The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Competition, Education on Feb 21st, 2012
In the long run, the clear winners from competitive market processes operating reasonably well are consumers. One need look no further than what it costs to obtain the most basic goods and services today as compared to even a generation ago. For example, the laptop I am writing this on has 4GB of RAM, 700 [...]
Posted in Education, Inequality, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Feb 16th, 2012
End all public funding of higher education. I was going to post a long ditty on it, but I prefer to make bald proclamations today. Note of course that my proclamation is even stronger (tautological perhaps?) if we take a global view of justice rather than a US-centric view.
Posted in Education on Feb 13th, 2012
Much has been written lately about how technology is ready to topple the existing bricks and mortar model of higher education. With the rapidly decreasing costs of communications technologies and advances in AI, and continued development of online learning forums, it would seem natural that the way we deliver higher education is bound to change. [...]
Posted in Central Planning, Education on Feb 7th, 2012
Some of us find this horrifying: “What’s most exciting about the new standards is the ‘nationalness’ of this work—we are all in it together, talking the same language and working toward the same goal, … That in response to the unveiling of new centrally planned math standards for our inmates K12 students.
Posted in Education, Health Care on Jan 30th, 2012
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 [...]
Posted in Education on Jan 23rd, 2012
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 [...]
Posted in Education, Flotsam and Jetsam on Jan 9th, 2012
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 [...]
Posted in Education, Environment on Dec 31st, 2011
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 [...]
Posted in Education, Environment, Institutions on Dec 26th, 2011
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 [...]
Posted in Education, Unintended Consequences on Dec 19th, 2011
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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