Rosner’s domain interviewed Jewish demography expert Dr. Ira Sheskin:

Where the lowering of the numbers will have an impact is on small Jewish communities. A Jewish community of 10,000 which now supports, say, 3 synagogues, a JCC, a kosher butcher, and several Jewish agencies and organizations, may very well lose some of this infrastructure if, say 20 years from now, the population is down to 5,000. So the impact of the lowering of the Jewish population will be at the local level more than at the national level.

Many resources in the Jewish community are being applied now by Jewish Federations and Foundations throughout the country to assure the Jewish future. Sheldon Adelson just started a foundation which will provide $200-$250 million per year in grants to Jewish communities. The challenge is to devise programs and services that will provide a quality of life within Jewish communities that will keep people wanting to be Jewish.

Dr. Sheskin also addresses intermarriage later on, though he tacks differently than i would. For those interested in Jewish demographics, most research studies are available for free online from the Jewish Databank. There, you can find the summary reports of most community and national studies, as well as the raw data for many of them, including the National Jewish Population Survey.

Categories: America, Community, Jewishness, Metrics, Philanthropy, Polling
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In Slate:

But the more I thought about Cramer, the more I realized that pointing out that he gives terrible investment advice would be like pointing out that the sun rises. Worse, I would be dismissed as a wet blanket who didn’t get that the point of Mad Money was just to have a bit of ironic fun. I mean, of course Jim Cramer gives terrible investment advice—we all know that, right?—and we only watch the show because, well, because he does possess a certain bizarre type of market and entertainment genius—if there’s a pundit out there with more opinions about more stocks, I’ve never seen him—and he’s irreverent, madcap, and, yes, even brilliant, in an idiot-savant, freak-show sort of way. (Moreover, Cramer is mesmerizing reality TV. Admit it: You watch because you wonder if this is the night he finally has a heart attack, kills someone, or explodes in a tirade of expletive-laced slander.)

That is precisely why I watch Mad Money, and I love watching the show (though I can never stomach a full episode at a time). I think CNBC personalities are awesome, and although Jim Cramer is great in small doses, he’s nothing compared to personal finance guru Suze Orman, who will help you fix up your crappy finances and crappy relationships at the same time.

Categories: Business and Economics, Entertainment Media, Information Asymmetries, Information Markets, Television
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Newly elected New York governor Elliot Spitzer is going to tie school funding to performance metrics:

Schools that do not perform well, he said, would be shut down. Educators who do not meet performance goals would be dismissed. A new accountability system would monitor how schools are performing academically and whether they are making the best use of their money, he said. Also, the schools will be judged on whether their academic programming is helping students perform better.

Categories: Education, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Metrics, Politics
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It also raises several questions. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies’ objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Historian David Bell asks “Was 9/11 Reall That Bad?“   It’s only Monday, but I’m going to call this as the must-read for the week.

Categories: America, Governance, Politics
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The character’s hair is generally mousy and flat, and the lettuce lends it no body. Her wardrobe is mannish, and she’s disdainful of the traditional female sexuality. You sense that Liz Lemon would push Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw under a bus, claim she did it on principle, and cackle about it for ages. In this sense, Jenna—whose heart is in her cleavage, whose deepest conviction is that her sexuality is a weapon—is something of a foil. As is Liz’s assistant, Cerie, a clueless little nymph who cannot comprehend her boss’s suggestion that she not wear short shorts to the office. On the occasions that Liz dolls herself up, Fey lays the snark on thicker yet: In the third episode, “Blind Date,” she put on a cocktail dress, and her producer, admiring, said, “You look like a fancy prostitute.” Liz made a flattered little bounce.

A Slate Review of 30 Rock.

30 Rock, The Office, and the under-rated How I Met Your Mother all compete for the title of Best Comedy on Television.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Television, Winter of Dave
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Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Blog asks do artists who give their music away for free want to make money?

Many do, but they’re just smarter than most music industry execs. They understand the difference between abundance and scarcity economics. Music as a digital product enjoys near-zero costs of production and distribution–classic abundance economics. When costs are near zero, you might as well make the price zero, too, something thousands of bands have figured out.

Meanwhile, the one thing that you can’t digitize and distribute with full fidelity is a live show. That’s scarcity economics. No wonder the average price for a ticket was $61 last year, up 8%–in an era when digital products are commodities, there’s a premium on experience. No surprise that bands are increasingly giving away their recorded music as marketing for their concerts, which offer something no MP3 can match.

Categories: Business and Economics, Distribution, Entertainment Media, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Marketing, Strategy
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Nevertheless, a small band of economists from universities, research institutions and the government are clearly expressing the blasphemy that many Americans could be saving less than they are being told to by the financial services industry — and spending more — while they are younger. The negative savings rate, they say, is wildly distorted.

According to them, the financial industry, with its ostensibly objective online calculators, overstates how much money someone will need in retirement. Some, in fact, contend that financial firms have a pointed interest in persuading people to save much more than they need because the companies earn fees on managing that
money.

From the NYTimes, via Marginal Revolution.

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Information Asymmetries
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I’ll be traveling to Chicago this weekend to look at apartments and hang out with friends.  If you’ll be around, let me know and we can meet up.

Categories: Travel, Winter of Dave
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FuturTech Panels are today.  Everybody come!

Categories: Business and Economics, Futurtech, Graduate School, Information Economics, Science, Social Software, Technology, Winter of Dave
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Phoebe at Jewlicious bemoans that all Jewish events are Jewish singles events, taking her recent Birthright trip as the example:

The problem with Birthright (or at least the version I experienced) as it currently exists is the level of desperation. One can’t help but wonder, if Israel’s such a great country, then why do people have to pay us to go visit it? If Jewish women are so beautiful, as Momo keeps insisting, then why do Jewish men have to be told to notice this?

At some point, the leadership of the Jewish community has to wake up and end the forced mating program before Jews become like pandas, unwilling to breed in captivity to save the species. Instead, they need to go back to stating the value proposition of Judaism, the reasons that it’s worth saving.
Also, her post is one of the best I’ve ever read in the JBlogosphere.

Categories: Community, Dating, Israel, Jewishness, Matching Mechanisms, Strategy
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The GapMinder foundation has a cool tool hosted by Google that lets you compare graphs of development variables against each other over time.  It defaults to Life Expectancy vs. Income per capita, but you can chart other variables as well.  You can see some very interesting movements when you play with the time slider.  Genocides show up as major dips in life expectancy - look at Cambodia in the 70s, Rwanda in the 90s.  To see the impact of AIDS, look at Zimbabwe or South Africa more recently.  A fun tool to play with, though it doesn’t have nearly as much data as some other visualization sties out there.

Categories: Business and Economics, Metrics, Philanthropy, Politics, Science, Technology
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In the WaPo, a librarian laments that books are a hard sell, and futility tries to save them:

But as I moved along in my library science program, I found that books weren’t really our focus. Information management, database networking and research tools claimed the largest share of the curriculum. In other words, literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about libraries, information searches are usually for more specific information than a book offers.  Finding that specific information is tough, and a book surrounds it with hundreds of pages of noise that are difficult to search through.  Successful librarians, or information specialists, are the ones who are recognizing this and adapting.  They see their profession holistically.  Unfortunately, too many nostalgic Luddites are still wandering around library science programs trying to prolong and accentuate their love affair with the physical book.

Categories: Books, Education, Information Economics, Libraries, Marketing
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Mystery Pollster Mark Blumenthal cites a National Center for Health Statistics study concerning the growth in cell-phone only households, a concern for pollsters who can’t reach them, as well as a Pew Study which finds that this group is distinct from the rest of the population:

A new study of the issue finds that cell-only Americans – an estimated 7%-9% of the general public – are significantly different in many ways from those reachable on a landline. They are younger, less affluent, less likely to be married or to own their home, and more liberal on many political questions.

It doesn’t look like the study controlled for age in the base numbers, and aren’t younger people generally less affluent, less likely to be married or own their own home, and more liberal on many political questions? What the study really says is that young people aren’t reachable by pollsters because they are in cell phone only households. Don’t worry, though, young people don’t vote!  When they did control for age, most of the differences look like they’re for things that correlate strongly with affluence and urbanization, which makes intuitive sense.

Categories: America, Community, Politics, Polling, Technology
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In an interview that I referenced in an earlier post, Bruce Bickel, a VP at PNC Financial Services Group, referenced five areas of meaningful money management - earning, giving, saving, spending, and budgeting. I can’t think of a better way to organize or start my guide to personal finance, and I couldn’t find anyone else who referenced the same five elements. I’m going to start here with a brief introduction of each of the five, and then follow up with more in depth explanations for each later. For organization’s sake, I’ve changed his order around. Without further ado, we begin:

1. Earning

This is where money comes from. The title, “earning,” is important. Notice that it isn’t getting. Do you remember the saying “nothing in life is free?” That’s because people don’t just give you money, and you aren’t entitled to any just because of where you were born, who you were born to, or where you live. There are those that believe otherwise, and they can turn to a different guide to personal finance. To get money, you have to do something for it. Usually, that means getting a job. You can also get money through investments, but there’s a reason investment income is sometimes referred to as un-earned income.

2. Saving

Once you’ve earned some money, you have to decide, do you want to spend it all now, or save some for later? Saving is about taking the money you have in the present, and keeping it somewhere so that you have it to use in the future. Good saving involves looking at what your future needs might be, and what risks you face in your life. For instance, if you want to be able to retire, you want to have money to live off of now. Saving is like taking money you have right now and giving it to your future self. Of course, why leave money just sitting there when you can buy something useful with it? You can put that money to work for you by investing it, or loaning it to other people who will use it to generate more wealth.

3. Budgeting

Money is scarce, so you have to make choices about how you spend it. Remember, you worked hard to earn it, so you have to make choices about how you spend it. And just as importantly, you have to make sure you don’t spend more than you earn, otherwise you end up in debt. Budgeting helps you answer the question “What can I afford.” There are lots of things competing for that dollar you earn - the government through taxes, your future self through saving, your present self through spending, or your past self if you didn’t budget and have debt. That’s why it’s important to make good choices with you earned, and that’s why budgeting is important.

4. Spending

Spending seems pretty straight forward, you just hand somebody money in exchange for goods and services, right? That might have been enough two hundred years ago, but in our modern society, there’s actually a lot of ways to purchase things. Do you use cash or a check? A credit card? Debit card? And what exactly is a check card? While spending is straightforward in one sense - you give someone money, they give you something in exchange - there are lots choices involved in just how to give someone that money.

5. Giving

Once you’ve earned some money, you can put it to work making the world a better place by donating it to a charity or philanthropy. Picking where to give your money is an important decision, based on your own personal values. Finding a charity that accomplishes the goals you have for the world can be tough, but the reward of seeing the good your money does makes it all worthwhile. Also, if you give certain ways, you get a break on your taxes, which is always nice.

Categories: Guide to Personal Finance
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BusinessWeek has an interview with Bruce Bickel of PNC Financial Services group about how to get kids started in philanthropy. An exerpt:

What happens with older kids?
At age 17 or 18, the teens become family foundation “interns.” They come to the board meetings, they listen, and they can participate. They have no authority, and they don’t vote. By the time they turn 19 or 21 or 30, they have sat through all of this, they understand their beliefs and values, they understand the hearts of their mom and dad and what they want to represent.

I had a long post with my take, but I realize that it might be flawed on its assumptions, so I’m still thinking about it. The interview comes from a much larger BusinessWeek section on philanthropy that I just discovered.

Categories: Business and Economics, Education, Philanthropy
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