Category Archives: Education

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

Wisconsin Waterloo

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…for “liberals”:

Democrats furiously oppose Walker because public employees unions are transmission belts, conveying money to the Democratic Party. Last year, $11.2 million in union dues was withheld from paychecks of Wisconsin’s executive branch employees and $2.6 million from paychecks at the university across the lake. Having spent improvidently on the recall elections, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the teachers union, is firing 40 percent of its staff.

Progressives want to recall Walker next year. Republicans hope they try. Wisconsin seems weary of attempts to overturn elections, and surely Obama does not want his allies squandering political money and the public’s patience. Since 1960, no Democrat has been elected president without carrying Wisconsin.

Walker has refuted the left’s sustaining conviction that a leftward-clicking ratchet guarantees that liberalism’s advances are irreversible. Progressives, eager to discern a victory hidden in their recent failures, suggest that a chastened Walker will not risk further conservatism. Actually, however, his agenda includes another clash with teachers unions over accountability and school choice, and combat over tort reform with another cohort parasitic off bad public policies — trial lawyers.

Here’s hoping he wins those fights, too.

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

Is Higher Education Worth It?

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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

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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.