The remarkable Salman Khan — the founder of the popular Khan Academy — talks about using video to reinvent education. Enjoy. H/T Paul Kedrosky.
Khan on Education
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Monthly Archives: March 2011
The Regulatory Mindset
Richard Epstein is typically lucid in taking on the increasingly foreboding regulatory culture that creates barriers for entrepreneurial creation of jobs and wealth:
What is to be done about the compliance culture–a culture born in response to excessive regulation–that now threatens to compromise the technological advances that have long spurred innovation in the United States?
This sad chronicle of relative decline takes place in three separate stages.
The first involves the new mindset that too often finds harmful externalities and bargaining breakdowns in virtually all human endeavors.
The second involves the bulky remedial structures that government puts in place to respond to these newly identified perils.
The third stage involves the subtle alterations in the selection of the compliance culture: the rise government officials and key private officers and executives whose skills matter ever more in these more severe regulatory environments.
This three-fold progression is not specific to this or that industry, but applies across the board. . . . [. . .]
No one should be so reckless as to claim that these forces operate in all cases in all ways. We still have our wonderful success stories. Yet by the same token, no one should be so naïve as to think that these forces have no role to play in the loss of innovation and competitiveness in this country, a loss felt in both absolute and comparative senses. This loss has become an ever-larger feature of the modern United States.
Stated another way, it’s not that rules are unnecessary for markets to perform efficiently. But what type of rules are better?
Rules that politicians enact and governmental officials enforce generally are far less efficient than rules that emerge as a result of the voluntary interactions of millions of individuals and companies. The successes and mistakes of those individuals and companies pursuing their own interests create rules that are the product of competition and personal responsibility. When those rules become sufficiently important in the fabric of a market economy, they become formalized as common law and precedent by courts.
The distinction between inefficient government-imposed rules and the decentralized rules that facilitate productive market economies is an important one to understand as we wade through the carnage of this current era of increasing governmental regulation.
What are we doing to ourselves?
Overcriminalization of life in America has been a frequent topic on this blog.
Mark Perry’s post places the topic in perspective.
A truly civil society would find a better way.
Baseball Flowchart
This is an absolutely brilliant flowchart. Perfect for getting ready for the baseball season. Click the image to view a larger image.
My Back Pages
As sung by Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and the late George Harrison at Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert in 1992.
Neil Young,Dylan… My Back Pages
Uploaded by ivaxavi. – Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.
Touring Rice
A video tour of one of Houston’s most beautiful places, Rice University.
Don’t try this on your weekend bike ride
VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.
Jeff Miron on Libertarianism
What’s the Difference?
The NY Times Joe Nocera notes that Countrywide Financial’s Angelo Mozilo is the latest winner of the criminalization of business lottery.
Meanwhile, Charles Gasparino explains why those who made faulty business decisions that led to a major U.S. banking crisis really shouldn’t be prosecuted for crimes.
Yet, the reality is that there is no discernible difference between what Mozilo did at Countrywide or what Dick Fuld did at Lehman Brothers with what Jeff Skilling did at Enron.
Yet, Skilling continues to serve a 24-year prison sentence and endure the immense collateral damage of his fate.
On the other hand, Mozilo and Fuld deal with civil litigation and move on with life.
Neither Mozilo nor Fuld should be prosecuted for trying to save their companies. Any responsibility that they have for the demise of their companies can be allocated in the civil justice system among all the responsible parties.
But that Jeff Skilling remains in prison – particularly given the despicable way in which he was put there – remains a serious blot on the American criminal justice system.
A truly civil society would find a better way.
Is entitlement reform our generational challenge?
Henry Blodget passes along this revealing Mary Meeker graph on how bloated entitlement programs now comprise a staggering 58% of federal government expenditures and a corresponding portion of the $1.3 trillion federal deficit.
In his wonderfully lucid style, the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins follows up with this column in which he explains how this system is intrinsically unsustainable, but also fixable:
Nobody should be surprised that public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are fighting to preserve every penny of their promised benefits.[ . . .]
. . . this fight was penciled in long ago, when politicians and union leaders made the strategic decision to negotiate benefits without negotiating for the funding to make good on them. The mock shock and horror is all the more laughable given that events in Wisconsin are a perfect microcosm of the battle that every sentient American knows, and has known for a generation, awaits Medicare and Social Security.
Medicare is the real killer. According to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, an average couple retiring last year can look forward to consuming Medicare benefits with a present value of $343,000, having paid Medicare taxes with a present value of $109,000. [. . .]
The flip side of this depressing consideration, though, is a happier one. Moving toward a system of real savings, in which payroll taxes would flow into some version of personal accounts controlled by the worker, would bring a big improvement to incentives. We could expect a sizeable growth dividend to help finance the transition.
By "finance the transition," of course, we mean today’s workers having to reach into their own pockets twice, paying for their own retirement while also making up for the saving their parents and grandparents didn’t do. When people talk about generational injustice, this is what they mean. But the pain can be lightened and spread more evenly with borrowing. Here’s where we should not be afraid of debt. The bond market can be trusted to distinguish between good debt and bad debt–between borrowing to fix the system and borrowing to prop it up.
The global bond market demonstrably still has confidence in America even today, in the absence of a clear path of reform. How much more willing would investors be to advance us money if it were being used to put the entitlement state on a sound, pro-growth footing? By the same token, if we don’t at some point justify the market’s current confidence in our future, our comeuppance will be swift and overwhelming.
This is the entire political challenge today, and you cannot shower enough contempt on those politicians who try to stonewall reform by exciting fears in the elderly that they will be left out in the cold. . . .
Recent past generations of Americans survived the challenges of the Great Depression and World War II to help provide a prosperous economy and great wealth for citizens.
Will the current generations of Americans accept the responsibility to take on the challenge of sustaining that prosperity?