Last week, former Secretary of Education and US Senator Lamar Alexander wrote in the Wall Street Journal that a college degree is both affordable and an excellent investment. He repeated the usual talking point about how a college degree increases lifetime earnings by a million dollars, “on average.” That part about averages is perhaps the most important part, since all college degrees are certainly not created equal.
Mises Daily Wednesday by Matt Palumbo:
It’s been a light season for hurricanes and tropical storms in North America, and contrary to what many economics “experts” may think, that’s a good thing. After all, natural disasters are extremely costly in terms of opportunity costs and capital.
In the early nineteenth century, Bastiat posed the story of a young man who throws a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. We’re told that this may have a bright side — that the baker must now pay a glazier to fix the window, who will then use that income to spend elsewhere, creating a ripple effect that benefits many.
Web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains how global financial markets work: Basically, build something really huge that threatens the rest of us, then make everyone else pay to keep it from collapsing. This is followed by an ironic “happily ever after.”
From the interview with the Financial Repression authority podcast:
“The only way they can do that [negative interest rate policy] is to lock people’s deposits into the banking system. That is where the war on cash comes in. They would love to restrict or even abolish the use of cash within the United States if they could. That means they would have to use deposits. this is another way of propping up a very unsound and dangerously flawed banking system.”
Mises Daily Tuesday by Michel Accad:
While doctors and nurses become more scarce, the number of health care administrators continues to go up. The role of these administrators is to aggregate and centralize data, although there is no evidence this increases the value of health care.
The drama over Greece’s financial crisis continues to dominate the headlines. As this column is being written, a deal may have been reached providing Greece with yet another bailout if the Greek government adopts new “austerity” measures. The deal will allow all sides to brag about how they came together to save the Greek economy and the European Monetary Union. However, this deal is merely a Band-Aid, not a permanent fix to Greece’s problems. So another crisis is inevitable.
The Greek financial crisis is far from over, although the latest developments show how much the establishment players in the bailout want to move on to the-crisis-is-over-so-turn-your-attention-elsewhere mode. While previous bailouts have always been about bailing out the big banks in France and Germany, this one looks different in that it illustrates the limits of German patience with Greece, with collateral requirements for the Greek government and orders to reorganize industries, raise taxes, and cut spending.
In contrast to the expected shortage of tens of thousands of physicians, there appears to be an abundance of health care administrators.
A survey finds that economists agree that 17 our of 18 research practices are “unjustifiable.” However, many economists engage in these practices in alarming numbers. Many of the unjustifiable practices relate to econometric issues regarding data, modeling, and cherry picking.
