Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Higher-Education Bubble

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More thoughts on the overvaluation of a college degree:

Wolf’s position is firm. An increase in the quantity of graduates will neither create a dynamic, wealth-producing economy nor will it create the conditions for the emergence of lots of dynamic, wealth-producing individuals. Universities are not what they are currently being cracked up to be. But that leads to another problem. So deeply entrenched is the belief that, to use the words of the 1998 Dearing report, ‘Higher education has become central to the economic wellbeing of nations and individuals’, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recall what the purpose of institutions of higher education might be. Their autonomy as academic bodies, in which one ought to be free to pursue an interest in a subject area to a higher level, has been effaced by their thoroughgoing instrumentalisation as drivers of economic growth and social mobility.

One of the biggest myths is that the subject matter doesn’t matter — that a degree in medieval French literature is just as good, and worth just as much money as one in chemical engineering. It’s not.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why The “Unexpected” Keeps Happening

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It’s because the idiots in the press actually believe in these “progressive” economic nostrums.

[Update a while later]

Obamanomics is shovel ready:

Obamanomics favors top-down compulsory cooperation over voluntary. It is the anti-Reaganomics. Mr. Obama has done the following: (1) raised taxes, (2) unleashed a wild orgy of spending, including his disastrous so-called “stimulus,” (3) dramatically increased regulations and even nationalized industries and businesses, and (4) printed money out of “quantitative easing” thin air.

The results were predictable. Since the Obama stimulus – a collection of “shovel-ready” projects promised to save the economy – was signed into law, America has lost 1.9 million jobs and unemployment has surpassed 9 percent. GDP growth remains anemic. Consumer confidence has tumbled. Gas prices were at $1.81 per gallon before Mr. Obama put his “boot on the neck” of suppliers, and now it’s more than doubled, to $3.81. We burn our food supply in our gas tanks, and grocery prices have skyrocketed – some staples by as much as 40 percent. Since the president signed his mortgage rescue plan, Americans have seen 3.82 million foreclosures. Most disturbingly, the majority of Americans are receiving some type of welfare.

And yet they persist.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Natural Gas Fiasco

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…at the New York Times:

Natural gas just might be the energy solution environmentalists say they want, but actually can’t stand because nothing would put them out of business faster. Forbes blogger Chris Helman words it perfectly:

We would have thought that the Times would be in favor of plentiful, low-cost natural gas. It burns a lot cleaner than coal, and with nuclear off the table for now, gas is poised to fuel U.S. economic growth for more than a generation to come. I can only guess that the problem, as the Times sees it, is that as long as we have all that cheap gas, there’s precious little need for solar panels, windmills and other cornerstones of their much-heralded but slow evolving green jobs revolution.

Forbes, on the other hand, thinks it’s pretty awesome that thanks to drilling ingenuity the U.S. has proven to have one of the world’s biggest and cheapest hoards of clean-burning gas. Now that’s a story.

This may be a solution to some of the idiocy in California as well, given out high electric rates due partly to NIMBY reluctance to build generating capacity and the insane carbon law they passed. We’re currently paying fifteen cents a kilowatt-hour in SoCal (more for amounts exceeding baseline). I can buy a generator like this one (or smaller), and produce the same power for about a quarter of that at current gas prices (and they’re likely to continue to go down). But I imagine if I were to do that, the carbon nazis would come after me. Also, I’m not sure if they’re designed for steady use, but I think that if you could come up with one that was fairly quiet and could run 24/7, it will become pretty attractive to a lot of people around here.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Debt Problem

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…is even worse than we think:

Both make a case that Republicans should be making more often and more forcefully: The path out of our troubles requires spending cuts, and especially entitlement reform, but above all it requires growth. Without dramatically improved economic growth, no amount of austerity could help us avert a fiscal catastrophe, let alone improve the economic state of the average family. How to achieve dramatically improved economic growth is, of course, no simple question. But we can be pretty sure that tax increases on investors and job creators are not the way.

But it’s the only play the Democrats have in their playbook.

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

The Failure Of Al Gore

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More thoughts from Walter Russell Mead:

The global green strategy was a comprehensive, unified and coordinated one. Green activists around the world, in some countries empowered because proportional representation gives fringe groups disproportionate political influence, would unite around the push for a single global solution to climate change. The global solution involved a treaty to be negotiated under UN auspices that would be “legally binding” and subject the emission of greenhouse gasses to strict global controls. Developing countries would receive massive transfers of official aid ($100 billion or more a year) to compensate them for the costs they would incur in meeting carbon targets; developed countries like the United States would face stricter targets still. The target for the treaty was to cap global emissions at levels believed to keep the global temperature rise this century to two degrees centigrade.

To reach this Valhalla, a political strategy was put in place; it is the strategy that the former vice president is still gamely trying to push in his Rolling Stone article. It has failed.

Good. As with Obama, his failure is success for the rest of us.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, a success for the rest of us who don’t live in California. Here, he succeeded, because the voters are idiots, and the ruinous law that the Democrats and Scharzenegger pushed (thanks, Maria!) will be just one more factor that irretrievably sinks the state’s economic prospects.

[Late morning update]

Al Gore — idiot Malthusian.

As bad as Bush was, we really dodged a bullet in 2000.