Interesting report from the Campaign for America’s Future on America’s investment deficit in infrastructure:

America grew up investing in its land and its people. Historically, we directed roughly 8 percent of our gross domestic product to long-range investments, and the investment paid off. Now we are down below 4 percent. Our post World War II infrastructure is starting to decay, and we aren’t replacing it. We are lamenting the loss of jobs rather than hiring people to renew and rebuild.

Other countries are racing past. China spends 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure investment and opens a new subway system every year.

Beyond the quantity of funds, one major problem with our infrastructure policies is the quality of our decision-making. Our spending allocations are highly politicized and our politics are highly skewed toward underpopulated areas and toward senior members of congress. But the two places where you don’t need more infrastructure are the places where nobody lives and the places that have already been targeted for spending. Instead of the spending we need, we’ve tended to get round after round after round of bridge and road construction in Alaska when what we need are things that would reduce congestion and support smart future development in the country’s largest metro areas.

Tyler Cowen notes that “46% of the surveyed men lie about what they have read — to impress partners — and 33% of the surveyed women admit to lying about their reading habits.”

I have to say that I’m so accustomed to the idea of lying about one’s reading habits that my first thought upon reading this was “what’s wrong with the other 54 percent of men?” Then I wondered if maybe they weren’t just lying about lying. And then I started thinking about how there are plenty of people besides potential hookups who you might want to try to impress by lying about which books you’ve read; indeed, it strikes me as the sort of thing that’s more useful as idle chit-chat than a dating strategy.

I wonder if you see a substantial difference based on educational attainment here. It seems to me that college (at least as we did it at Harvard) largely consists of lessons on how to pretend to have read various books. How many section discussions of British Moralists 1650-1800 (by far the best introduction to the subject!) did I bluff my way through?

Not that this will come as shocking news to anyone, but income in Finland is distributed much more equally than in the United States:

The difference is especially pronounced at the very top and at the bottom. The richest ten percent of Americans take a much larger share of income than do the richest ten percent of Finns. Meanwhile, the bottom twenty percent of Finns get a much larger share of income than do the bottom twenty percent of Americans. But of course everyone knows that the rich need money more than the poor, so the American system is fairer. Plus our way is worse for the middle sixty percent, too, but pointing that out would be class warfare and your populism would be sneered at by media celebrities whose incomes are all in the top twenty.

Meanwhile, note that an egalitarian social and economic environment actually hits the rich coming and going. Not only are Finland’s rich poorer than their American compatriots, but the relatively non-desperate state of the Finnish poor means that prices are higher than in the US for the sort of labor-intensive personal services that are primarily consumed by the prosperous. A tourist will note that restaurants are relatively expensive, but the same principle would carry over to maids and nannies and so forth.