This is important. Amazingly, socialist Sweden attempted radical partial privatization of its schools with about one fourth of students now attending publicly financed privately managed schools (roughly charter schools). This daring reform was followed by a dramatic decline in scores on the PISA international standardized test including the largest decline in math scores of all […]

Buce sends us to Der Spiegel’s description of Barack Obama’s potential 2012 opponents (“You Think This is Bad?”) John Kay in today’s FT (no link) tells us why letting economists pontificate about finance is a Mug’s Game. The mugging being of people who are stupid enough to believe economists. (If Brad DeLong or Mark Thoma […]

So today I read at the Yahoo Finance (it’s my home page because I can look at the stock numbers on the left and read the headline on the right for a guaranteed laugh) that  John Mauldin thinks the OWS would be better off if they occupiedCongress: Mauldin believes America still has time to figure […]

Had a long day of Social Security related blogginess so will just put up this to spark some discussion: In Part One of this post I discussed the danger that the 2% ‘temporary’ payroll tax cut might be a Trojan Horse destined never to expire in full or at all only to have any continuing […]

By divorced one like Bush The following from Robert’s post got me thinking about railroads. “There have been three big banking booms in modern U.S. history. The first began in the late nineteenth century, during the Second Industrial Revolution, when bankers like J. P. Morgan funded the creation of industrial giants like U.S. Steel and […]

Full article here Chrysler is the smallest of the Big Three automakers, but it stands apart from its peers in another crucial respect. While General Motors and the Ford Motor Company are public corporations, Chrysler is controlled by one of the world’s richest and most secretive private investment companies. That investment company is Mr. Snow’s […]

CNN does some he-said, she-said, but throws in some data: The administration’s proposal also requests that Congress authorize an increase to the nation’s debt ceiling. Currently, it’s set to rise to $10.6 trillion for fiscal year 2009 – which runs from October 2008 through September 2009. But the proposal requests that limit be increased to […]

Unlike Fannie and Freddie, AIG was royally and truly doomed. The Fed tells us so: In unusual and exigent circumstances, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, by the affirmative vote of not less than five members, may authorize any Federal reserve bank, during such periods as the said board may determine, at […]

by cactus The Efficiency of the Private Sector Recently, the wife and I moved to a new state. When you do that, you need to get a new driver’s license, plus re-register your vehicles. The whole process, including taking the written (well, computerized) exam, from the moment we walked in until the moment we walked […]