Assorted Links

1.  Strategy+Business releases it's 2014 list of best business books. Piketty is a no-brainer for this list, but some of the others (see, for example, Eggers) departs from the usual in this genre.2. We read and hear many commentators opining on the brokenness of the education business model, yet there is remarkably little in the way of innovation on this point. A post and video from Knowedge@Wharton may stimulate new thinking on this point.And, catching up ...3.  From the NY Times (September 19, 2014), comes the good news:

Today’s 25-year-olds, compared with their parents’ generation at the same age, are twice as likely to still be students, only half as likely to be married and 50 percent more likely to be receiving financial assistance from their parents.

People tend to react to this trend in one of two ways, either castigating today’s young people for their idleness or acknowledging delayed adulthood as a rational, if regrettable, response to a variety of social changes, like poor job prospects. Either way, postponing the settled, responsible patterns of adulthood is seen as a bad thing.

This is too pessimistic. Prolonged adolescence, in the right circumstances, is actually a good thing, for it fosters novelty-seeking and the acquisition of new skills.

4.  And also from the Times, comes the bad news on September 17: "Leaving Home, But Not Leaving the Folks." Taking helicopter parenting to a new level, some parents, obviously without enough to do, are moving to live near their boarding school student children. Another clear sign of the apocalypse.