Atlantic's James Fallows on 2011 Economy at NPR.org

Year In News: Volatile Politics, Economic Crisis, Tablets : NPR

Apologies for the out-of-date link, but James Fallows is always interesting commentary and in this Christmas Day interview with Guy Raz on NPR, Fallows takes on the economy, the political landscape, and tablet computers vis his world predictions and how they played out from last year, with a few bits of prognostication for the year to come. Of some note:

And now it's striking how the economic crisis mainly means unemployment with the sort of corollary issue of the housing markets, where financial markets are up, corporations are having big profits. And so, the kind of all fronts sort of depression era feared, many people had in late 2008 and much of 2009, that for many people has been buffered and contained, and we're left with this very, very significant problem of chronic, very high unemployment for, you know, almost 10 percent of the public. For better or for worse, it concentrates our minds on unemployment as being the economic crisis, you know, as we look ahead.

The debate rages on the overall value of higher education in an underemployed economy. While notable for-profits continue to be challenged in the courts on this very issue, take a walk down history lane in this paper from the San Jose State College Senior Seminar in Economic Research: Higher Eduction and Unemployment: Some Paradoxes (PDF Link). Thanks to the amazing link economy of the 'net, we uncover that yes, we've been having this discussion since at least 1966. Enjoy!

Fallows will be the plenary speaker at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges National Conference on Trusteeship, April 3 - April 5, 2011.