Today from 3 — 6pm is my last final for this quarter. Soon after, I hop on a plane to Monterrey, Mexico to visit my grandma. I won’t be back until April 02, so no blogging until then.
Archive for March, 2006
Mar24th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in Economics, Europe, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 0 Comments“Advocates of the European model point to the pockets of poverty in the United States, but may not realize that poverty cannot be abolished without recourse to measures that produce the social pathologies that we observe in Europe. Social mobility implies the opportunity to fail. If society protects jobs, the employment opportunities of ambitious newcomers […]
Mar23rd2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in Economics, Europe, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 3 Comments“Krugman’s failure to relate the European model to Europe’s Muslim problem is telling. To point to the upside of Europe’s social model without mentioning the most serious downside is to provide bad advice to our own policymakers. The assimilation of immigrants by the United States, compared to the inability of the European nations to assimilate […]
Mar22nd2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in Economics, Europe, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 3 Comments“There is an ongoing debate among economists over whether social mobility is greater in the United States or Europe. The general evidence on this does not offer a definitive answer, but there is little doubt that most immigrants believe opportunities for themselves and their children are greater in the United States. This is why America […]
Mar21st2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in Economics, Europe, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 0 Comments“Clearly, the European system of employment helps the “insiders” with good jobs, and works against “immigrants” and other newcomers ,or “outsiders” in labor markets. …The labor market restrictions, however, make it hard for immigrants to obtain jobs in the legal economy, so either they are unemployed, or they work in the flourishing underground economies of […]
Mar20th2006
“Workers themselves increasingly recognize the reality that there is no free lunch through unionization and are increasingly voting to be non-union. But the word has yet to reach many among the intelligentsia, who still think of labor unions as institutions that benefit the working class. You can always benefit particular segments of any society at […]
Mar18th2006
“To appreciate how cockeyed America’s Dubai-phobia is, you have to spend a little time here, as I did this week. The truth is, this is one of the few places in the Arab world where things have been going in the right direction — away from terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism and toward an open, modern […]
Mar18th2006
“Are we truly to believe Hillary’s insistence last week that she knew nothing about Bill’s counseling of his friend and benefactor the crown prince of Dubai, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, on the ports deal? Do Bill and Hillary Clinton ever speak to each other, or do they just attend funerals, fundraisers and Billy […]
Mar17th2006
“The place to begin in thinking about the issue [of school vouchers] is with the difference between the state’s mandating and subsidizing a service, on the one hand, and providing the service itself, on the other hand. The government can require that children be vaccinated and pay for their vaccination without manufacturing vaccines. Similarly, it […]
Mar16th2006
The Truth About The Gender Gap
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, General and ModernPolitics. 7 CommentsBoston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes:
Of the last seven presidential elections, Republicans have won five — three times with more women’s votes than the Democrats. For all the rhetoric about the mighty gender gap — Democratic strategist Ann Lewis once called it ”the Grand Canyon of American politics” — Republicans seem to bridge it without […]
Mar16th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in Economics, General, HealthCare, Minimum Wage and Wal-Mart. 0 Comments“But the externality cannot be fully eliminated by passing a law that would require Wal-Mart and other employers of low-income employees to insure all their employees. This is clearest in the case of minimum-wage employees who at present are not insured. Since the labor cost that an employer incurs is the sum of the wage […]
Mar15th2006
The Wall Street Journal points us to an interesting area of Health Care where prices have been going down while quality has been going up:
One leading theory on health-care inflation suggests that part of the problem is that consumers don’t generally spend their own money on health care. Rather, it’s paid for by “third parties” […]
Mar15th2006
“Since an HSA requires a large deductible, they are best when combined with a form of catastrophic insurance; that is, medical insurance that pays only for large, expensive, and unusual medical problems. For this reason, and to cut down free riding by the uninsured on taxpayers, I believe everyone should be require to have catastrophic […]
Mar14th2006
Mark Steckbeck, professor at Hillsdale College, writes:
The virtue of a free market economy is that it serves disparate tastes and talents—wants and skills. Hotels and motels, for example, differ in their locations, amenities offered, cleanliness, etc. In fact, some are utter fleabags many of us might deem unseemly. But they serve the wants of others, […]
Mar14th2006
“The root of Old Europe’s problems is that it is in denial regarding the nature of the society it has constructed. In the first instance, European nations are capitalist, not socialist. It takes capitalism to have socialism, in the sense that without capitalism you get Cuba and North Korea and Albania when you try to […]
Mar13th2006
“Numerous inner-city charter and private schools are proving that the gaps can be narrowed, even closed, when rigorous pedagogy is practiced by teachers in teacher-centered classrooms where knowledge is regarded as everything. But most ed schools, celebrating “child-centered classrooms” that do not “suffocate discourses,” are enemies of rigor”. — George Will, in an article in […]
