There's a lot of information out there. Some of it is junk, some of it is frame-worthy. For every dozen foam-spewing-from-the-mouth rants out there, there's a well-thought-out, factual, logical piece of work that deserves your attention. Here are five you might enjoy: 

1. The U.S. Is Not Falling Behind
Michael Elliott, CNNMoney
This article is several months old, but well worth the read. Very relevant, lots of good information, and very well-written. Among the pithy observations: "In 1945 the U.S. accounted for about 50% of total global output, twice what it does now. Why? Because most of the rest of the industrial world was in ruins."

2. Will Next Time Be Different?
Raghuram Rajan, Project Syndicate
Rajan, a University of Chicago professor, correctly called the financial crisis well before it materialized. His new warning: Moral hazard fuels these things, and there's more moral hazard today than you can shake a stick at. "The scary answer may be that it does not end until governments run out of money (as in Ireland) or the public runs out of sympathy (as in Germany vis-a-vis the rest of Europe)."

3. Can China Compete With American Manufacturing?
Michael Schuman, Time
A good piece of contrarianism: China has more cheap, low-skill labor than it knows what to do with, but when it comes to high-tech manufacturing, the U.S. prevails (for now). Good news for companies such as Boeing (NYSE: BA) and IBM (NYSE: IBM).

4. Wall Street's Dead End
Felix Salmon, New York Times
Today's hottest companies, like Facebook and Twitter, aren't going public. They don't need to, and they don't want to. The stock market has become an irrelevant sideshow. Many of the great companies that are public, like Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), "don't pay dividends or employ many Americans, and their shares are essentially speculative investments for people making a bet on how we're going to live in the future," Salmon writes. Controversial but thought-provoking.

5. Stop Teaching Calculating, Start Teaching Math
Conrad Wolfram, TED
This video has nothing to do with investments, but is relevant to anyone with an interest in the development of our economy. Conrad Wolfram (of WolframAlpha fame) discusses how computers can now do all the calculating for our math problems, yet blunt-force hand calculation is still the overwhelming majority of our math curricula. Instead, we should let the computers do the number-crunching and reformat our teaching to focus on asking the right math questions. I love this kind of thinking.

Got any of your own? Share 'em in the comment section below.