Working for a successful company isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Self-employed workers in the United States are more satisfied with their jobs than other people, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. They’re also more likely to work for intrinsic reasons, like improving society or “because they want to,” rather than for money.

Working for yourself has plenty of benefits, but money isn’t one of them. The same satisfied workers also reported feeling more financial stressed, possibly due to the lack of health care and pension plans provided by self-employment.

If governments change the health care structure, and provide more benefits for self-employed people, we could experience a self-sufficiency revival, according to Phillip Longman in Foreign Policy. In the current financial crisis, people are increasingly working for themselves, growing vegetables for local consumption or developing open-sourced software in their basements. This has the potential to restructure the entire economy for the better.

Working for reasons other than money can make people more productive, too. In a speech to TED, Dan Pink proposes a radical “rethinking how we run our businesses,” based on aspects other than money. In creative work, according to Pink, motivating people with money can actually lead to worse performance. Pink proposes a system where people are motivated more by intrinsic qualities, like “mastery,” “autonomy,” and “purpose,” rather than money. If the Pew Center survey is any indication, people will be a lot more satisfied, too.

You can watch a video of Pink’s talk below:

Source: Pew Research, TED, Foreign Policy 

Image by  Tim Patterson , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

The fact that college tuition costs thousands of dollars each year is accepted as fact in most of the United States. A new web service called StraighterLine, profiled by the Washington Monthly, wants to bring the price down to just $99 per month. For the cost of a nice dinner for two people, StraighterLine students get courses “designed and overseen by professors with PhDs,” and real live tutors “available at any time, day or night, just a mouse click away.”

The company is currently trying to take business away from the big introductory college classes, where hundreds of students pack into lecture halls, often taught by grad students or adjunct faculty. StraighterLine purports to be more responsive to the students’ needs at a fraction of the cost of big institutions, and even cheaper than most online universities. The problem, according to Washington Monthly, is that big schools often use the money from the big introductory classes to fund the “libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else.”

A company like StraighterLine has the potential to disrupt the entire college business model and make things very uncomfortable for a lot of big-name universities. According to the article, StraighterLine, and other institutions like it will “seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.”

Source: Washington Monthly 

Image by  taberandrew , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Sounding off about the government can be put to good use through the @2gov website. A user can enter his or her zip code, and the website will figure out who that person’s elected representatives are. Then, when that person expresses a political viewpoint and mentions @2 gov on Twitter, those views are reported directly to the government.

Representatives will start receiving detailed reports of what political views are being expressed on Twitter in an easily understood format. Users don’t need to know their representatives names, and the politicians don’t need to be on Twitter.  The website can also verify people’s voting status to let the representatives know that the voices on twitter actually represent their constituency. The idea is to move political discourse from Twitter’s website to your representatives’ ears.

(Thanks, @jakebrewer.)

Source:  @2Gov  

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) issued his now infamous outburst—“You lie!”—during a very specific part of President Obama’s health care speech: the dismissal of claims that a new health care plan would cover “illegal” immigrants.

“In an instant, Wilson was willing to breach protocol, embarrass himself, and undermine his party—because he was so infuriated by the idea that Obama’s plan might provide care to a certain group of people,” Channing Kennedy writes on ColorLines’ blog RaceWire.

To illuminate why “our conversation around immigration [is] so often driven to extremes, both of language and of policy,” Kennedy points to a fantastic short video about the loaded term illegal featuring ColorLines publisher (and 2008 Utne visionary) Rinku Sen.

Source: RaceWire, ColorLines

You don’t need a standardized test to know how well a school is performing. You just need to check the bathroom. If the bathroom is dirty and filled with graffiti, the school probably isn’t very good. If it’s clean, with plenty of toilet paper, that’s a good sign. Writing for Miller-McCune, school evaluator Folwell Dunbar outlines this and other “soft measures” to judge the quality of a school, none of which fit into a standardized test. A few of the highlights include:

Classroom windows and/or the vertical slits on school doors are covered over with dark construction paper. Trust me, it's seldom for purely decorative purposes.

Children clutch long pencils with ground-down erasers. If this is the case, chances are students are more concerned about making mistakes than taking chances.

Civics teachers don't keep up on current events. Science teachers aren't excited about the latest scientific breakthrough. English teachers don't read for pleasure. Physical education teachers are overweight and/or smoke.

You could also see many of these indicators from watching The Wire.

Source: Miller McCune 

Image by  Svadilfari , licensed under  Creative Commons .