Comparing people unemployment for over six months to people unemployed for under six months, Catherine Rampell writes:

Perhaps those who were unemployed longer were less desirable job candidates to begin with, which would explain both why it took them so long to find work, and why, when they did found new work, the job was relatively crummy. Or perhaps people who have been job-hunting for a long time are more desperate to take any job that becomes available, so they end up in less attractive positions. Or maybe the gaping holes on their resumes start to look more and more suspicious to employers, so the job options become narrower and narrower.

Or perhaps those who’ve been out of work longer have become so embittered by the experience of unemployment that any new job they take will be viewed as a disappointment.

Does school choice foster entrepreneurism? Economists Oliver Falck and Ludger Woessmann find “a statistically and quantitatively significant effect of the extent of competition from privately operated schools on the intentions of students towards the end of compulsory school to become entrepreneurs.”

Using PISA-2006 student-level data to estimate the effect of private-school competition on students’ entrepreneurial intentions, Falck and Woessmann find that…

[A] 10 percentage-point higher private-school share raises students’ entrepreneurial intentions by 0.3-0.5 percentage points (11-18 percent of the international mean) even after controlling for current Catholic shares, students’ academic skills, and parents’ entrepreneurial occupation.

Their research ultimately suggests that school competition may play a role beyond developing students’ cognitive skills as measured by test scores:

Students’ intentions to become an entrepreneur are amenable to institutional features of the school system. Competition from private schools seems to create a climate in the overall school system that is supportive of entrepreneurial intentions. Given that the existing literature suggests that explicit programs of entrepreneurship education may not be able to raise entrepreneurial intentions significantly, this result has important implications for the future direction of discussions about how education systems can promote entrepreneurship.

MSNBC reports on the recent move to legalize industrial marijuana farms:

Jeff Wilcox, a middle-aged, clean-cut man who dresses in the Bay Area casual business attire of clean jeans, collared shirt and running shoes, may be the face of Marijuana, Inc, the corporatization of cannabis.

He has just persuaded Oakland to legalize industrial-sized marijuana farms, touting a study that promised millions in city taxes and hundreds of high-paying union jobs.

The long-struggling city, which has failed spectacularly to capitalize on the high-tech boom, could be the Silicon Valley of pot, Wilcox told the City Council this week before its historic vote to grant four permits for urban, industrial-size marijuana farms.

If California legalizes marijuana, the rest of the nation may well follow. One way or the other, cut rate, highly potent California weed is unlikely to stop at the state’s borders.

The negative consequences of marijuana prohibition are far greater than those of of marijuana legalization. But this solution, the legalization of industrial-sized pot farms, is not, in my opinion, ideal. If a substance is legal, the free market should be left on its own to devise the best way of production and distribution. Though I applaud any move to end drug prohibition, the government is now threatening to interfere in the economy to the advantage of larger businesses, such as corporations. This is a scary combination of business and government that could lead to corporatism in the marijuana industry. Perhaps future generations will debate over the ethics and practicality of bailouts for global marijuana producers?

Ironically, Jeff Wilcox actually envisions a marijuana industry comprised of both industrial-sized producers and smaller growers:

But as Wilcox points out, his business model — a nonprofit — will be less Google or Apple and more Trader Joe’s, a California cut rate gourmet grocery chain. The store’s best-known product is $2 per bottle Charles Shaw wine, known affectionately as Two Buck Chuck and considered a great glass of wine for the price.

“The new Two Buck Chuck will be $40 an ounce pot,” Wilcox said in an interview, looking forward to a day of full legalization. Boutique growers could produce the high-end stuff in their “gardens,” he explained, while he supplied the masses with a clean, controlled, great-value product.

While China recently reached one important milestone, becoming the world’s top energy consumer, it has now met another: almost one quarter of Chinese adults are overweight.

But one fifth isn’t so bad. Compare that to the 63% of Americans who are overweight.

Read the interesting New York Times article here. I found this line particularly important:

“Remember the Soviet Union?” said Hector Alvarado, who heads a civic advocacy group. “They had a lot of bureaucracy, and they lost. Maywood was like that. Now people know if they don’t work, they will be laid off. Much better this way.”