James Surowiecki, writing in the Financial Page of the New Yorker writes:
Twenty years ago, a radical economic experiment began in Latin America. With economies beleaguered by foreign debt and runaway inflation, many of the region’s politicians decided that salvation lay in a program of market-friendly reforms that became known as the Washington Consensus—privatization of state-owned […]
Archive for February, 2006
Feb16th2006
Bolivia, Before And Now
Published by in Economics, General, Hispanics (Minority Issues) and LatinAmerica. 2 CommentsFeb16th2006
“For all too many years, in too many cases, we’ve seen non-elected judges imposing their own values and policy views and disregarding the democratic rights of the people. From the free exercise of religion in public places, to the pledge of allegiance, to issues of life itself, some judges are acting like legislators. In two […]
Feb15th2006
School Choice Helps Primarily The Poor
Published by in Education, General, Hispanics (Minority Issues) and Vouchers. 0 CommentsThe Opinion Telegraph reports:
Charter schools are supported by public funds and may not charge fees. Public authorities pay them a cash amount per pupil, usually lower then the average cost of local state schools….
One of the most authoritative studies has been carried out by academics from Harvard University and Columbia Business School. They looked at […]
Feb15th2006
“By contrast, private firms like Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club and Home Depot had trucks on the road immediately after the hurricane. Stores even gave away items like chain saws and boots for rescue workers, sheets and clothes for shelters, and water and ice for the public. Wal-Mart was so efficient that there was talk among some […]
Feb14th2006
The Opinion Telegraph writes:
Evidence from Sweden shows that choice benefits the least well off, and helps to raise standards for all pupils in neighbourhoods where schools compete.
Sweden is the only European country operating a universal voucher scheme. The reforms began in 1992 when independent schools were guaranteed the right to receive funding from municipalities. Vouchers […]
Feb14th2006
“Combined with this is the fact that most European populations experience a profound feeling of impotence in the face of their own immovable political elites…This feeling of impotence is not because of any lack of intelligence or astuteness on the part of the populations in question: if you wanted to know why there was so […]
Feb13th2006
An Unusual University
Published by in Education, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 3 CommentsThe Welfare State Were In blog points to this very interesting University in Guatemala:
I am told that there is a remarkable private university in Guatemala. It is much bigger than Britain’s only private university, Buckingham, although the population of Guatemala is much smaller.
Apparently it has had 12,000 students but it is hiving off the purely […]
Feb13th2006
“Now I’m not a big fan of labor unions. I think they help some workers at the expense of others. I think they can allow racism to flourish. I think they make the workplace less flexible, less creative and more bureaucratic and rule-burdened”. –Russell Roberts, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Feb10th2006
“I’ve long argued that most post-secondary education (possibly most post-primary education), does not confer any useful skills upon students, but rather is a signalling mechanism: the education is a proxy for things like middle-classness, intelligence, and drive. Given that, increasing education will not increase the economic opportunity to teh currently uneducated; it will onl drive […]
Feb9th2006
Asymmetrical Information explains what statistical discrimination is:
In Economics, in work done by Gary Becker (Nobel Prize, Chicago) racism is defined as a preference for one race over the other. If an employer picks a stupid white candidate over a smart black candidate he is making a racist decision — the stupid white candidate will be […]
Feb9th2006
“I’m not a conservative, have never been a conservative, and don’t ever expect to become a conservative. So it spooks me how accurate all those old-time McCarthyite rants about Communist subversion turned out to be now that we have the Venona transcripts and ex-KGB generals telling all to historians. Back in the ’60s and ’70s […]
Feb8th2006
In a nutshell:
Another bias is what Caplan calls anti-market bias. Liberals are excessively distrustful of markets and overly confident about the use of government power. The assumption is that government power will always be administered with wisdom and benevolence. I would be the first to admit that markets are not perfect. And government programs are […]
Feb8th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Education and General. 1 Comment“More generally, the political culture of the West is only now beginning to recover from the memetic damage done to it from 1920 on by Soviet propaganda and Soviet agents of influence (see, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives : Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals). This memetic attack followed the prescriptions […]
Feb7th2006
Esko Aho, former prime minister of Finland, in a new report prepared for the European Commission states:
Europe’s most successful companies are turning their backs on EU markets because of red tape, a high-level report said yesterday.
The companies that Europe needed to survive were instead investing more money than ever in the United States and Asia, […]
Feb7th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Communism, Economics and General. 0 Comments“No real-world market is perfect. But market failure is only grounds to deprecate markets when we have reason to believe non-market allocation mechanisms can do better. Otherwise, the only aim and effect of the deprecation can be to replace an imperfect market with something worse. (Usually the “something worse” is a committee of bureaucrats.) Can […]
Feb6th2006
In Florida And Wisconsin, Teachers Unions Crush Educational Opportunities
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Economics, Education, General, Unions and Vouchers. 3 CommentsThe Wall Street Journal has an editorial that reads:
The Education Borg
In Florida and Wisconsin, teachers unions crush educational opportunities.
Sunday, January 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST The Education Borg
Teachers unions keep telling us they care deeply, profoundly, about poor children. But what they do, as opposed to what they say, is behave like the Borg, those […]
