Category Archives: Economics

Economics, Education, Political Commentary

An Open Letter To Greg Mankiw

27 Comments

In which oversized children at Harvard demand that they be mistaught economics. I love the comment from “Karl Marx.”

[Update a few minutes later]

The Crimson‘s response is brutal:

…the students’ attempt to connect their classroom protestations to the Occupy movement illustrates the disjointed and often unfocused nature of the movement. Indeed, it seems ironic that students in an introductory economics course at Harvard feel that by walking out of their completely optional lecture taught by a famous economist on the theme of income inequality feel that their actions ought to be considered a sign of solidarity with the Occupy movement. Such protests don’t show solidarity, they show ignorance and a lack of self-awareness.

There’s a lot of that going around at #OWS.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Few Words For #OWS

7 Comments

…from Bill Whittle.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Left’s war on self reliance (not a permalink).

[Update a couple minutes later]

They are the one percent:

Many “Occupy Wall Street” protesters arrested in New York City reside in more luxurious homes than some of their rhetoric might suggest, a Daily Caller investigation has found.

And what did the arrest records of all those Tea Party members reveal? Oh, wait! There aren’t any.

The Tea Party is a political movement. #OWS is a crime wave.

[Update late morning]

Lifestyles of the rich and arrested — a slideshow of homes of the “99%.”

[Bumped]

Hey, remember how Queen Nancy told us that the Tea Party was just astroturf, not a real grass-roots movement? Well, ACORN has been busted:

…an activist named Channing, who has been at the Occupy Wall Street protests from the beginning, volunteers the information that the former ACORN organization–through its new front group, New York Communities for Change–is paying $10 per hour and $100 per day to homeless people to attend the demonstrations.

It’s such a popular protest among the disaffected, they have to be paid to attend. And I wonder where ACORN is getting the money? From the 53%?

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Latest Warm-Monger Scam

2 Comments

Some thoughts:

Here’s what interest me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own?

Well, they believe in the “scientists.” But why? Are all scientists always right? Of course not; the definition of science is that new information and ideas are constantly refining or overturning old verities. The definition of science is that scientists are sometimes wrong, or will be at some point.

What if it’s a class thing? Instapundit has a link to an essay class warfare within the New Class. “OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.”

This seems to me to be the same thing. Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class: the technologists and researchers.

The phrase “the science is settled” is the very antithesis of science. But these people don’t really understand science.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Magnificently Right

15 Comments

Here’s why the Tea Party is:

Republican consultants report that in focus groups, TV commercials about out-of-control debt prompt strongly positive responses even from Democrats. Even Democrats have to live somewhere and a lot of them own homes. And there are a lot more Democratic taxpayers and homeowners than there are government workers. This is a wedge issue for Republicans that won’t quit.

Here’s one result that I found remarkable: It shows the aggregate property taxes paid to state and local governments, against aggregate mortgage payments (the outstanding volume of mortgage debt multiplied by the current mortgage rate). The result is somewhat exaggerated, because about a third of property tax collections are commercial rather than residential, but it’s still compelling: the property tax burden on homeowners is now roughly equivalent to the interest burden on their mortgages!

When one gets to that point, one is no longer a home owner, but simply renting their home from their local government. That’s the way it feels here in CA. Our mortgage is still more than taxes, but not by all that much.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Are Schoolteachers Underpaid?

8 Comments

No:

Most teachers have Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in education, and most people with education degrees are teachers. Decades of research has shown that education is a less rigorous course of study than other majors: Teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores but receive much higher GPAs than other students. It may be that a degree in education simply does not reflect the same underlying skills and knowledge as a degree in, say, history or chemistry. When we compare salaries based on objective measures of cognitive ability — such as SAT, GRE, or IQ scores — the teacher salary penalty disappears.

I’d always suspected that, but I had never actually seen the statistics. Colleges of Education should be abolished, or at least not eligible for federal funding of any kind, including student loan guarantees.