Category Archives: current reading

Seligman on happiness: authentic or by definition?

I’m almost done with Mar­tin Seligman’s well-known book of pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy, Authen­tic Hap­pi­ness (2003). It’s been a very good read — although I was famil­iar with many of the rel­e­vant research find­ings, from my var­i­ous inter­net trav­els (and Bark­ing Up The Wrong Tree in par­tic­u­lar), Selig­man puts it all together and lays it out in

have your college and eat it too: consuming education

Today, I want to make what, to my economics-ish friends, are prob­a­bly some painfully obvi­ous points. How­ever, I had never explic­itly con­sid­ered this angle on college/education before tak­ing eco­nom­ics of edu­ca­tion last semes­ter, and I sus­pect that it’s some­thing many oth­ers of even my rather intel­li­gent friends and col­leagues have also failed to con­sider in depth.

education, the state, and protecting children from ignorance

The other day, I started Edu­ca­tion and the State by E.G. West. It is some­times argued that state funded, state reg­u­lated, and state pro­vided edu­ca­tion is jus­ti­fied by the neces­sity of  pro­tect­ing chil­dren from igno­rance. So, West begins with two chap­ters explor­ing this argu­ment philo­soph­i­cally and assess­ing how well this “pro­tec­tion” works in prac­tice. These chap­ters