The Marvel Of American Resilience
Fracking is making the U.S. the world’s leading oil and gas producer. How did this happen?
- Not because of any great advantage in geology—many countries have larger recoverable shale gas reserves.
- Not because America’s big energy companies are uniquely skilled or smart or deep-pocketed:
- Not because enlightened mandarins in the federal bureaucracy and national labs saw the future potential.
It happened:
- Because Americans, almost uniquely in the world, have property rights to the minerals under their yards.
- Because the federal government wasn’t really paying attention.
- Because federalism allows states to do their own thing.
- Because against-the-grain entrepreneurs like George Mitchell and Harold Hamm couldn’t be made to bow to the consensus of experts.
- Because our deep capital markets were willing to bet against those experts.
- Because of freedom, optimism, flexibility, and resilience.
The article concludes:
We are larger than our leaders. We are better than our politics. We are wiser than our culture. We are smarter than our ideas. Enjoy the holiday.
If you can’t get access to the Wall Street Journal article that celebrates this American triumph, click on the top Google article here.
The Death Of The American Family Dinner Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Across the United States, roughly 88 percent of Americans still say they frequently eat dinner with other members of their household, according to a new study by the Corporation for National and Community Service.
The survey found that the average family eats dinner together more than 5 times a week, and nearly 60 percent of households with children younger than 18 sit down to supper six or seven nights a week.
Some of the benefits of eating regularly together include:
- Teenagers who frequently ate with their families tended to use drugs less often.
- Students who ate less often with their loved ones were more likely to be truant at school.
- Children who eat group meals at home demonstrate fewer signs of depression.
The Unbelievable Rise Of Single Motherhood In America Over The Last 50 years
- More women are having their children later in life.
- And they’re doing so in less traditional ways: before marriage, without marriage, or with unmarried partners.
- Half of all children will live with a single mom at some point before the age of 18.
- Children with two parents fare better in many ways — in school, in their own relationships — than children with only one at home.
- A black child today is much more likely to be born to a single mom than a white child, or the child of a mom with a college degree.
- More than 70 percent of all black children today are born to an unmarried mom, a three-fold increase in that rate since the 1960s
Private Colleges Are A Waste Of Time For White Middle Class Kids
A Gallup survey asked graduates how they were doing across five different metrics, including financially, physically and socially. The summary finding: for kids with well educated parents, what matters is getting a college degree, not where it came from. Some of the other findings:
- Eleven percent of graduates of public universities and private universities said they were “thriving” across all five metrics.
- Twelve percent of graduates of U.S. News & World Report’s top 100 schools were thriving, essentially the same as the rest.
- The biggest predictor of whether a graduate wasn’t thriving was whether he or she had student loans. Fourteen percent of those without any debt said they were thriving, compared to 2 percent of those with more than $40,000 of debt.
- The happiest students, in general, were the ones who developed a relationship with a mentor, participated in extracurricular activities or took on a major academic project — all things you can do at any school.
- Students with more potential made more money as adults, and the students with less made less — no matter where they went to school.
- Conclusion: how much you make depends on you, not where you get in.