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12-14-07 Links

* You may want to read this post from The Wealth Report in the Wall Street Journal, which details supposed changes in the way the rich give or the way they want to give. It’s light on detail but worth pondering:

Today, at the peak of the charity season and the height of the wealth boom, the charity world needs to wake up and realize that the rich have changed. The new wealthy aren’t content to write checks and hope for they best. They are self-made entrepreneurs who want to give away their money just as they earned it — by measuring everything, by being in control, by cutting out waste, and by finding a more-efficient way to deliver a service. They want transparency and concrete results.

(Robert Frank, who writes The Wealth Report, is also the author of Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich.)

* Rolling Stone has an interesting article with lots of good history as well as numerous questionable causal assertions concerning politics. It, combined with books like The Corner, demonstrates why drug treatment programs are never going away:

Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes – a twelvefold increase since 1980 – with no discernible effect on the drug traffic.

* Got links we should post? Send them in.

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