The Unbroken Window

John Goodman, summarizing the failure of the Medicare pilot programs to produce cost reductions, asks rhetorically: Can you think of any other market where the buyers of a product are trying to tell the sellers how to efficiently produce it? Great quote. I’d say that higher education gets close particularly if we take a generous [...]

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I must admit, I have no tolerance for people playing charades. And in no sector do I see such games played more than in education. As I’ve said time and again: education is not about education. Let’s agree to an idea that should cut across party lines and ideological lines. What should we be able [...]

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I run through recent economics journal/working paper activity on Monday mornings. Here are some very attenuated bits of interest: Government mergers of hospitals in England do not produce better outcomes. (Same is true for privates, we knew this and the government went ahead anyway). High quality grammar school teachers have an impact that lasts a [...]

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The entire National Park Service has a budget and staffing level that is just about identical to the budget and staffing level of my very own University of Rochester. The NPS budget request for this year was $3.1 billion. The U of R budget for the last year they reported it to the government was [...]

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If only it was $11,500 we were talking about. At the same time as our university installed the Solar-Dok, it broke ground on a new student dormitory. This time the stakes are a little bit higher – the dorm is slated to cost $17 million. How is this relevant, don’t we need to build dorms to [...]

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For conservatives it might seem pretty inconsistent to hold the position that Pell grants and financial aid drive up college costs (they do) and then to support schol vouchers at the K12 level. I understand that preference for each of these positions is not coming from the same place. But think about it – the [...]

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Our fair college sends all of us an e-mail everyday that includes news and notes about our college – from the profound (our faculty working on cancer cures) to the mundane (parking information). We are sent about 5 or 6 bullet points with links every day. About every week or two one of those links [...]

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Michael Moore should be paid more and is exploited. I mean it. He has produced a number of misleadingly anti-capitalist documentaries that have become educational darlings. I cannot get my mind around that these are commonly used “educational” tools in high school much less college. But given that he is so popular and that so [...]

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Remember that we spent nearly $800 billion to arguably get something ranging between $0 and $1 trillion of additional economic stimulus? Remember that even under the most optimistic of cases, this stimulus happened by raising taxes on Americans (in the future of course). Remember that even under the most optimistic of cases, this stimulus is [...]

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I heard a new point made the other day from someone who was arguing with someone else about whether immigrants should be allowed in America. I first heard the argument that immigrants pay less in taxes than they use in social programs and therefore are a net drain on the US. I won’t address that [...]

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