Amanda Levinson's blog

There's been some hand-wringing in the press lately about why so many young people, from Ivy League graduates to Law School students, are forgoing public sector and non-profit jobs in favor of the private sector and corporate law firms. Are young people just more materialistic and apathetic these days? Or is there something else at work?

You wouldn't know it from recent headlines screaming impending doom, but some people believe the forecast for retirement savings looks fine. Writing for Slate Magazine, Tim Harford argues that most Americans--about 80%--are probably saving enough for retirement. This flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that our national saving rate may have to triple for most Americans to have enough for retirement.

Fed Chief Ben Bernanke read our minds. Speaking to a Senate Panel on Capital Hill today, Bernanke noted that the three main challenges facing health care reform are controlling costs, providing health care to the estimated 47 million Americans who lack coverage, and improving the quality of care. As this New York Times article reported:

This weekend I received a letter from Blue Shield, my insurer, telling me that two weeks ago they terminated their contract with my health care provider and hospital. Yes, that's correct--they told me two weeks after the fact, leaving me and countless others scrambling to figure out where to go for health care, and whether their care during the previous two weeks had been covered. Being strongly attached to my doctor (who is also my son's doctor), I got on the internet to see if I couldn't just switch health insurance companies.

Democratic congressman Rahm Emanuel scores points for his Op-Ed in today's Wall Street Journal, in which he proposes a "New Deal for the New Economy" a plan that puts the middle class front and center of some policy proposals to increase economic security in America.  His plan encompasses post-high school training (requiring all students to receive 1 year of some sort of training after high school, whether at a community college, technical school, or university, and to mak

I just finished watching the most recent installment of the "Up" films--a series of documentary films beginning in 1964 that has followed fourteen British children from different socioeconomic backgrounds since they were seven years old. The series is based on the maxim "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man," although in this case the explicit intention was to see how British class structure perpetuates itself throughout the subjects' lives.