Category Archives: Education

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

Is Higher Education Worth It?

2 Comments

A lot of it isn’t:

These estimates of high lifetime earnings levels make a common error: They assume that the current generation is going to get the same financial benefit from college that people did who graduated 40 years ago.

But things are different today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 70% of all high school graduates go on to college — compared with 45% in 1960.

Then, only the brightest and best-prepared students attended college and the schools offered academically rigorous courses that prepared students for the future.

Now even middling high-schoolers attend college — and often learn very little. Then they enter a job market where a bachelor’s degree is relatively common — and must compete against many others for the same jobs.

Overpriced and underperforming, combined with government subsidies: thus are bubbles made.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Jumping The Broken Windows Shark

22 Comments

OK, so according to Paul Krugman, Alderaan should be the richest planet in the galaxy:

People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.

Well, if he means that if Washington had been destroyed, as I (jokingly) suggested (and some anticipated) earlier, he might have a point, but I doubt that’s what he means. I really think he’s serious.

[Wednesday morning update]

Krugman is claiming that he didn’t write it, and it was a case of identity theft.

[Update a few minutes later]

The identity thief ‘fesses up.

Education, Political Commentary

Schools Of Education

It’s not a new topic for me, but here’s more reason to simply abolish them:

The education sector is notoriously ineffective at identifying high- and low-quality workers, making it difficult for the labor market to penalize students from education departments that produce low-quality teachers. The culture of low standards in education is partly to blame, as those within the education establishment have shown little interest in distinguishing good teachers from mediocre teachers, but why can K-12 schools get away with not distinguishing high-quality workers from low-quality workers? What makes education different?

Two words: teachers’ unions. As that famous report noted three decades ago, if a foreign entity had imposed on us this educational system, it would rightly be considered an act of war. What should we think about the domestic enemies that have done, and continue to do so?

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Most Murderous Faith-Based Religion

No, it isn’t Islam — it’s Marxism.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related, somehow. How is Warren Buffett like the Pope? They’re both completely clueless about how economies work:

The great advantage of competition in markets is that it exhausts all gains from trade, which thus allows individuals to attain higher levels of welfare. These win/win propositions may not reach the perfect endpoint, but they will avoid the woes that are now consuming once prosperous economies. Understanding the win/win concept would have taken the Pope away from his false condemnation of markets. It might have led him to examine more closely Spain’s profligate policies, where high guaranteed public benefits and extensive workplace regulation have led to an unholy mix of soaring public debt and an unemployment rate of 20 percent. It is a tragic irony that papal economics mimic those of the Church’s socialist opponents. The Pope’s powerful but misdirected words will only complicate the task of meaningful fiscal and regulatory reform in Spain and the rest of Europe. False claims for social justice come at a very high price.

A similarly harsh verdict must be rendered on Warren Buffett, whose much discussed editorial in the New York Times foolishly condemns the very economic system that allowed him to flourish as an extraordinary investor. Rhetorically, Buffett’s editorial reads like the confession of a man who got away with putting his hand in the cookie jar. He starts by insisting that in difficult times the principle of “equal sacrifice” should guide collective deliberations. In good autobiographical fashion, he then admits that the current tax system has allowed him to get away with paying just under $7 million in taxes this past year, which works out to be 17.4 percent of his $40 million personal income.

In Buffett’s utopian world, higher taxes, including higher capital gains taxes, magically generate the revenues needed to eliminate the current massive deficit. For this bold proposition, we have Buffett’s personal assurance that he has never seen capital gains rates that approach 40 percent “scare off” large or small investors. This is a simple case of sampling error, for those people who are scared off by high capital gains taxes don’t beat a path to his doorway in the first place. It would have been better if Buffett had addressed the “lock-in effect” with respect to capital gains. People only pay capital gains when they sell their stock. Accordingly, investors are highly sensitive to the capital gains rate, because why sell if the net proceeds from the sale are so small that they more than negate a higher rate of return from a shrunken capital base?

On this logic, lower capital gains rates generate more tax revenue for the federal government.

Of course, according to the president, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is “fairness.”

Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Lies Of Rousseau’s Disciples

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…have been laid bare in England:

The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness): you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it. What you saw were society’s victims responding to any or all of the following: bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality, etc, etc. Their crimes were simply part of the same package of callous selfishness displayed by (as one particularly bizarre equation had it) tabloid phone hackers.

What is not ludicrous and insulting to common sense in these propositions is contradictory in its own terms. There are indeed views of the human condition which hold that all species of wickedness are connected, because they are all rooted in the fact that man is a fallen creature. But somehow I doubt that the ardent liberal secularists who were piping up last week were believers in original sin or the machinations of the Devil.

The moral equivalence that they wanted to establish between looters and arsonists on the one hand, and the perpetrators of any other kind of bad behaviour you can think of on the other, was rooted in ideological, not theological, orthodoxy. The rioting gangs could not simply be what they seemed – what they so obviously were – because that would be a devastating victory for the judgment of popular opinion over the fantasies of liberalism.

There’s actually nothing “liberal” about it.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Our Innumerate Secretary Of Education

38 Comments

Apparently, Arne Duncan has been ignorantly channeling Paul Krugman. Derbyshire (and Iowahawk) take him to school.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of the crazy economics professor, Ed Driscoll reviews his latest antics.

I should add (as I have before) that it’s important to understand just how and why WW II ended the Depression. The conventional wisdom from the Keynesians is that all of the federal spending grew the economy, but that didn’t really happen — wars are in fact ruinous for economies, even for those economies that win them. Much of the production that occurred during the war was consumed in the war, or scrapped afterward, while there was rationing of food and goods on the home front. The real reason that we recovered was that once the war was on, FDR was too distracted by it to continue to tinker with the economy, as he had during the thirties, keeping it continually sick (much like a medieval doctor continuing to bleed a patient). He had to get arms production up and could no longer afford all of his random pet nostrums. Beyond that, unemployment plunged because so many men were drafted, taking them off the rolls, and then the women were put to work in the factories.

Had Roosevelt lived, after the war, he probably would have returned to his damaging tinkering, and in fact Truman wanted to, but the new Republican Congress that came in in 1946 wouldn’t let him, and so finally, after a decade and a half of disastrous Democrat policies, the economy finally recovered, and even boomed. But it doesn’t mean that the solution is a war, or even the “moral equivalent” of one. It means that the solution is sane government. I hope that we’re less than a year and a half from that.

[Update a while later]

The leftists can’t make up their minds about it.