MacRaven - Dave Haxton's Weblog

Thu, 08 Jun 2006

Washington area richest, most educated in US: report

And what is the chief product of this swampy and steamy geographic area? Laws, rules and regulations. This tidbit of trivia speaks reams about our society and our nation...

Reuters - The Washington area has the wealthiest households and most educated work force of any metropolitan area in the United States, according to a report released on Thursday by a local business group.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

/Politics | 4 writebacks | permanent link

On 6/8/2006 09:23:02
Arwin wrote

It depends

I think you can draw multiple conclusions depending on your outlook. For example: 1. No wonder DC is the wealthiest most educated city. Our leaders live there and in self interest they slant laws to line their pockets and gain education for themselves, their families, and their supporters. 2. I'm sure glad we are electing well educated and therefore successful to lead our government. Those well educated folks in turn hire well educated successful people to run the government. It just depends on your level of cynacism.

On 6/8/2006 12:35:42
Dave H wrote

Or ...

we have the best government money can buy! And it has! Thanks for the comment, and Be well, Dave H

On 6/8/2006 16:26:33
Thud wrote

Common misconception that what comes out of DC is primarily laws. There are a lot of laws, that's true. But the policy makers are by and large on the Mall and the effective lobbyists are restricted to K street. But there are many educational institutions in quite a small area. George Washington University, American University, Georgetown University, George Mason University, Catholic University, Johns Hopkins University. Probably I've missed some. That many major centers of learning in a small area, you're likely to have a highly educated population. Ooops. Almost forgot one of the world's greatest research institutions, the Smithsonian. Besides the museums on the mall, there's a massive research facility. Scientists, historians, art experts galore. The Library of Congress has three massive buildings within the District. This is the home of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. National Institutes of Health. PBS is based here. So is NPR. Professional associations innumerable. The knowledge industry is massive, no wonder it's a highly educated work force. A lot of defense programming and engineering gets done here, although hardware manufacture takes place elsewhere. Think of a major military contractor, they often have several large buildings. Programmers and engineers galore; they tend to be highly educated and well-paid. I think we export quite a bit more than law and regulation.

On 6/8/2006 17:27:58
Dave H wrote

Point taken

on the institutions of higher learning, research facilities, museums and the Library of Congress. However, I shan't concede on professional associations, NIH, AAAS - these and other lobbyists are indirectly involved in the regulatory process, mostly to insure that their members benefit from government largess. As for NPR and PBS, well, I actually listen to NPR, and pay a membership to my local station, but I'm not sure either could exist on their own merits - and both are decidedly governmentally flavored bureaucracies. Having been associated with a defense contractor in the past (and with NASA contractors as well) in a professional capacity as a software engineer, I can honestly say that the miracle of military technology is truly that it works at all. Most of the engineers in the DC area in my day were far more involved with compliance documentation and contract bidding than actually building anything. Most of NASA's work was done in Alabama and Florida, and most of the military work in California. But that's admittedly been twenty some odd years, so things may have changed. Thanks for the comment and, Be well, Dave H.

:: Categories ::

agriculture
asatru
copywrongs
humor
musings
politics
technology
index
haxton.org

:: Search ::

:: Blogroll ::

A Mindful Life
The Accidental Smallholder
Austro-Athenian Empire
Cauldron Born
Center for a Stateless Society
Dances with Ewes
Dispatches
egregores
Hardscrabble Creek
Honk & Helen
In Siberia
Laudator Temporis Acti
Lorrie's Livejournal
Masson's Blog
MyAppleMenu
NoNAIS
Notes on Religion
Numenous Thoughts
OrangeGuru
Overlawyered
Prophet or Madman
rogueclassicism
Sugar Mountain Farm
Thud Factor
Universe of Discourse
Wildhunt Blog
within the crainium

:: Archives ::

←December→
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

:: Site ::

Contact Me

MacRaven
Dave Haxton's Weblog
Musings, Reflections, Rants and Comments from a Hoosier Heathen husband, father, grandfather, farmer and software engineer. There's really only one of me ...

lunar phases

Unless otherwise noted, all original
work on this site is licensed under a

comment...


Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.

Name:
URL:	(optional)
Title:	(optional)
Comments:
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time