Commencement Speeches

Someday I'd like to give a commencement speech, and I hope it will be as good as this one by Steve Jobs (Via Newmark's door). Or maybe I'll fall back on this one by some Chicago Tribune Columnist remade into a song by Baz Luhrmann.

Here is the money quote from Jobs:

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep
looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you
find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the
years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

Don't forget the sunscreen.

Keywords: Graduation

Fiscal Policy

Via Voxbaby we have some very wise words from Gene Stueuerle on fiscal policy.

The Money Quote:

The Social Security debate could and should be part of a larger one in
which we engage our fellow citizens in choosing the best direction for society
as a whole as better things happen to us in the way of longer lives and new
health care goods and services. How can we really take best advantage of these
new opportunities? How can we spread the gains from this increased level of
well-being and wealth to create a stronger nation with opportunity for all? And
how should we share the costs?

Instead, the debate is upside down. Due to the ways we have designed
our programs and our budgets, every year we spend greater shares of our national income in areas where needs have declined, and then claim we don’t have enough left over for areas—such as education, public safety, children, and
anti-terrorism—where real needs remain and have often grown. I sometimes imagine sitting in the Ways and Means Committee room when someone from the National Institutes of Health comes in claiming to have found a cure, though expensive, for cancer. The members of committee, trapped in the logic of our current budget, find that instead of celebrating this advance, they commiserate among themselves about the increased cost for Social Security.

And this highlights the problems I have with TABOR laws.

Keywords: ECO120, ECO305, Fiscal Policy, TABOR

Macro Reading List

Tyler Cowen's Macro reading list, maybe some of these will find their way on to my intermediate reading list.

Keywords: ECO305

Too Much Homework?

This blog was originally created in part to talk about teaching and learning, so I thought I'd throw in a post or two on that topic. Here (Via Slashdot) we have a report on the correlation between the quantity of homework and the performance on an international standardized test. It appears as though more homework is not the answer to better performance. Shocking, and I thought making a student add 2+2 a million times would make them better at turning a fraction such as 1/2 into a decimal.

The interesting quote:

During the early 1980s, many U.S. schools and teachers ramped up their homework assignments, at least to younger children, in reaction to intense media focus on studies comparing the mediocre performance of American students to the industriousness of their Japanese counterparts. At the same time, ironically, Japanese educators were attempting to reduce the amount of homework given to their students and allow them more leisure from the rigors of schooling. Neither the American nor the Japanese educational reform of the 1980s seems to have affected general achievement levels in either country, according to the book.

Keywords: learning, Teaching, Homework

Growth and Democracy

In grad school I was very interested in the relationship between economic growth and democracy. I think this post from Corner Solution, has an excellent quote from the WSJ article:

"In some countries, like China, it could be easier to make changes," Mr. Cover says. "But that's the cost of democracy."

But some of my views on growth need to apparently need to change. I often thought Islamic lending laws provided a major impediment to growth. But this Marginal Revolution post suggests that Islam itself is not associated with lower growth than other religions. Maybe the answer can be found in this post over on Mahalanobis.

Islam's Sharia law severely limits the practice of charging or paying interest. But a new generation of Islamic banks have found ways to make products mimic the Western originals, from floating-rate infrastructure loans to Islam-compliant credit cards issued by Visa. The paperwork, however, is Islamic. "Risk," Mr. Mishari (* CEO of Bank Aljazira *) says with a smile, "has no religion."

Keywords: Growth, Interest Rates, ECO301, ECO305

The Economics of Movies

Slate has a few good articles by Edward Jay Epstein on the economics of movies entitled The Hollywood Economist. (Via Newmark's Door).

Keywords: Hollywood, Movies, Entertainment.

Immigration policy

Open borders is the best anti-poverty program we could have. David Card (via Marginal Revolution) finds that the immigrants that have entered our country haven't depressed the wages of the native population. So what other reason would their be for limiting immigration?

Part of the abstract from the paper by Card is below:

This paper reviews the recent evidence on U.S. immigration, focusing on two key questions: (1)Does immigration reduce the labor market opportunities of less-skilled natives? (2) Have immigrants who arrived after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act successfully assimilated? Looking across major cities, differential immigrant inflows are strongly correlated with the relative supply of high school dropouts. Nevertheless, data from the 2000 Census shows that relative wages of native dropouts are uncorrelated with the relative supply of less-educated workers, as they were in earlier years. At the aggregate level,the wage gap between dropouts and high school graduates has remained nearly constant since 1980, despite supply pressure from immigration and the rise of other education-related wage gaps.

Overall, evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant. On the question of assimilation, the success of the U.S.-born children of immigrants is a key yardstick. By this metric, post-1965 immigrants are doing reasonably well: second generation sons and daughters have higher education and wages than the children of natives. Even children of the least educated immigrant origin groups have closed most of the education gap with the children of natives.

Talk of The Nation on NPR just had a segment on this very issue, they spent most of the time discussing the economics of immigration on labor suppy. It would have been nice if they would have had a real economist like Card on, instead of the "think tank" hacks they had.

Keywords: ECO120, ECO305, immigration