Nouriel Roubini:

The US has been living in a situation of excesses for too long. And when you have too many financial engineers and not as many computer engineers, you have a problem.

I think this country needs more people who are going to be entrepreneurs, more people in manufacturing, more people going into sectors that are going to lead to long-run economic growth. When the best minds of the country are all going to Wall Street, there is a distortion in the allocation of human capital to some activities that become excessive and eventually inefficient.

From the archive:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Speak up:

When nonengineers think about engineering, it’s usually because something has gone wrong. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored.

If you see something, say something:

The difference between alchemy and science is if you tell people what you’ve learned.

Consider:

Georgia is about to become the first state to approve the use of the Bible as a textbook in public schools.

Finally:

Government policies -- from as early as the 1890s -- subsidized the spread of cities and fueled a chronic nationwide dependence on cars and roadbuilding, with little regard for expense, efficiency, ecological damage, or social equity.