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For a country, such as the Philippines, which sends thousands of nurses overseas, this is excellent news.

Another widespread myth holds that most Americans need to go to college in the future. In reality, most of the fastest-growing jobs, including those in healthcare, do not require a four-year bachelor’s degree. According to the Council of Economic Advisers: “The categories with some education required beyond high school are growing faster than those not requiring post-secondary schooling. The growth is not solely among occupations requiring bachelor’s degrees; occupations that require only an associate’s degree or a post-secondary vocational award are actually projected to grow slightly faster than occupations requiring a bachelor’s degree or more.” The appropriate public policy response is not necessarily to send more Americans to expensive four-year colleges, particularly if that means crippling burdens of personal debt in the form of student loans. We need to expand the vocational training provided by the community college system.
None of this means that we don’t need world-class scientists and engineers, or that we don’t need to rebuild our manufacturing export industries, or that we don’t need to hire people to design and build up-to-date infrastructure and energy systems. High-tech agriculture, manufacturing and infrastructure and related business and professional services will remain essential to economic dynamism. But thanks to ever smarter machines, fewer and fewer people will work in the primary (field), secondary (factory) and tertiary (office) sectors. Most of the job growth will be in the “quaternary” sector of healthcare and other qualify-of-life services.
Dilbert’s days are numbered. Look for Dilbert Jr. at the nursing station.
via Salon.com | Why Dilbert is doomed.

This is interesting. In a sense a good reason why celebrities swear by being happier with having children, Being loaded (with cash) means having children does not carry with it the negative consequences. Does this mean that only rich people should have children? Of course not, but this I believe shows that unhappy poor people shouldn’t be allowed to have children. I don’t know. read the linked blog post for the pertinent papers.

Children & happiness
Having children makes you miserable. That’s the message of this paper by Luca Stanca, which draws upon data from 94 countries:
Having children is negatively related to subjective well-being. Conditioning on individual characteristics shows that the effect of parenthood on well-being is positive and significant only for widowers, older and highly educated individuals…On the basis of a purely economic approach, the optimal number of children for a rational agent is zero.
This partly corroborates evidence from the UK (pdf), which shows that children increase the well-being only of married couples and widowers, but reduce the well-being of single or separated parents.
However, the reason for this is rather mundane. Children make (many) people less happy only because they are expensive. Mr Stanca finds that children improve people’s satisfaction with non-financial aspects of their life, but worsen their financial happiness. This corroborates some other evidence (hat-tip).
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Children & happiness.

Frank Eippert from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf used a technique caled functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the backbones of volunteers as they experienced the placebo effect. Eippert heated the recruits’ forearms to the point of pain and he gave them cream to soothe the sting. The creams were all shams with no pain-relieving properties, but only half of the recruits were told this. The others were told that they’d been given lidocaine, an anaesthetic.
Sure enough, the volunteers who used the alleged “anaesthetic” felt about a quarter less pain than those who were aware that they were using an ordinary cream – the placebo effect in action. But Eippert also found that the activity of neurons in the spine (specifically an area near the back called the “dorsal horn”) was also strongly allayed.
via The placebo effect affects pain signalling in the spine : Not Exactly Rocket Science.

I’ve grapple with this constantly, whenever I have to explain this I am lost for words. It is like people believe their lives are compartmentalized.  As the person who wrote this said, being religious does not excuse acting like an asshole, being religious does not excuse you from not being a decent human being. Let us a accept that we are who we are 24/7. There is no churchgoing version of ourselves versus the ruthless work personality we have.

After talking for some time about her family situation we turned to other areas of her life. When she reached spiritual matters we had the following exchange:
“I need to spend more time working on my relationship with God.”
I responded, “Why would you want to do that?”
Startled she says, “What do you mean?”
“Well, why would you want to spend any time at all on working on your relationship with God?”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”
“Let me answer by asking you a question. Can you think of anyone, right now, to whom you need to apologize? Anyone you’ve wronged?”
She thinks and answers, “Yes.”
“Well, why don’t you give them a call today and ask for their forgiveness. That might be a better use of your time than working on your relationship with God.”
Obviously, I was being a bit provocative with the student. And I did go on to clarify. But I was trying to push back on a strain of Christianity I see in both my students and the larger Christian culture. Specifically, when the student said “I need to work on my relationship with God” I knew exactly what she meant. It meant praying more, getting up early to study the bible, to start going back to church. Things along those lines. The goal of these activities is to get “closer” to God. To “waste time with Jesus.” Of course, please hear me on this point, nothing is wrong with those activities. Personal acts of piety and devotion are vital to a vibrant spiritual life and continued spiritual formation. But all too often “working on my relationship with God” has almost nothing to do with trying to become a more decent human being.
The trouble with contemporary Christianity is that a massive bait and switch is going on. “Christianity” has essentially become a mechanism for allowing millions of people to replace being a decent human being with something else, an endorsed “spiritual” substitute. For example, rather than being a decent human being the following is a list of some commonly acceptable substitutes:
Going to church
Worship
Praying
Spiritual disciplines (e.g., fasting)
Bible study
Voting Republican
Going on spiritual retreats
Reading religious books
Arguing with evolutionists
Sending your child to a Christian school or providing education at home
Using religious language
Avoiding R-rated movies
Not reading Harry Potter.
The point is that one can fill a life full of spiritual activities without ever, actually, trying to become a more decent human being. Much of this activity can actually distract one from becoming a more decent human being. In fact, some of these activities make you worse, interpersonally speaking. Many churches are jerk factories.
Take, for example, how Christians tip and behave in restaurants. If you have ever worked in the restaurant industry you know the reputation of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Millions of Christians go to lunch after church on Sundays and their behavior is abysmal. The single most damaging phenomenon to the witness of Christianity in America today is the collective behavior of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Never has a more well-dressed, entitled, dismissive, haughty or cheap collection of Christians been seen on the face of the earth.
via Experimental Theology: The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity.

A friend when asked why he did charity work, answered: “I do it because it makes me feel good. I do it for me not them”. I agree with him. In a sense he is at least honest to himself!

This meshes nicely with a self-signalling conception of morality. If part of the point of behaving morally is to convince yourself that you’re a good person, then once you’re convinced, behaving morally loses a lot of its value.
By coincidence, a few days after reading this study, I found this article by Dr. Beck, a theologian, complaining about the behavior of churchgoers on Sunday afternoon lunches. He says that in his circles, it’s well known that people having lunch after church tend to abuse the waitstaff and tip poorly. And he blames the same mechanism identified by Mazar and Zhong in their Dictator Game. He says that, having proven to their own satisfaction that they are godly and holy people, doing something else godly and holy like being nice to others would be overkill.
via Less Wrong: Doing your good deed for the day.