Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

On Firing Schoolteachers

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The benefits:

I doubt that the lowest possible turnover rate is compatible with the best possible education. Turnover has costs, but it also has benefits: fresh blood, lower burnout rates, and an incentive for teachers to keep performing. The whole idea of hiring someone in their early twenties and employing them forever seems like an unhealthy organizational structure to me–in the military and old-school law firms as well as teaching, though the military and law firms do more to weed out the number along the way. It breeds an organization that is insular–resistant to new ideas, suspicious of outsiders, resentful of its nominal clients. We should be looking for ways to make teaching more open to part-timers and people in second, third, or eighth career cycles, and to make it easier for teachers to move around between schools and districts, and between teaching and other industries.

It will never happen, though, as long as the NEA retains its power, because it’s never about the children with them. And it’s another good argument against public-employee unions.

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

The Climate-Change Gravy Train

How well paid are the warm-mongers? Looks like nice work to me, if you can get it, and all you have to do is go along with the politically correct status quo. I don’t know of anyone who’s done as well by scepticism. But then, the latter are being true to standards of science.

[Update a few minutes later]

The EPA person responsibility for regulating CO2 levels doesn’t know what the current level is. The country’s in the very best of hands.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

A Harsh Assessment Of The Past Half Century

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…in space. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that we’ve pi**ed away fifty years — we did lay a foundation for what’s to come, but we certainly could have been a lot further along with smarter policy, actually focused on opening up space (something that US space policy has never been). Several people at the suborbital conference here have commented (as I often do) that there is very little happening today in the newspace world, at least suborbitally, that we couldn’t have been doing twenty, or even thirty years ago (though modern computer and manufacturing technology has certainly made things cheaper and faster). But we have another half century to start getting it right. I hope.