fixtures. As a seafaring nation, Denmark has global shipping giants such as Maersk, which ranks 138 on the Fortune Global 500 list. And in the service sector, Danish multinationals, such as the ISS Group, with 220,000 employees worldwide, are among the largest contractors for janitorial and security-guard services for office buildings, airports, and hospitals.

Wages in Denmark are about 70 percent above the OECD average, but the high productivity of the Danish work force justifies them. And because the Danish welfare state is financed primarily by income taxes and not payroll charges, overall labor costs to employers are moderated. But more than anything else, as Jørgen Søndergaard, director general of the Danish National Institute of Social Research, pointed out to me, it is Denmark’s culture of collaboration that allows win-win outcomes for corporations and their employees alike.

In another typically Danish bit of ingenuity, a good deal of consumer choice is deliberately built into the social-welfare model, since Denmark is highly libertarian as well as partly socialist. Choices are offered to accommodate individual preferences, so that the model enhances liberty rather than imposing one-size-fits-all regimentation. Consumer choice also allows the discipline of competition to keep social providers on their toes and to retain the support of more affluent Danes for the model. Thus, there is good socialized medical care, but the basic package is complemented by private insurance, now used by about seven percent of the population, and Danes have a broad choice of doctors and hospitals. There is excellent free public education all the way through university and graduate school, but private and religious schools can get 85 percent government financing. In the United States, school vouchers are promoted by the right as a way of undermining the public-school system; in Denmark, state-financed private schools are accepted by the left as a safety valve.

According to a survey by Prince & Associates, a Connecticut-based wealth-research firm, the average "price" that men and women demand to marry for money these days is $1.5 million.

The survey polled 1,134 people nationwide with incomes ranging between $30,000 to $60,000 (squarely in the median range for nationwide incomes). The survey asked: "How willing are you to marry an average-looking person that you liked, if they had money?"

Fully two-thirds of women and half of the men said they were "very" or "extremely" willing to marry for money. The answers varied by age: Women in their 30s were the most likely to say they would marry for money (74%) while men in their 20s were the least likely (41%).