The President's Right-hand Man has resigned . . .

Not Joe Biden, but Lawrence Summers, his chief economic advisor. Summers will return to Harvard, where he has a professorship in economics, and where more famously he was pressured to resign as president after making some much-misinterpreted comments about the abilities of men and women in science.

Summers has had a distinguished academic career (it does take some qualifications to get tenure at Harvard, after all), and is known predominantly as a macroeconomist. Perhaps this is why he was tapped to serve as Treasury Secretary under Clinton. But one of the pieces of his work (with Andrei Schleifer and Lawrence Katz) I find most interesting cuts to the core of family relations: how often children visit their parents in nursing homes.  Here is their work in a nutshell:

1) Children of rich parents visit more often than children of poor parents.
2) Result 1) holds only if there is more than one child.
3) In the instance of one-child families, there is no difference in visitation rates among rich and poor.

In other words, children visit their nursing-home-ridden parents because there's money on the line. But money is only on the line when there's competition for that money in the form of siblings.

Ah, family!

Something Pithy:

One of my all-time favorite students bestowed this bit of wisdom on me:  Declaring something 'priceless' is just a way to get people to pay nothing for things that are worth something.

A short one-liner . . .

I believe there is a big difference between a society in which 95% of the people decide to each sacrifice a little to help the other 5%, and a society in which 90% of the people agree to take a lot from the remaining 10% and parcel it out among themselves.