Today, we face an aging work force in most technologically developed countries. We often hear that aging workers are just as productive as younger workers, but there are practical reasons why that is unlikely to be clearly true.

It costs about $84,000 to attend the prestigious Columbia Journalism School MS program. There are businesses you could buy for less. So even if your blood is printer’s ink, if you need to make a living, we need to look at the situation calmly and clearly. The Economist provides some sobering recent statistics about your [...]

The free fall to fishwrap  is certainly a historic story though we must stand back a bit, to see why. I used to live in a city (Toronto, Canada) where real estate prices went up and down, the latter event made to sound like a street-level apocalypse. But when I mentioned the doomsaying to an [...]

Probably not, and here is why: The move to institute new paywalls (where you have to pay to read the article/see the TV show) is usually a frantic effort to stem the rising tide of red ink. Generally, readers have never covered anything like the costs of traditional print media. In the movies, the newsboy [...]

Recently, some friends were discussing the falling reader and viewer stats of traditional mainstream media. I commented that a sign of their growing weakness is the increasing number of simple, disastrous errors in reporting. A friend offered, “They can’t really help it though; they have to compete with Facebook and Twitter.” I retorted, “If that [...]

Don’t pretend it’s mainstream journalism. Mainstream journalists are increasingly believers in increased power for government to force attitudes, values, beliefs, and lifestyles on citizens, and are often apparently willing to help. That may include suppressing or manipulating news if necessary. This sort of thing didn’t used to be so big a problem because, when the [...]

It’s been a long time coming. Far too much social sciences research has been done on American, first-year psychology students and—as a recent, wave-making paper shows—once you get out of that environment, you are in a different world. (Paper here, and a report for the public here.) I should know. I have always lived in one of [...]

I was doing some research on schools when I came across this school motto: The mission of ***** University is to provide students with a dynamic education based on excellence and flexibility that creates lasting value and relevance for evolving careers. We’ve come a long way from Harvard’s one-word motto: Veritas! The new concept of [...]

Two ways, really. Demographics is just the fact that between January 1 and December 31 of any given year a certain number of babies are born worldwide, and you cannot go back and change the number. But you can use it to predict trends, which may be helpful if you are planning a career. Jonathan [...]

Canadian demographer David Foot is famous for claiming that demographics explains two-thirds of everything. I am not sure if that is quite true, but would urge anyone planning a career that includes higher education to take demography seriously. It matters to your future how many people are in an age group that will need your [...]