“The recipe sounds familiar: merit pay for teachers, rigorous testing, national academic standards. Is it a school turnaround effort in New York City, New Orleans, or Los Angeles? No, it’s happening in Shanghai. Over the past decade authoritarian China has been able to achieve what has eluded generations of educators in the […]
Archive for June, 2011
Jun28th2011
The Freakonomics blog has an interesting perspective:
From a pair of Harvard economists, Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn, and a UCLA business school professor, Paola Giuliano, comes this working paper (Abstract here and below; full version here) that tests the hypothesis that current gender role differences can be traced to shifting methods of agriculture, […]
Jun27th2011
“I’m visiting a friend who does due diligence for his private equity fund’s investments in various U.S. companies. As a result, he talks to businessmen every week. For many months now, he has found businessmen complaining about the Obama administration’s criminalization of various failures, many of them small, to […]
Jun24th2011
Most of you are probably familiar with the GDP vs Median income graphs showing that since around the 1970’s, GDP has been growing faster than median income. This has lead to various theories as to why this is the case. Common explanations range from technology change, higher premiums for education, globalization, to the conspiracy Brenton […]
Jun22nd2011
David Leonhardt On Liberal Economists
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism and Economics. 0 CommentsOn Monday, I posted a quote from Paul Krugman stating that it’s usually conservatives who are less aligned with facts than liberals. Well I dug up a post from David Leonhardt (a well respected liberal), implying the opposite.
He writes:
The difference, I think, is that conservative economists’ blind spots overlap more with general conservative blind […]
Jun21st2011
This is the fundamental reason the Jewish lobby is so strong:
See more here.
Jun20th2011
Paul Krugman gave an interview on book recommendations where he said this:
In my experience with these things – which I find both within economics and more broadly – is that if you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, “What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What […]
Jun15th2011
Dean Baker, in the March issue of the American Prospect (Yes, I am about 3 months behind in my magazine reading - I’ve been busy!) wrote something that surprised me:
In a recent paper, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that by far, the largest single factor contributing to the growth of […]
Jun13th2011
CATO Unbound runs a monthly debate where a position is taken, and experts throughout are allowed to rebut and debate the point. This months topic is The Targeted Killing Of Civilians And The Rule Of Law.
Should be interesting.
Jun8th2011
He warns:
The figure, taken from the annual report of the Social Security actuaries released in May 2011, tells the story. Up until 2011, the “non-interest income” for the Social Security trust fund–which basically means payroll taxes–exceeded the costs of the system. Under the rules of federal budget accounting, Social Security was providing extra funds that […]
Jun7th2011
“This week, Bloomberg BusinessWeek put the financial woes of the U.S. Postal Service on its cover with a story titled “The End of Mail.” The dire plight of the USPS isn’t exactly news — it’s been losing money since 2006, including nearly $20 billion since 2007. But the cliff the agency has […]
Jun6th2011
“What is true is that the U.S. Medicare is expensive compared with, say, Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) or the French health care system (which is complicated, but largely single-payer in its essentials); that’s because Medicare American-style is very open-ended, reluctant to say no to paying for medically dubious procedures, and […]
Jun2nd2011
“None of this is to say that that’s not in fact “the way it should be”. If we are to trust the Economic Policy Institute, a union-funded think tank overseen by big-labour bigwigs, Ohio public-sector workers earn less than allegedly comparable private-sector workers. Surely it’s true that government lawyers make less than their private-sector peers. But I […]
Jun1st2011
Which is better? Andrew Samwick, professor of economics at Dartmouth College answers it this way:
My colleague Jon Skinner and I made that comparison in an article in the American Economic Review. The result was that the projected distributions of retirement income were surprisingly similar under the old-style DB plans that were dominant in the 1980s and the 401(k) plans […]
