school choice

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pages: 403 words: 105,431

The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education by Diane Ravitch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, confounding variable, David Brooks, desegregation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

For most of Reagan’s two terms, the Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress, and the party was closely allied with the two national teachers’ unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The unions opposed school choice, which they saw as a threat to public education and a step toward privatization. Congress rebuffed Reagan’s proposals for school choice, as well as his plan to eliminate the Department of Education. However, the concept of school choice found a home among free-market-oriented foundations and think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The foundations and think tanks incubated a generation of scholars and journalists who advocated school choice long after the end of the Reagan administration.

The Department of Education was committed to both standards and choice (choice was even higher on the agenda of Republicans than standards, because Republicans generally opposed national standards, which suggested federal meddling). At meetings of top staff in the department, I sat in on many discussions of school choice in which the question was not whether to support choice, but how to do so. The issue of choice had never been important to me, but I found myself trying to incorporate the arguments for choice into my own worldview. I reasoned that standards would be even more necessary in a society that used public dollars to promote school choice. The more varied the schools, the more important it would be to have common standards to judge whether students were learning. I began to sympathize with the argument for letting federal dollars follow poor students to the school of their choice.

This approach was the very opposite of Friedman’s goal of maximizing individual freedom through school choice. As the federal government kept up the pressure for desegregation and as resistance to mandatory busing increased, some school districts attempted to encourage voluntary desegregation through choice. They opened magnet schools—schools with specialized offerings in the arts or sciences or other fields—to encourage white students to attend urban schools that would otherwise be heavily nonwhite. But until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the issue of school choice remained far outside the mainstream, mainly because it was viewed by the media and elected officials as a means to permit white students to escape court-ordered racial desegregation.


pages: 282 words: 80,907

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

Spreading the Word After our initial experience in New York and Boston, other school districts began to call us for help. Indeed, since founding the nonprofit Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, Neil Dorosin has become the Johnny Appleseed of market design for school choice. With support from Atila, Parag, and me, IIPSC has helped design school choice mechanisms for Denver and New Orleans and has had input into school choice in Washington, D.C. As I write this, we have projects under way in several other cities as well. Economists in Japan and Belgium also have begun to look into designing school choice systems there, and in England it seems to have become a priority for the Conservative Party.

Notice that we’ve just repeated the logic that we used in the previous chapter to demonstrate Gale and Shapley’s discovery that the final matching that results from the deferred acceptance algorithm is stable. Details, Details I made some simplifications in my explanation of how the deferred acceptance algorithm was adapted to fit New York school choice. It’s worth mentioning a few of these simplifications, because details matter so much in market design. Just as the medical Match had some special features (including couples looking for two jobs), so, too, does New York school choice. Also, school choice operates under a lot of constraints, and many people have to sign off on any innovations. Sometimes this led to unavoidable complications. Not all of these complications were unavoidable, but just as in kidney exchange, my economist colleagues and I were only advisers, and not all of our advice was adopted.

A random lottery number was assigned to each child and used to break ties—for example, when there weren’t enough places for all the walk zone kids, only some could be admitted. For the other half of the seats in a school, only the lottery established priority. This division of the Boston schools into halves implicitly acknowledged a political reality. School choice divides parents into two “parties.” People who live near good schools become the “walk-to-school party,” while those who live elsewhere become the “school choice party.” The priority policy in Boston (where people still recall the “busing wars” fought there a generation ago during desegregation) represented a compromise between the two, and the details of this compromise were adjusted from year to year based on which groups wielded the most influence.


pages: 304 words: 22,886

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, continuous integration, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, endowment effect, equity premium, feminist movement, financial engineering, fixed income, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, index fund, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, medical malpractice, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, pension reform, presumed consent, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Zipcar

Haddad, and Bruce Paton. “The Economics of Energy Efficiency: Insights from Voluntary Participation Programs.” Energy Policy 28 (2000): 477–86. Howell, William. “School Choice in No Child Left Behind.” In Choice and Competition in American Education, ed. Paul E. Peterson, 255–64. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Hoxby, Caroline. “School Choice and School Productivity: Could School Choice Be a Tide That Lifts All Boats?” In The Economics of School Choice, ed. Caroline Hoxby, 287–341. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Hsee, Christopher K. “Attribute Evaluability and Its Implications for Joint-Separate Evaluation Reversals and Beyond.”

Some of the most heated debates in American politics, involving same-sex marriage and related issues, could be made much less hot with a little separation of church and state—and by insisting on freedom both for religious organizations and for people who love each other. 13 IMPROVING SCHOOL CHOICES In 1944 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt included “the right to a good education” in what he called a Second Bill of Rights, designed to promote “security” and suitable for a modern democracy.1 Most Americans seem to believe that children do have a right to a good education; there is a consensus on that point. One reason for that consensus is that educated people are more free. But the consensus breaks down when people explore how, exactly, to achieve that right. School choice remains an intensely polarizing issue in American politics.

If schools compete, kids win. And if schools compete, those who are the least advantaged have the most to gain. Wealthy families already have “school choice,” because they can send their children to private schools. If we give parents vouchers to send their children to any school they want, then we will put children from poor families more nearly on a par with their more privileged middle- and upper-class counterparts. Shouldn’t poor children have the same rights that wealthy ones do? Critics of school choice argue that such programs amount, in practice, to an attack on the public school system that has helped make America great.


pages: 339 words: 95,988

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

airport security, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Broken windows theory, crack epidemic, desegregation, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, mental accounting, moral hazard, More Guns, Less Crime, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pets.com, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, school choice, sensible shoes, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, War on Poverty

And since most parents would agree that education lies at the core of a child’s formation, it would make sense to begin by examining a telling set of school data. These data concern school choice, an issue that most people feel strongly about in one direction or another. True believers of school choice argue that their tax dollars buy them the right to send their children to the best school possible. Critics worry that school choice will leave behind the worst students in the worst schools. Still, just about every parent seems to believe that her child will thrive if only he can attend the right school, the one with an appropriate blend of academics, extracurriculars, friendliness, and safety. School choice came early to the Chicago Public School system.

This was hardly the goal in the mind of the Chicago school officials who conceived the lottery. But when viewed in this way, the lottery offers a wonderful means of measuring just how much school choice—or, really, a better school—truly matters. So what do the data reveal? The answer will not be heartening to obsessive parents: in this case, school choice barely mattered at all. It is true that the Chicago students who entered the school-choice lottery were more likely to graduate than the students who didn’t—which seems to suggest that school choice does make a difference. But that’s an illusion. The proof is in this comparison: the students who won the lottery and went to a “better” school did no better than equivalent students who lost the lottery and were left behind.

.” / 141 Pinker called Harris’s views “mind-boggling”: Steven Pinker, “Sibling Rivalry: Why the Nature/Nurture Debate Won’t Go Away,” Boston Globe, October 13, 2002, adapted from Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). SCHOOL CHOICE IN CHICAGO: This material is drawn from Julie Berry Cullen, Brian Jacob, and Steven D. Levitt, “The Impact of School Choice on Student Outcomes: An Analysis of the Chicago Public Schools,” Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming; and Julie Berry Cullen, Brian Jacob, and Steven D. Levitt, “The Effect of School Choice on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, 2003. STUDENTS WHO ARRIVE AT HIGH SCHOOL NOT PREPARED TO DO HIGH SCHOOL WORK: See Tamar Lewin, “More Students Passing Regents, but Achievement Gap Persists,” New York Times, March 18, 2004.


pages: 257 words: 68,143

Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save America's Failing Public Schools by Participant Media, Karl Weber

An Inconvenient Truth, antiwork, collective bargaining, feminist movement, hiring and firing, index card, knowledge economy, Menlo Park, Robert Gordon, school choice, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

Second, we need to decentralize decision making so that local schools—where the demands are known, where the people are known, and where programs can be designed to increase achievement—have the freedom to perform. We cannot try to specify from the state or national capital how to learn. Third, we have to offer school choice to all parents. Currently, well-off parents exercise school choice through their selection of residential location, but poor parents have many fewer options. Choice options such as those presented by charter schools help all families by putting pressure on schools to improve. Some argue that it is just too hard to make big changes in our schools.

See also Test scores Reassignment centers, teacher Resnick, Lauren Resource policies(table) Resources Responsibility Revelle, Roger Rhee, Michelle biographical information Rimer, Ned Roberts, Kimberly Rocketship Education (San Jose, California) Rose, Joel Ross, Frank “Rubber rooms,” Safe learning environment Schaeffler, Susan Scholastic Inc. School choice School of One (New York’s Chinatown) Schools characteristics of successful and lotteries and school choice suburban vs. urban See also Charter schools; individual schools School segregation School services Schwarz, Eric Science proficiency Science scores. See also Test scores Scientists, as citizen teachers SEED Charter School and lotteries Segregation Self-confidence Self-interest Seniority September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Services, school Shaw-Garnet-Patterson Middle School (Washington, D.C.)

Nonetheless, preparing local officials for these tasks is where we should be headed. Neither should we assume that every policy that emphasizes student outcomes and provides performance incentives is necessarily effective. The design of incentives is complicated, and many incentive structures lead to unintended and undesirable consequences. For example, if a move to broaden school choice heightens racial or economic segregation in the schools, most people would consider this an undesirable policy. We need to develop more experience with incentives and evaluate these experiences critically. With incentive systems, the details generally prove to be crucial. The ultimate goal of the incentive systems we design must be to attract, encourage, and reward high-performing teachers while pushing low-performing teachers toward either improving their efforts (if they are capable of doing so) or leaving the profession altogether.


pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

My most common complaint about education journalism is not so much that I disagree with a particular piece’s conclusions (though I usually do), but rather that most of the writing in this sphere does not present a coherent definition of our goals and values. Consider two brief passages from a New York Times piece on the disappointments of school choice in New York City: school choice has not delivered on a central promise: to give every student a real chance to attend a good school. Fourteen years into the system, black and Hispanic students are just as isolated in segregated high schools as they are in elementary schools—a situation that school choice was supposed to ease. and Sean P. Corcoran, an associate professor of economics and education policy at New York University, has researched the choice process and how students match.

As I’ve said in the past, broad categorizations of good and bad schools reverse cause and effect—the worst-performing students don’t perform poorly because they are excluded from the best schools, but rather the best schools are considered so because they systematically exclude the worst-performing students. But let’s set that aside for a moment. These two passages demonstrate the muddled ideas at the heart of our educational debates. What exactly would success in school choice look like? In the first passage it means that every child gets to attend a “good” school and that racial segregation by school ends; in the second, it’s that schools and children are matched by ability. Typically, the kind of rigid tracking suggested by Dr. Corcoran is anathema to school reformers, who see tracking—that is, the sorting of students into ability bands for placement into different levels of class difficulty and potentially different curricula—as foreclosing on the potential of students in the lower tracks.

It may raise our averages overall and improve our position in international competitions, but it wouldn’t help the students at the bottom of the distribution secure scarce seats in elite colleges and the jobs that come with them. I don’t mean to harp on this one quote from one story. It’s simply an indicative example of broader unexamined assumptions about what exactly we want from our school system. That the New York school “choice” system produces inequality among schools should come as no surprise. Inequality among schools is in fact inevitable in any system that involves choice and the injection of an ostensibly free-market ethos. In the free-market reformer mind-set, schools improve because of market pressures; if the schools don’t educate effectively, the thinking goes, parents will pull their children out, and the schools will either be forced to get better or close.


pages: 459 words: 123,220

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam

assortative mating, business cycle, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, full employment, George Akerlof, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, index card, jobless men, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, school choice, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, the strength of weak ties, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, white flight, working poor

This process clusters advantaged kids with other advantaged kids in one set of schools, like Troy High, and poor kids with other poor kids in another set of schools, like Santa Ana High. Admirable though it may be for other reasons, “school choice” has had at most a slight impact on the class gap. It does allow an increasing proportion of students (roughly 15 percent) to attend schools chosen by their parents, rather than schools based on their residence. But especially among lower-income families, the choices parents make are often not well informed and are constrained by transportation and child care problems.26 School choice would not likely have made much difference for the lower-class children we’ve focused on in this book, for example, because they lacked savvy parents to help them make better choices.

Haurin, “Parents, Peers, or School Inputs: Which Components of School Outcomes Are Capitalized into House Value?,” Regional Science and Urban Economics 39 (September 2009): 523–29. 26. Lareau and Goyette, eds., Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools. For conflicting views on whether school choice narrows class and racial gaps, see Mark Schneider, Paul Teske, and Melissa Marschall, Choosing Schools: Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Tomeka M. Davis, “School Choice and Segregation: ‘Tracking’ Racial Equity in Magnet Schools,” Education and Urban Society 46 (June 2014): 399–433. 27. Jaap Dronkers and Rolf van der Velden, “Positive but Also Negative Effects of Ethnic Diversity in Schools on Educational Performance?

Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, eds. Duncan and Murnane, 339–58. James E. Ryan, Five Miles Away, a World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), reports that most children attend their neighborhood school, and even participants in school choice programs usually attend nearby schools. 23. Annette Lareau and Kimberly Goyette, eds., Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools: Residential Segregation and the Search for a Good School (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014). 24. Jonathan Rothwell, “Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools,” Brookings Institution (April 2012).


pages: 360 words: 113,429

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Thus, as Diane Reay and her colleagues have pointed out, exposure to otherness serves both moral and instrumental purposes.17 The idea of instilling particular values in kids goes hand in hand with fostering capacities for dealing with difference. These become a form of cultural capital, as Eliana’s notion of “fluency outside the bubble” suggests.18 School Choice These questions of exposure and advantage came to the forefront in talking about children’s central social environment: school. In New York, as in many other cities, public schools are much more likely than private ones to provide the exposure to difference that many parents said they wanted.

CHAPTER SIX: PARENTING PRIVILEGE A modified version of this chapter has been published as Sherman 2017. 1.See Khan 2011; Lareau (2011) uses this word to mean a more positive sense of empowerment. See the introduction and Sherman 2017 on this point. 2.See, e.g., Cooper 2014; Katz 2008, 2012; Nelson 2010. 3.See Cucchiara and Horvat 2014 for a discussion of school choice as identity construction for parents. 4.Nelson 2010, 6. See also Katz 2001, 2008, 2012; Lareau 2002, 2011; Streib 2013. On the pursuit of educational advantages specifically, see Calarco 2011; Johnson 2006; Lareau and Weininger 2008. For the UK context, see, e.g., Devine 2004; Reay 1998, 2005a; Vincent and Ball 2007; Weis et al. 2014.

Ethnic and Racial Studies 37 (12): 2209–2225. Cucchiara, Maia. 2013. “‘Are We Doing Damage?’ Choosing an Urban Public School in an Era of Parental Anxiety.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 44 (1): 75–93. Cucchiara, Maia, and Erin Horvat. 2014. “Choosing Selves: The Salience of Parental Identity in the School Choice Process.” Journal of Education Policy 29 (4): 486–509. Cullen, Jim. 2004. The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation. New York: Oxford University Press. Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 2012. The Sociology of Elite Distinction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. D’Amico, James V. 2010.


Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

The public is demanding further education reform to the “Leave No Child Behind” initiatives that were passed into law—but how those reforms are explained determines their level of support. I have been active in the so-called “school choice” effort, and in my research work I have found that calling the financial component a “voucher” rather than the more popular “scholarship” trivializes the powerful opportunity and financial award that children from poor families receive when their parents have the right to choose the school they will attend. In fact, I’d argue that it’s more accurate to call it “parental choice in education” than “school choice” because it really is the parents who are deciding the schooling for their children. Or, considering how such a program equalizes education for rich and poor alike, the most accurate phrase may well be “equal opportunity in education”—and it certainly tests best in the polling my firm has done.

From responsibility for employees and shareholders, for customers and the community, a company that practices “corporate responsibility” is seen as a good corporate citizen. NEVER SAY: School choice INSTEAD SAY: Parental choice INSTEAD SAY: Equal opportunity in education NEVER SAY: Vouchers INSTEAD SAY: Opportunity scholarships Thanks to an effective advertising campaign by national and state teacher unions, Americans remain at best evenly split over whether they support “school choice.” But they are heavily in favor of “giving parents the right to choose the schools that are right for their children,” and there is almost universal support for “equal opportunity in education.”

But they are heavily in favor of “giving parents the right to choose the schools that are right for their children,” and there is almost universal support for “equal opportunity in education.” “Vouchers,” seen as depriving public schools of necessary dollars, have even less support than the principle of school choice. However, “opportunity scholarships” do have widespread backing, as they are perceived to be a reward for good students to get a good education. Here again, the words you use determine the support you will receive. NEVER SAY: Health care choice INSTEAD SAY: The right to choose This is an important nuance often lost on politicians. Almost all Americans want “the right to choose the health care plan, hospital, doctor, and prescription drug plan that is best for them,” but far fewer Americans actually want to make that choice.


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Suárez-Orozco thinks that the first step in incorporating immigrant children into public schools is to make the school choice process easier to understand. It is common for immigrants to arrive in the United States “thinking American schools are the best in the world, to come with basic trust, and assumptions about educational authority that are not fully true,” she said when we spoke. Schools need “to create more transparent educational pathways,” she added, “so you don’t have to be a chess master to get your kid through school.” It’s not only immigrants, however, who must navigate the school choice process. The experience of parents and students like Blanca and Guido should match that of the privileged families who wend their ways through the public school system, knowing how to lobby for access to, say, the progressive public school with the farm on the roof, or the “best” (and wealthiest) public schools whose zone borders encompass only the most expensive addresses.

This brings us back once more to cultural capital—the knowledge necessary to figure out unwieldy social systems using one’s networks. THE MOST PRIVILEGED PARENTS CAN HIRE TUTORS AND SEND THEIR children to expensive prep courses. Others hire coaches who have built careers out of helping parents navigate public school choice. I once saw a mother buttonhole a principal and insist that he rank all the public schools in the mother’s catchment area in descending order. As she took up the man’s time and ignored the line of other parents waiting to speak to him, a phrase popped into my mind, a variation on the “will to power” of philosophy: the “will to education.”

You can’t help that the public schools in your district are failing, that you can’t find common ground with your neighbors to create shared, reasonably priced day care, that you wound up seeking scholarships at a private school and left the commonweal entirely. I’d stab my iced coffee with a straw, standing in the urban sunshine as I offered these nostrums. My sleep was also full of advice, seemingly to myself from my troubled unconscious: I had nightmares about housing shortages and school choice. Initially, I feared for my family, as for a while neither my husband nor I had any work except freelance writing. While things turned out just fine for us in the end, I knew statistically as well as firsthand that workingwomen had it worse. Always worse. The mothers I knew and the ones I gave grants to through the nonprofit tended to make less than the males around them.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Moreover, the early progressives understood that they must institutionalize their educational activism by, among other things, controlling the administration of education and the classroom through a tenured and unionized legion of teachers, where like-minded instructors armed with ideologically driven (“social activism”) curricula populate all levels of educational institutions, often choose their successors, and are protected from scrutiny or competition. For these reasons and more, they adamantly oppose standardized testing, merit-based teacher evaluations, school choice, and the like. After all, their purpose is to uproot traditional, pre-progressive oriented educational approaches and clear the way for progressive/Marxist-oriented, ideologically based doctrinal approaches instead. It also bears reminding that the early progressives, like their modern progeny, are the intellectual offspring of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx.

Even if correct, this view is both paternalistic and a pathetically poor effort to regain a position of dominance.”30 But there were and are prominent critics of CRT who were active in the early civil rights movement, including the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s chief of staff, confidant, and friend, Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker. Walker was a legend in the civil rights movement in his own right. His friend and frequent collaborator in the school choice movement, Steve Klinsky, writes that Walker was King’s “ ‘field general’ in the organized resistance against notorious Birmingham safety commissioner ‘Bull’ Connor. Walker compiled and named King’s ‘The Letter from Birmingham Jail.’ He was with King for the march on Washington that produced the ‘I have a dream’ speech, and in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize.”31 Walker emphatically rejected CRT.

Although teachers’ unions in certain states have the power to strike, the power of the purse is an important and underutilized tool in the struggle for control over public schools. 7. Community committees should demand competition in education. The issue is what is in the best interest of individual students and the public, not entrenched school board members, teachers’ unions, and the educational bureaucracy. This triumvirate always oppose school choice, including charter schools, vouchers for private and parochial schools, etc., because they oppose competition. Parents and other taxpayers should insist that tax dollars follow the student, especially now given the radicalization and politicization of our public school systems, and the abuse of power demonstrated by many teachers’ unions during the coronavirus pandemic. 8.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Thomas Sowell described this phenomenon by saying, “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.” Today, Democrats oppose school choice, a decision that can trap (mostly black) children in failing schools, while politically correct policing often leaves black neighborhoods at the mercy of violent crime. And let’s not forget, candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both opposed gay marriage during their first runs for the White House.

., 70, 131–32 Buttigieg, Pete, 159 BuzzFeed, 9, 21–22, 60, 149 Cain, Caleb, 159, 161, 162 cancel culture, 85 Capehart, Jonathan, 154 capitalism, 141–42 Carlson, Tucker, 122–24 Carnevale, Anthony, 104 “Cashing in on the Rise of the Alt-Right” (Harkinson), 77 catastrophizing, 196–97 CBD (cannabidiol), 33 CBS, 149–50 Chabloz, Alison, 52 character assassination, 16–17 Charlesworth, Tessa, 98 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, 20–21 China, 139–40 Churchill, Winston, 203 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 38, 112 Clarkson, Kelly, 198 classical liberalism, 7–8, 28, 29–71 abortion and, 45–49 definition, 30 drugs and, 32–36 economics and, 62–67 foreign policy and, 67–71 free speech and, 50–54 gay marriage and, 37–39 gun control and, 54–58 historical proponents of, 30–31 immigration and, 39–45 individual rights, protection of, 30–31 political language of, 96 stereotypes, neutralization of, 31 tolerance of opposing viewpoints and, 37–39 trans issues and, 59–62 class warfare, 65 Clinton, Hillary, 42, 113 CNN, 10, 21–22, 148–49, 150 Covington story and, 153, 155 Jussie Smollett news story and, 157 Russian Hoax and, 158 college professors, left-wing political brainwashing by, 151 comedy, 187–90 coming out, 3–5 Confederate flag, 112 conservatives political language of, 96 pro-life position of, 49 Cook, Tim, 146 Covington story scandal, 152–55 crack, 34–35 Cruz, Nikolas, 58 culture war, 197–201 Cuomo, Andrew, 156 Daily Beast, The, 149 Daily Show, The (TV show), 62–63, 134–35 Daily Signal, The, 92 Damore, James, 25–26 Daniels, Jessie, 92 Darcy, Oliver, 161 David and Goliath story, 183 debt, government, 66 Declaration of Independence, 31, 144 Deconstructing Harry (film), 4 defensive gun use, lives saved from, 106 DeFranco, Philip, 159, 160–61 DeGeneres, Ellen, 146 Democratic Party, historical background of Civil Rights Act, opposition to, 112 Confederate flag, creation of, 112 Dred Scott ruling and, 111 Ku Klux Klan, formation of, 111–12 Lincoln assassination and, 112 opposition to Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, 112 school choice, opposition to, 113 War on Poverty and, 112 Democrats = good, Republicans = bad myth, 111–13 Demos, 101 denial, 12 digital journalism, 151 discrimination, 83 Dred Scott ruling, 111 dressing as the person you want to be, 175–79 drugs, 32–36 alcohol, 33–34 government role, 34–36 marijuana, 33 nicotine, 33 Schedule I controlled substances, 34–35 state versus federal issue, 36 taxation and, 35 Dunham, Lena, 127 economic issues, 62–67 government debt, 66 government size and spending, 64 minimum wage, 62, 65–66 tax rates, 64–65 unpaid internships, 62–63 welfare, 66 Economist, The, 80 Ehrlich, Paul, 108 Elder, Larry, 87–95 “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” (Fryer), 98 environmental issues, 108–10 extreme weather, 109 food shortage, 108–9 polar bears, 110 Equality Act of 1974, 38 Evans, Chris, 127 Evergreen State College, 22, 23 extreme weather, 109 Facebook, speech guidelines of, 53 fact checking, 8, 87–113 Democrats = good, Republicans = bad myth, 111–13 Elder interview and, 87–95 environmental issues, 108–10 gun control, 105–6 hate crimes, 107–8 learning and growing when faced with new facts, 94–95 nuclear family, importance of, 91–93 political languages, recognizing, 95–97 slow thinking, practicing, 96–97 systemic racism, 89–92, 97–100 wage gap, 103–5 war on women, 100–103 fake news, 9–10, 148–65 algorithmic manipulation of news intake, 163 blatant falsehoods, 163 categories of, 162–63 college professors, left-wing political brainwashing by, 151 Covington story scandal, 152–55 curating list of trusted journalists who operate in good faith, 163–64 distrust of media, 162 gut instinct, following your, 164 historical background, 149–51 institutional, 163 Jussie Smollett news story, 155–57 narrative-driven, 162 political activism and propagandism by journalists, 151–52 proprietors of, examples of, 148–49 Roose’s hit piece blaming Rubin and others for radicalizing youth, 159–62 Russian Hoax and, 157–58 family, 91–93, 112–13 Family Guy (TV show), 189 fatherless children, 91–92 Feinstein, Dianne, 44 Ferguson, Niall, 134 Field of Dreams (film), 177 Fifteenth Amendment, 112 First Amendment free speech rights, 14, 50–54 Fonda, Jane, 103 food shortage, 108–9 foreign policy, 67–71 peace through strength strategy, 67–68 red line in Syria, failure to enforce, 68 troop withdrawals, 70 Ukraine, NATO’s failure to help, 69 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 111–12 Fourteenth Amendment, 112 Fox News, 150 France, 69, 141 free speech, 50–54, 207 combating conspiracy theories and bad ideas with, 50–51 comedy and, 189 as essential to civilized society, 52 exceptions specified by Supreme Court, 50 hate speech laws and, 52 Kaepernick’s kneeling for national anthem and, 53–54 progressive policing of, 52–53 free thinking, 7–8, 28, 29–71.

See leftism/progressivism ProPublica, 99 racism, 18–19, 83–84 against Asian Americans, 143 hate crimes, statistics on, 107–8 systemic (See systemic racism) against white men, 144–45 Raskin, Aza, 200 Reagan, Ronald, 67 Real Time with Bill Maher (TV show), 17–20 redemption narratives, 183 red line in Syria, failure to enforce, 68 Reilly, Wilfred, 107 religious hate crimes, 108 religious stories, need for, 180–84 Republicans = bad, Democrats = good myth, 111–13 reverse psychology, 67 “Reverse Racism Effect, The” (James, James & Vila), 98–99 Review of Income and Wealth, The, 103 Ridley, Matt, 110 Right Side of History, The (Shapiro), 168, 183–84 Rihanna, 146 Roberts, Robin, 156 Rock, Chris, 189 Rogan, Joe, 159 Roose, Kevin, 159–61 Rubin, Artie, 137 Rubin, Ira, 137 Rubin, Isaac, 136–37 Rubin, Jennie, 136–37 Rubin, Miriam, 137 Rubin Report, The, 6–7, 26, 76, 77, 78, 87, 94, 114, 122 Ruffalo, Mark, 127 Russian Hoax, 157–58 Saad, Gad, 87, 139 Salem Witch trials of 1692, 198 Salon, 149 Salzmann, Karl, 199–200 Sanders, Bernie, 69, 156 Sandmann, Nick, 154, 155 Saturday Night Live (TV show), 198 Schedule I controlled substances, 34–35 Sheindlin, Judith (Judge Judy), 146 school choice, 113 Schumer, Amy, 127 Schumer, Chuck, 43–44 Second Amendment, 54–55 second-guessing yourself, 8–9 Selective Service registration, 102 sexism, 83, 84, 144–45 shaming, 8 Shapiro, Ben, 6–7, 39, 78–79, 160–61, 167–68, 183–84 Shepherd, Lindsay, 24–25 Shermer, Michael, 50, 51 Shoot the Damn Dog (Brampton), 203 Shout Your Abortion, 46 silencing of dissent, 22–24 Simpsons, The (TV show), 189 Sinatra, Frank, 125 Skokie, Illinois neo-Nazi march, 1972, 50 slow thinking, 96–97 Smith, Adam, 30–31 Smollett, Jussie, 107, 155–57 socialism, 14 social technology, 200–203 Somalia, 133 “Some Inconvenient Gun Facts for Liberals” (Kristof), 106 Sommers, Christina Hoff, 6–7, 81 Southern Poverty Law Center, 132, 134 Sowell, Thomas, 6–7, 63–64, 65, 95, 112–13 Spiegel, Der, 74–75 Sri Lanka, 101 Starr, Sonja, 102 Stelter, Brian, 157 Stephanopoulos, George, 43 stereotypes, classical liberalism and neutralization of, 31 Stewart, Jon, 134–35 Submission (film), 134 suicides, gun-related, 106 Sweden, 140 Switzerland, 140–41 Syria, chemical assault by, 68 systemic racism, 89–92, 97–100 black shootings of police, statistics on, 99 decline in racial bias, studies indicating, 97–98 diversity in Congress and, 100 Elder interview and, 89–92 homicide rates, 100 police shootings of blacks versus whites, statistics on, 98–99 poverty rates, 99–100 taking rights for granted, avoiding, 131–35 talkpoverty.org, 92 taxation amounts paid, men versus women, 102–3 cigarettes and, 35 tax rates, 64–65 terrorism Charlie Hebdo attack, 20–21 9/11 terrorist attacks, 4–5 Thailand, 140 Thiel, Peter, 6–7, 85 Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 96–97 Thirteenth Amendment, 112 “This Is America” (song), 146 Three Languages of Politics, The (Kling), 95–96 Thunberg, Greta, 197 Today Show, The, 155 tolerance of opposing viewpoints, 37–39 Top Five Regrets of the Dying, The (Ware), 195–96 trans issues, 59–62 as decision for adults and not children, 59–61 detransition rates, 61 gender dysphoria, children may outgrow, 61 language use and, 61–62 troop withdrawals, 70 Truman Show, The (film), 149 Trump, Donald, 45, 53, 69, 130 Tupy, Marian I., 109 Turner, Ted, 150 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Peterson), 81–82 Twitter speech guidelines of, 53 trolling on, by women, 101–2 Uighurs, 139 Ukraine, 69 United Kingdom, 69, 101 U.S.


pages: 367 words: 108,689

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

[24] Quoted in Val Gillies (2005), ‘Raising the meritocracy: parenting and the individualisation of social class’, Sociology, vol. 35, no. 5. [25] Edge et al. (1996), ‘Secondary school choice and involvement in education’, paper to the American Education Research Association annual meeting, New York, April 1996. [26] Fiona Millar and Gemma Wood, A New Conversation with Parents: How can schools inform and listen in a digital age? (London, Family Lives, 2011). [27] Katya Williams et al., ‘He was a bit of a delicate thing: white middle class boys, gender, school choice and parental anxiety’, Gender and Education, vol. 20, no. 4, July 2008. [28] Lord Chatfield, The Navy and Defence (London, William Heinemann, 1942), 232

The key message seems to be: for goodness sake, give yourself a break and spend a bit of time doing nothing at all — the traditional luxury of childhood in all ages. Perhaps the middle-class worriers should not need to panic quite as much as they do, but the real question is why they feel they have to. School choice and the other education reforms of the late 1980s were supposed to hand power to parents. Why should they feel that they have so much less power than they did? What went wrong? Go to Tunbridge Wells in Kent if you seek the heart of the Panic Belt. Kent is complicated enough because there are fifteen different types of schools, from academies to grammar schools, and now free schools as well.

., 37 property, investing in, 57, 168–71 public sector salaries, 268–9, 291 Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets, 264 public services, centralization of, 263–7 pubs, closure of, 252 Q ‘quangocracy’, 291 quant funds, 129 Quattrone, Frank, 114–15 Quilter Goodison, 134, 147 R Radley College, 59 railways, coming of, 35, 282 Raphael, Adam, 33 Rawnsley, Andrew, 225 Ray, Paul, 49 Raynsford, Nick, 265 Read, Peter, 217–19 remortgaging, 9–10 rents, 21, 68–9, 306 restrictive covenants, 302 retirement age, 180, 203, 302 Reynolds, Christina, 10–11 RIBA, 77–8 Richardson, Gordon, 62, 72 Richmond, 287 Riddell, Fred, 225 Ridley, Adam, 58–60, 63 Ritalin, 229 Roddick, Anita, 301 Rogers, Richard, 78 Roman Catholics, 39 Romania, 3, 68 Rothschild, Jacob, 146 Rowe & Pitman, 138, 146 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 119, 122, 193 Royal Mail, 194 Royal Navy, 143, 264 Rutlish School, 213–14 S Sainsbury’s, 244, 246, 250 St Francis of Assisi, 59 St Paul’s Cathedral, 289 ‘salariat’, 17 Salomon Brothers, 149, 153 Samuel Montagu, 135, 146 Santander, 118, 122 Saratoga, New York, 253–4 Savage, Mike, 40, 44, 53 Scarborough, 265 Schiff, Andrew, 20 school catchment areas, 212–13 and house prices, 20, 210–11, 221 school fees, 19–20, 204, 212, 239 School for Social Entrepreneurs, 296 school meals, 294–5 school playing fields, 238 schools choice of, 230–4, 288 church schools, 211, 214, 216, 239–40 free schools, 216, 240–1 grammar schools, 36–7, 216–17, 219 grant-maintained schools, 221 investment in, 211–12 and league tables, 224–9, 231–3 237–8, 285, 302 Literacy Hour in, 265 nursery schools, 268–9 rural, 252 secondary moderns, 229, 237 size of, 234–8, 303, 328 special school units, 218 ‘super-selective’, 216 see also education Schwed, Fred, 186 SEAC (Stock Exchange Automated Quotations), 147 Seldon, Anthony, 232 self-employment, 5, 45, 184, 249, 292 self-help, 49 Shaw, George Bernard, 290 Shearlock, Peter, 150 Sheffield, 162 Shepherd, Gillian, 228 Shrewsbury, 252 Sibary, Shona, 9–11, 16 Sieff, Marcus, 243 silver, 278–9 Simmonds, Jane, 271 Sizer, Ted, 237 Skegness, 221 Skidelsky, Lord, 227 skiing, 169 Skinners’ School, 217 Smith, John, 225, 263 social care, 21, 85, 201, 296 software ERP and CRM, 256, 261 report-writing, 231 Somerset Food Links, 296 Sorbonne, 157 Soros, George, 131, 157 South London, 43 Southwark, 225 Spain, 56, 97, 294 Golden Age, 277–81 ‘squeezed middle’ (the term), 22 stamp duty, 149 Standard & Poor’s index, 198 Standard Life, 172 Standing, Guy, 17 Stewart, James, 255 Stiperstones Primary School, 252 Stock Market Crash (1987), 61 stockbrokers, 134, 136–40, 145–8, 150, 162, 247 Stockton, Earl of (Harold Macmillan), 288 Stockwell, Christopher, 27–34, 50 Stott, Martin, 44 student loans, 19, 300 subprime mortgage crisis, 140, 155 suicides, 32 Sunday Telegraph, 36, 60 Sunday Times, 33, 150 Surbiton, 73–4 Sure Start centres, 76 sustainable living, 78–9 Sutton Coldfield, 180 Swiss Cottage, 287 Switzerland, 97, 116, 180, 183 T Tasker, Mary, 234–5, 237 Tatler, 284 tax avoidance, 300 tax credits, 5, 164, 270–1 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 248, 253–7, 261–3 Tea Party, 273 teaching unions, 224, 227–8 Tebbit, Norman, 149, 181 Tennant, Julian, 34 Tesco, 47, 243, 246, 250–1, 300 Thames Water, 202 Thatcher, Margaret, 1, 3, 36, 67, 70, 99, 109, 176–7, 221–2, 290 and City deregulation, 137–8 and financial reforms, 57–9, 63–4, 72–3 and pension reforms, 180, 183, 190 theatres, 126 Thornton, Clive, 71 ‘Tiger Parents’, 215 time banks, 299 Time Warner, 133 Times, The, 65, 67, 135, 147, 177, 226 Times Educational Supplement, 237, 269 Tokyo, 75, 78, 149 Tough, Paul, 234 Toulouse University, 127, 141 Tower Hamlets, 61 trade unions, 160, 255 transport costs, 18 Travelex, 126 trickle-down economics, 124, 157, 161, 286, 289–91 Trollope, Joanna, 79, 245 Truro, 18, 102 Tufnell Park, 80–1 Tunbridge Wells, 216–17 Turner, Adair, 152, 202 tutoring, 219 Tyco, 117 U UKIP, 273 unemployment, 271–2 Unilever, 194 United States of America and auditing culture, 261 banking, 92, 95–7 education, 215–16, 236, 238 housing developments, 85 inequalities of wealth, 23–4 influence of financial sector, 152 job creation, 249 middle classes, 22–3, 272, 282, 286 New Deal, 153 small-town life, 122–3 subprime lending, 75 universities, 212, 215, 242, 248–9 university fees, 18–19, 270 UnLtd, 296 utility bills, rising, 10–11 see also fuel bills V Valladolid, 277, 280–1 Van Reenen, John, 248 Vickers da Costa, 146 Vinson, Nigel, 179 voluntary organizations, 253, 260 W Waitrose, 242–4, 302, 306 Wakeham, John, 181 Walker, David, 137 Wall Street, deregulation of, 135 Wall Street Crash, 186 Warburg’s, 146 Wass, Sir Douglas, 62 Watt, James, 152 Wellington College, 232, 239 Wells, H.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Now, Jonas Vlachos is hardly an apologist for the glories of free enterprise and markets. He’s from Sweden, for one thing, and Scandinavians are known worldwide for their love of big taxes and big government. More personally, Vlachos has been a vocal critic of his country’s market-like approach to education, which is based in part on the school choice vision laid out by Milton Friedman, an icon of laissez-faire ideology. Vlachos’s own kids go to good old-fashioned government-run schools rather than the privately owned voucher ones that exist alongside them. Vlachos had argued that markets were, in many ways, ill suited to serving the educational needs of Swedish students.

., 22 Liu, Qihong, 128–129 Lyft car service, 173 MAD (doctrine of nuclear deterrence by mutually assured destruction), 26 mail-in-bids, for auctions, 83–84 “The Market for Lemons” (Akerlof), 44–51, 64 market frictions, 169–174 market fundamentalists, 16–17 market insights, 14–15 market makers, 107–110, 118–121 markets 18th-century book, 90–91 competitive, 35, 124–126, 172–174, 180–181 design, 133, 137–142 dysfunction of, 36, 75–77, 143 economics of platform, 107–112 equilibrium, 33 fixed-price versus auctions, 96–97 food bank system, 154–160 image problem of, 152–153 labor, 48, 64–66 lemon, 44–51, 58–59, 64, 112 multisided, 108–112, 118–124 one-sided, 108–112 in POW camps, 4, 7–13, 175–177 rules for platform, 112–117 school choice in Sweden, 151–152 selfishness in, 177–179 technology and, 169–173 trade with uninformed parties, 166–169 transformation of, 13–17 two-sided, 108–112, 118–124 See also auctions; economics; platforms Marx, Karl, 20, 23 matching problems middle school dance partners, 131–132, 134, 137–140 student to school, 138–139, 141–142, 143–149 mathematics algebraic topology, 44–45 economic theory transformed by, 15, 19–27 game theory, 136 general equilibrium model, 29, 31–34, 36–37, 40, 45, 76 kidney exchange algorithm, 163–165 models, 20, 24–25, 30 in real world economics, 35–37 Samuelson connecting economics and, 28–29 Shapley-Gale algorithm, 137–140 Matsuzaka, Daisuke, 79–81, 87–89 Maxwell, James Clark, 24 McManus, Brian, 73–75 mechanism design, 133, 134 medical residency programs, 140 merchant from Prato, 105–107 middle school dance-matching, 131–132, 134, 137–140 Milgrom, Paul, 70–71, 98, 102–103 mobile market platform, 116 modeling applied theory, 45, 50, 75–76 competition, 35, 166, 172–173 congestion pricing, 86, 94 dysfunction of, 75–77 economic, 15, 24–29 mathematical, 20, 24–25, 30 reality-based economic, 35–37, 45, 49–51, 141 models auction, 82–84 eBay, 43, 46, 48 general equilibrium, 31–34, 36–37, 40, 76 lemons, 44–51, 58–59, 64, 112 Solow, 35 See also platforms; signaling model Moldovanu, Benny, 90–91 money burning costs, 70–71 money-back guarantees, 69–71 Morals & Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (Zelizer), 153 Morgenstern, Oskar, 25–27 mortality rates, of Japanese vs German POW camps, 10–13 MS-13 gang, 67 multisided markets, 108–112, 118–124 multisided platform, 14 multiunit Vickrey auction, 93 Murphy, Frank, 9 Nasar, Sylvia, 29 Nash, John, 32 National Archives’ World War II Prisoners of War Data File, 11 network externalities, 121–124 New England Program for Kidney Exchange, 164–165 New York Department of Education, 143–144, 145, 149 Nobel Prize in Economics, 34 See also Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel noncustomers, paying, 123–124 Nordstrom’s return policy, 69–70 no-risk money-back guarantees, 69–71 normal good, 180 no-trade rule, Japanese POW camps, 10–13 nuclear deterrence, 26 Omidyar, Pierre, 39–40 one-sided markets, 108–112 online retail, 41–43, 52–55 optimized efficiency, 85–86, 133 organ sales, 160–161 organizations, sick, 142–143 out-of-town bids, for auctions, 83–84 Pareto, Vilfredo, 20, 21–22 Pareto efficiency, 22 Penny Black stamp, 82–84 Percy P.

., 7–10, 22–23 Ranau Japanese POW camp, 10–11 RAND Corporation, 25, 27, 134–136 reality-based economic modeling, 35–37, 49–51, 141 See also lemon markets theory recessions, 36, 48, 75 Roberts, John, 66, 70–71 Ross, Lee, 177–179 Roth, Al, 140, 141, 163–165 rush, fraternity/sorority, 140 Rutland, VT, 1 Rysman, Marc, 109 Samuelson, Paul, 28–29, 44 Samuelson, William, 55–57 San Fernando Valley gangs, 61–62 San Fers gang, 61–62 Sandakan camp, Borneo, 10–11 Sauget, IL, 168–169 scams internet, 52–55 money-back, 69–70 Scarf, Herbert, 163–164 school choice, in Sweden, 151–152 school to student matching, 138–139, 141–142, 143–149 Schultz, Theodore, 35 Schumpeter, Joseph, 24, 49–50 Scottish auctions, 82 Sears, 115–116 second-bid auction, 81–82 second-price sealed-bid auctions, 87–89 “Selection process starts with choices, ends with luck” (article), 146 self-destructive behaviors, signaling theory and, 67–68 selfish, markets making us, 177–179 seller misrepresentation, 52–55 sellers, knowing more than buyers, 41, 44–55 Seven Minute Abs, 172 Shakin’ Cat Midgets gang, 61 Shapley, Lloyd, 134–136, 137–138, 163–164 Shapley-Gale algorithm, 137–140 Shi, Peng, 148 Shleifer, Andrei, 180–181 shopping malls, as two-sided markets, 122–123 Shoup, Carl, 85 sick organizations, 142–143 signaling model applications of, 66–68 commitment signs, 62–66 competitive signaling, 69–71 integrity, 71–75 Silicon Valley, market friction and, 169–173 Skoll, Jeff, 39–40, 43, 51 Smith, Adam, 21 Snider, James, 42 social efficiency, auctions, 89 social well-being, assessing, 22 Solow, Robert, 35 Solow model, 35 Sönmez, Tayfun, 144 Sony’s Blu-ray format war, 125–126 sorority rush, 140 spectrum auction theory, 102–103 Spence, Michael, 62–66 Stack, Charles, 42–43 Stalag VII-A POW camp market, 5–6, 7–10, 13 stamp collecting, 82–84 Stiglitz, Joseph, 35–36, 76, 182 strategy proofness mechanism, 145 student to school matching, 138–139, 141–142, 143–149 Summers, Larry, 166–167 Super Bowl advertising, 70–71 supply and demand, 96 survival rates, of Japanese vs.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

A 2013 survey found that while 53 percent of white and Hispanic parents thought the school system was better after Katrina, only 29 percent of black parents felt the same way. And New Orleans’s system of school choice requires parents to apply for schools at the beginning of each school year. The process involves mountains of paperwork and can be confusing. That means it favors parents with extra time and money, and it often means that the students struggling most end up in New Orleans’s worst schools. School choice also translates into longer travel times for parents and their kids, especially since many of the city’s new schools do not have extracurricular activities such as music and arts programs.

only about 6 percent of high school seniors in the RSD: Mercedes Schneider, “New Orleans RSD: Far from Meeting Louisiana Four-Year College Admission Requirements,” Huffington Post, February 9, 2015. A 2013 survey found that while 53 percent: “K–12 Public Education through the Public’s Eye: Voters’ Perception of Public Education,” Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, April 2013. And New Orleans’s system of school choice requires parents: Mercedes Schneider, “New Orleans Parental Choice and the Walton-Funded OneApp,” deutsch29 blog, July 5, 2013. “It is about breaking unions”: “The Educational Land Grab.” Those who were hired back were stripped: United Teachers of New Orleans, Louisiana Federation of Teachers, and American Federation of Teachers, “No Experience Necessary: How the New Orleans School Takeover Experiment Devalues Experienced Teachers,” June 2007, 22.


pages: 298 words: 95,668

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

Friedman writes passionately of the benefits that he believes students would receive from the voucher system—of the increased opportunities that they would experience through diversity, choice, and competition, and of the improved performance that all schools, including existing public ones, would experience. School vouchers would primarily benefit lower socioeconomic students in large, urban school districts and Friedman thinks that a system of voucher schools would especially benefit African American students. He does not understand why more African American leaders do not embrace school choice through vouchers. He believes that the main opponent of vouchers is the educational establishment, particularly teachers’ unions. His essential formula for improving inner cities and reducing racial tension is to implement vouchers in education, legalize drugs, cut welfare, and eliminate affirmative action.

Not only has the school voucher idea been considered outside of this country, but here and abroad the concept of vouchers—providing funding through government but leaving provision of services in competitive, private hands—has proved capable of extension to many other areas, resulting in privatization of government activities. Moreover, within education, notwithstanding the lack of political success that vouchers have had up to this point, the idea of expanding school choice has had many ramifications, from open student transfer policies to, in part, charter schools and home schooling. Although he rejects any comparison with John Dewey, Friedman is not just, with Keynes, one of the two leading economists of the twentieth century; he is arguably, with Dewey, one of the two leading educational reformers.

., 19 Roosevelt recession, 121 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 23, 34, 35, 114, 121, 123 Rosten,Leo,37 Rowley, Charles, 103 Rumsfeld, Donald, 167, 202, 236 Rutgers University, 13–18, 19, 34, 36, 38, 50, 122 Samuelson, Paul, 21, 49, 94–95, 130, 138, 155–57, 160, 169, 180, 216, 241 Savage, Jimmie, 46, 60, 68, 85–86 school choice, 225, 228 school vouchers, 3, 173, 204, 223–29, 234 Schultz, Henry, 22, 24, 25, 32–33, 35, 37, 50, 54 Schultz, Theodore, 60 Schuman Plan, 80 Schumpeter, Joseph, 99, 132 Schwartz, Anna Jacobson, 1, 113, 117–18, 120, 125–26, 173, 186, 232, 238 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 237 Seldon, Arthur, 211, 232 sequential analysis, 45, 47 Shanker, Albert, 202 Shils, Edward, 21–22 Shoup, Carl, 42 Shultz, George, 73, 167, 181, 186, 197, 207–209, 226, 237 Silk, Leonard, 35 Simon, William, 208–209 Simons, Henry, 22, 24–25, 54, 68, 70, 116, 131, 142, 162, 175 Sjaastaad, Larry, 90, 219 Skole, Robert, 191 Skousen, Mark, 117, 131, 156, 241 Slutzky, Eugen, 115 Smiley, Gene, 125–26 Smith, Adam, 20, 187, 192, 193–94, 200–202, 220, 237 Sobel, Robert, 44 social security, 171–72 socialism, 3, 34, 69, 109, 144 Socrates, 65 Solow, Robert, 57, 80, 157, 159 Soper, C.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

A budget relocation could be zero-sum in monetary terms but positive or negative sum in terms of human happiness or fulfillment. We should always explore whether a proposed policy change creates a zero sum game. For example, many people argue for school choice—giving parents the ability to choose the school their child will attend—because it increases competition. Market logic suggests that by being forced to compete, schools have incentives to improve quality. However, schools only have an incentive to improve quality if excess capacity exists. Otherwise, school choice can create a zero-sum game among the students. Imagine a city with 10,000 students and 10 schools each with a capacity for 1,000 students.

Students are playing a zero-sum game. If new schools open, or if existing schools improve, the game is no longer zero-sum. Everyone can win. Both the market and the zero-sum models provide insights. The market model reveals incentives for quality improvements and for the creation of new schools. The zero-sum model shows that school choice alone means that some students will gain while others lose. The relative weight we should place on each model depends on the context: Does sufficient excess capacity exist in the better schools so that they can absorb the additional students? Do schools have the resources and expertise to improve their quality?

Do schools have the resources and expertise to improve their quality? Will entrepreneurs create new schools? Does the transportation system enable students to get to multiple schools in order to create competition? Our takeaway should be that neither of the two models gives us a correct answer, but each produces useful insights. School choice will create competition. It also creates a massive sorting problem with features of a zero-sum game. Whether the positive aspects of competition will outweigh the negative sorting costs depends on the context. We must array our lattice of models on the set of facts to make a good policy choice. The Identification Problem Data on people’s actions often reveals clustered behavior.


pages: 350 words: 109,379

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy by Michael Barber

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Checklist Manifesto, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, deep learning, deliberate practice, facts on the ground, failed state, fear of failure, full employment, G4S, illegal immigration, invisible hand, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, North Sea oil, obamacare, performance metric, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, school choice, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

In the end, as Gabriel Sahlgren points out in his rigorous analysis, the issue is not an ideological one – there is too much polemic on both sides of this subject – it is a matter of getting the design right. ‘The conclusion,’ he says, ‘is that school choice and competition have the potential significantly to increase school quality, but that design matters.’ He quotes Terry Moe, long-standing US advocate of school choice: ‘choice always operates within a structure … which in turn shapes the kinds of outcomes that choice will ultimately generate … Different structures, different outcomes.’12 So in Punjab, which has the fastest-growing voucher scheme in the world, we have focused it on poor families who are out of school.

An Examination of the Role of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in Relation to A&E Waiting Times (2001–2005)’, dissertation for MBA at Warwick Business School Reich, R. (1998), Locked in the Cabinet, New York, Vintage Books Riddell, P. (2005), The Unfulfilled Prime Minister: Tony Blair’s Quest for a Legacy, London, Politico’s Ringen, S. (2013), Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience, Yale, Yale University Press Rogers, Everett M. (1983), Diffusion of Innovations, New York, Free Press Russakoff, D. (2014), ‘Schooled’, New Yorker, 19 May Ryan, Alan (2013), On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present, London, Penguin Sahlberg, P. (2011), Finnish Lessons, New York, Teachers College Press Sahlgren, G. (2013), Incentivising Excellence: School Choice and Education Quality, London, Centre for Market Reform of Education Scharff, M. (2012), Delivering on a Presidential Agenda: Sierra Leone’s Strategy and Policy Unit, 2010–2011, Innovations for Successful Societies, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Mamdouha S.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The fellowship formally launched in January 2011 with a month of training, with the fellows going to their cities in February for onboarding. Over the next few years, we helped local governments create a series of apps that, as first-year fellow and former Apple designer Scott Silverman said, were “simple, beautiful, and easy to use.” A school choice website in Boston; a system for tracking blighted properties in New Orleans; a crowdsourcing app for clearing snow from fire hydrants that, being open source, spread to numerous other cities and was used for other forms of citizen participation, such as clearing storm drains and, in Honolulu, reporting back on whether the tsunami sirens were operational.

In Santa Cruz, the fellows built a portal for easier small business permitting; another group of fellows, working in their spare time, built an easy way to model new public transit routes for any city. The speed with which the fellows could build and stand up new applications shocked city staff. The first version of the Boston school choice site was built in about six weeks. City IT staff later marveled that if they had gone through a normal procurement process, the site would have cost them $2 million and taken two years. Allen Square, the CIO of New Orleans, made similar comments about the blight tracking tool. More important, the fellows’ work showed that it is possible to improve the performance of the platform of government.

It contained a lot of information, but like many government publications, it could not address any individual situation because each required calculating the distance from a child’s address to the possible schools, so it effectively couldn’t do the job its users needed it to do. The frustration parents felt trying to navigate the school selection process without these tools had led to a yearlong series of articles in the Boston Globe that followed the struggles of families trying to navigate the maze. The school choice app was a win not just for Boston families but for embattled politicians. Building an app using consumer technology talent and user-centered practices (and without going through government procurement channels) was a powerful way to show that our government doesn’t have to be bloated, inefficient, and out of touch.


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

This would enable parents of all backgrounds, including those in disadvantaged neighborhoods, to compare nearby schools and make appropriate decisions about which ones their children should attend. However, families from disadvantaged neighborhoods would be in a much better position to make and act on such decisions if an effective public school choice program were in place. This would involve the availability not only of vouchers for the selection of public schools but also information about school performance that could be interpreted with ease. Although the empirical data on the effectiveness of existing school choice programs on student achievement is scant, new evidence suggests that increased competition among public schools (as reflected by a larger number of school districts in a metropolitan area) improves average student performance and restrains levels of spending.

Harvey: Rotberg and Harvey (1993). 12 Recent research on the nationwide distribution of science and mathematics opportunities: Oakes (1990). 13 Teacher shortages in many central-city and poor rural schools: Darling-Hammond (1990 and 1994). 14 the kind of support that would enable schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods to meet the standards that are set: Darling-Hammond (1994). 15 Since two-thirds of all new jobs will require the use of computers: Hundt (1995). 16 According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, only 35 percent of black youths: Weaver (1995). 17 quotation from Frank C. Weaver: Weaver (1995), p. 7. Also see Krieg (forthcoming). 18 Although the empirical data on the effectiveness of existing school choice programs: Katz (1995). 19 new evidence suggests: Hoxby (1994) and Katz (1995). 20 The basic assumption underlying the act is that the role of the federal government is to “encourage experimentation”: Marshall (1994), p. 21. 21 Congress appropriated $125 million for Goals 2000 in 1994: Marshall (1994). 22 The learning system in other industrial democracies: Marshall (1994). 23 quotations from Marshall: Marshall (1994), P 7 24 In France, children are supported by three interrelated government programs: Bergmann (1993). 25 quotation from Bergmann: Bergmann (1993), pp. 343–44. 26 quotations from Marshall: Marshall (1994), p. 3. 27 Unlike employers in Germany and Japan: Marshall (1994). 28 quotations from Marshall: Marshall (1994), p. 9. 29 The delay in hiring youths has a number of critical consequences: Marshall (1994). 30 According to a recent report by the U.S.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

“Slow Income Growth and Absolute Poverty in the North Atlantic Region.” Unpublished paper. DeLong, J. Bradford. 2012. “The Changing Structure of Prices since 1960.” Grasping Reality with Both Invisible Hands, December 8. DeLuca, Stefanie and Peter Rosenblatt. 2010. “Does Moving to Better Neighborhoods Lead to Better Schooling Opportunities? Parental School Choice in an Experimental Housing Voucher Program.” Teachers College Record 112: 1443–1491. DeParle, Jason. 2004. American Dream. New York: Penguin. DeParle, Jason. 2012. “Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as Recession Took Hold.” New York Times, April 7. Dertouzos, Michael L., Lester C. Thurow, Robert M.

., “Effects of Public Opinion on Policy”, 154 Skocpol, Theda, 118 social democratic countries government revenues and employment hours in, 99 fig. 4.12 social institutions, 3–4 social policy American, 12–15, 79–80, 80 Fig. 4.4, 110–111, 149–180 future of, 177–180 and political shifts, 13, 14, 170 and public support, 154–156 complex, 108–109 policy persistence and, 13 problem solving and, 13 Social Security as a program that works well, 10, 22–23, 54, 109 as an entitlement, 110 cap on earnings subject to tax on, 79 disability benefits, 5 increasing, 73 opinions on spending for, 152 restructuring, 122, 168 Soskice, David, 86, 87 Spain, government revenues and employment hours in, 99 fig. 4.12 special education, 5 stagflation, 93 student loan funding, 167 Stimson, James, 154 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 6 Supplemental Security Income (SSI), 17 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), 42 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), 25, 26 Sweden, 119, 121, 124–127 benefits following childbirth in, 60, 116 early childhood programs in, 100, 16 employment programs in, 100, 138 family-friendly programs in, 138, government revenues and economic growth in, 83, 84 fig. 4.6, 85, 89, 90 fig. 4.9, 95 government revenues and employment hours in, 99 fig. 4.12 GDP per capita, 91 fig. 4.10 higher education in, 58 household income in, 63 innovation in, 92 low income in, 55 Rehn-Meidner model, 139 school choice in, 59 social expenditures and living standards in, 125 fig. 4.21 unions in, 132 Switzerland employment in, 98 government revenues and employment hours in, 99 fig. 4.12 taxes and increased lobbying by interest groups, 107 and receipt of public goods, 80 fig. 4.4 as share of GDP, 74 boosting household income, 168 fig. 5.6.


pages: 497 words: 130,817

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera

affirmative action, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, classic study, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, meritocracy, messenger bag, meta-analysis, new economy, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, young professional

But research shows that affluent and educated parents pass on critical economic, social, and cultural advantages to their children that give their kids a leg up in school success as well as the race for college admissions.18 Scholars often refer to these three types of advantages as forms of “capital,” because each can be cashed in for access to valued symbolic and material rewards, such as prestigious jobs and high salaries.19 Economic Advantages Income, wealth, and other types of economic capital are the most obvious resources that well-off parents can mobilize to procure educational advantages for their children. Simply put, affluent parents have more money to invest in their children’s educational growth and indeed do spend more on it.20 A crucial manner in which economic capital can provide children with educational advantages is through enabling school choice. The United States is one of the few Western industrialized countries where public primary and secondary school funding is based largely on property values within a given region. Consequently, high-quality public schools are disproportionately concentrated in geographic areas where property values are the highest and residents tend to be the most affluent.

Another banker, Donovan, explained, “I just try to talk to them about what they’ve done in the past, why they made the decisions they had, what they were interested in, how that manifested itself in their lives, and things specifically developed from that.” Targeted questions about undergraduate or graduate school choice as well as job and summer internship choices were particularly common. A consultant named Caitlin was a little more specific. She told me, “A lot of it is pushing in on what’s the why behind something. And so being able to, when asked a question, respond thoughtfully about, you know, why did I choose this major in college.”

I am only here because my father wouldn’t pay for grad school…. Seriously? Other people say they chose to go to law school because they didn’t know what else they wanted to be…. Stories like that really make you question their motivation. Attorney Keith, describing a more common but equally poor narrative of law school choice, said, “A bad answer [to the ‘why did you choose this law school’ question] is, ‘It’s the only one I got into. (He smirked.) Come on.” When I asked him to elaborate on what a good answer would be, he replied, “Maybe they wanted to be in New York to be closer to the big firms or purposely limited their search [geographically] to help run a family business or something.


pages: 76 words: 20,238

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

Self-education has never been more fun, and that is because we are in control of that process like never before. Third, we now see a critical mass in the American electorate favoring concrete steps to bring greater quality and accountability to K-12 education, whether through better incentives, school choice, charter schools, better monitoring, or whatever works. Siding with the schools, as they currently operate, is no longer a political winner. If we look at the current administration, the Democratic Party is often considered the “party of teachers’ unions.” Yet President Obama has opted for an education policy that, on the whole, teachers’ unions strongly dislike.


pages: 271 words: 82,159

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, mass incarceration, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, RAND corporation, school choice, Silicon Valley

How you feel about your abilities—your academic “self-concept”—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence. The Big Fish–Little Pond theory was pioneered by the psychologist Herbert Marsh, and to Marsh, most parents and students make their school choices for the wrong reasons. “A lot of people think that going to an academically selective school is going to be good,” he said. “That’s just not true. The reality is that it is going to be mixed.” He went on: “When I was living in Sydney, there were a small number of selective public schools that were even more prestigious than the elite private schools.

Chapter Three: Caroline Sacks The discussion of the Impressionists is based on several books, principally: John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (MOMA, 1973); Ross King, The Judgment of Paris (Walker Publishing, 2006), which has a marvelous description of the world of the Salon; Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists (Harper Collins, 2006); and Harrison White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Wiley & Sons, 1965), 150. The first academic paper to raise the issue of relative deprivation with respect to school choice was James Davis’s “The Campus as Frog Pond: An Application of the Theory of Relative Deprivation to Career Decisions of College Men,” The American Journal of Sociology 72, no. 1 (July 1966). Davis concludes: At the level of the individual, [my findings] challenge the notion that getting into the “best possible” school is the most efficient route to occupational mobility.


Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts, Paul Collier

Alvin Roth, anti-communist, centre right, charter city, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, failed state, Filter Bubble, global supply chain, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Kibera, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rising living standards, risk/return, school choice, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, trade route, urban planning, zero-sum game

The globalized economy offers possibilities unimaginable seventy years ago. The internet can enable jobs, education, and money transfer to reach even the remotest communities. There are new actors: business, civil society, diaspora organizations, and refugee-led community organizations are all helping to meet refugees’ needs. There are new techniques: from school choice to food banks to organ donations, creative models of institutional design are solving allocation problems. Time has passed the refugee system by: it is now in a time-warp. But to address emerging challenges and seize potential opportunities, a new paradigm is urgently needed. The existing model is mired in collective action failure, and bereft of new thinking.

Another example of a creative initiative relates to the idea of using ‘preference matching’ for refugee resettlement, which was an idea developed by the Nobel-Prize winning economist Alvin Roth.13 It offers a way in which two parties to a transaction can express their preferences regarding outcomes, and then have them ‘matched’ so that they are better off than they otherwise would be. Matching can be defined as ‘an allocation of resources where both parties to the transaction need to agree to the match in order for it to take place’. It has more commonly been applied to areas such as school choice, kidney exchange, and hospital residency. Recently, two academics, Will Jones and Alex Teytelboym, explored how matching markets might be applied to refugees.14 They argued that matching potentially offers a way in which refugees can be consulted about their preferred resettlement destinations, resettlement countries can be consulted on the types of refugees they wish to receive, and refugees and states can be matched.


pages: 318 words: 93,502

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, business climate, Columbine, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, new economy, New Journalism, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, school vouchers, telemarketer, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

So, for example, if decent public schools were made available to all children, regardless of the child’s zip code, then the bidding wars for suburban housing would let up and the newly single mother could start off divorced life with a more modest mortgage. She also might be less reluctant to give up the family home and move into a cheaper house if a school choice policy ensured that she wouldn’t be forced to transfer the kids to an unfamiliar—and often inferior—public school. Similarly, if publicly funded preschool were made available to all children, a single mother with young children would have more leeway in her budget. In addition, policies that encourage personal savings (see chapter 3) and discourage debt (which we’ll discuss in chapter 6) would help both spouses survive the economic aftermath of divorce.

See also Mothers, single mothers divorce explosion of the 1970s and joint custody of children and two-income families See also Child support Domestic violence Duke University Economist Education age of children starting school college education preschool private schools public schools school choice voucher programs of women Elderly people and long-term care insurance Elections/campaigns. See also Political contributions Equal Credit Opportunity Act Equal opportunity Failing schools. See also Education, public schools Falling from Grace (Newman) Families with children (fig.).


pages: 407 words: 109,653

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, FedEx blackjack story, Ford Model T, game design, industrial cluster, Jean Tirole, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, school choice, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, work culture , zero-sum game

Gender Differences in Responding to Competitive Academic Environments: Angrist, Joshua, & Victor Lavy, “The Effects of High Stakes High School Achievement Awards: Evidence from a Randomized Trial,” American Economic Review, vol. 99(4), pp. 1384–1414 (2009) Barankay, Iwan, “Gender Differences in Productivity Responses to Performance Rankings: Evidence from a Randomized Workplace Experiment,” Working Paper, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania (2011) Cotton, Christopher, Frank McIntyre, & Joseph Price, “The Gender Gap Cracks under Pressure: A Detailed Look at Male and Female Performance Differences during Competitions” (2010) Deming, David J., Justine S. Hastings, Thomas Kane, & Douglas Staiger, “School Choice and College Attendance: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries,” DHKS Draft (2009) Deming, David J., Justine S. Hastings, Thomas J. Kane, & Douglas O. Staiger, “School Choice, School Quality, and Postsecondary Attainment,” American Economic Review (forthcoming) (July 2012) Dobbie, Will, & Ronald G. Fryer Jr., “Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Increase Achievement Among the Poor?


pages: 339 words: 105,938

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

Focusing on these activities directly rather than the abstract idea of commodification also allows me to avoid using ugly language like ‘commodification’. The choice culture Recent governments on both sides of the Atlantic have been seduced by the mantra of ‘choice’. In the US much of the current debate focuses on school choice, while in the UK a range of policies has been used in an attempt to widen choice in both education and health care. The first argument for widening choice is very simple: it is what public service users want. Politicians of all shades who support widening choice point to opinion poll evidence of strong support for increased choice.

As well as the obvious costs of providing information -maintaining and monitoring an elaborate system of school and hospital performance measures — there is the cost of employing a new class of public service worker, the choice adviser. These advisers are now in place throughout England to assist parents with school choice, and have also been introduced in parts of the NHS. It is difficult to deny that such advisers help pawns become queens, but might it not be better simply to spend the money on more doctors and teachers? And why not let the doctors and teachers provide the choice advice? This brings us back to the question of motivation, both of public service workers and those attempting reform.


pages: 412 words: 128,042

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

., and Quadri, Z. (2016), Education Reform in Chile: Designing a Fairer, Better Higher Education System, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, viewed 18 January 2019. Bellei, C. (2008), ‘The Private–Public School Controversy: The Case of Chile’, in Chakrabarti, R., and Peterson, P. E. (eds.), School Choice International: Exploring Public–Private Partnerships (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). ————, and Cabalin, C. (2013), ‘Chilean Student Movements: Sustained Struggle to Transform a Market-oriented Educational System’, Current Issues in Comparative Education, 15 (2), 108–23. Brookings (2009), ‘The IMF’s Outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean: Stronger Fundamental Outlook’, Washington, DC, 21 May.

. ———— (1982b), ‘Free Markets and the Generals’, Newsweek, 25 January. Fuentes, C., and Valdeavellano, R. (2015), Chicago Boys, CNTV, November. Han, B.-C. (2017), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (London: Verso). Hsieh, C., and Urquiola, M. (2006), ‘The Effects of Generalized School Choice on Achievement and Stratification: Evidence from Chile’s Voucher Program’, Journal of Public Economics, 90, 1481. ICA (1959), Working with People: Examples of US Technical Assistance (Washington, DC: International Cooperation Administration). Klinenberg, E. (2018), Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (London: Bodley Head).


pages: 204 words: 53,261

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

Edward Kennedy, and passed both houses of Congress with both Republican and Democratic support, despite opposition from conservative Republicans antipathetic to the spread of federal power over education, and of some liberal Democrats.5 Yet more than a decade after its implementation, the benefits of the accountability provisions of the NCLB remain elusive. (Other aspects of NCLB—which promoted greater school choice, the creation of charter schools, and higher qualifications for teachers—seem to have been more successful, but are beyond the scope of our subject.) Its advocates grasp at any evidence of improvement on any test at any grade in any demographic group for proof of NCLB’s efficacy. But test scores for primary school students went up only slightly, and no more quickly than before the legislation was enacted, and its impact upon the test scores of high school students has been more limited still.


pages: 196 words: 53,627

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Considering that black children also watch more TV, read fewer books, and are overrepresented in the worst public schools in the country, those findings shouldn’t come as a surprise. What’s truly jarring is that so many black lawmakers, from Congressmen on down, support policies that keep black children stuck in those failing schools. In deference to the National Education Association teachers’ union, which is anathema to school choice, the black political class works diligently to block black access to vouchers and charter schools and other reforms that could facilitate a decent education. Before blaming the diminished job prospects of Jamal on Jorge, blacks would do better to address the anti-intellectualism that permeates the culture of the black underclass.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

“Fact Sheet on the President’s Plan to Make College More Affordable: A Better Bargain for the Middle Class,” press release, the White House, August 22, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/22/fact-sheet-president-s-plan -make-college-more-affordable-better-bargain-. 44. Daniel Kaplan, “Securitization Era Opens for Athletes,” Sports Business Daily, March 12, 2001, http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2001/03/20010312/This-Weeks-Issue/Securitization-Era-Opens-For-Athletes.aspx. 45. http://www.edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmans-on-School-Choice/The-Role-of-Government-in-Education-%281995%29.aspx, 1955. 46. For a recent policy analysis, see Miguel Palacios, Tonio DeSorrento, and Andrew P. Kelly, “Investing in Value, Sharing Risk: Financing Higher Education Through Income Share Agreements,” AEI Series on Reinventing Financial Aid, Center on Higher Education Reform, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), February 2014, http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/-investing-in-value-sharing-in-risk-financing-higher-education-through-inome-share-agreements_083548906610.pdf. 47.


pages: 219 words: 65,532

The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News,in Politics, and inLife by Michael Blastland, Andrew Dilnot

Atul Gawande, business climate, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, happiness index / gross national happiness, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), moral panic, pension reform, pensions crisis, randomized controlled trial, school choice, very high income

One school, Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, went from 30th in the raw GCSE tables to 317th out of the 370 sampled. Another, St. Albans C of E School in Birmingham, traveled in the opposite direction from 344th to 16th. Parents could be forgiven for wondering, in light of all this, what the comparisons of the past fifteen years that had put so many millions of them into a rabid panic about school choice had actually told them. And there, so far, ends the history, but not the controversy. The CVA tables—complicated and loaded with judgments—have moved far from the early ideal of transparent accountability. It also turns out that the confidence intervals (how big the range of possible ranking-chart positions for any school must be before we are 95 percent sure that the correct one is in there) are still so large that we cannot really tell most of the schools apart, even though they will move around with much drama from one year to the next in the published charts.


pages: 254 words: 69,276

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau

Airbnb, cognitive bias, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, connected car, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, future of work, gamification, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, mittelstand, moral hazard, personalized medicine, positional goods, principal–agent problem, profit motive, QR code, reserve currency, school choice, selection bias, sharing economy, smart cities, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Uber for X, vertical integration, web of trust, Wolfgang Streeck

The ‘choice revolution’ (Blomqvist 2004) means that service consumers do now indeed get to choose between a range of offerings. For this to work, the service market needs to be sufficiently differentiated, but there also needs to be a sufficient supply of information on the available options. With regard to school choice, for example, it has been argued from an economic perspective that state schools have no incentive to improve quality due to the fact of automatic enrolment; competition for pupils, it is claimed, would sharpen their response to parents’ interests and wishes. Educational demand is becoming a consumer choice, forcing schools to compete with each other on the basis of indicators: Functional quasi-markets require an infrastructure in the form of an information system for ensuring market transparency….


pages: 249 words: 66,383

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

See Elena Del Rey and Maria Racionero, “Financing Schemes for Higher Education,” European Journal of Political Economy 26 (2010): 104–13. 10. Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. Robert A Solo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), http://www.edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmans-on-School-Choice/The-Role-of-Government-in-Education- percent281995 percent29.aspx. 11. We are not the first to propose risk-sharing arrangements in mortgage finance. See, for example, Andrew Caplin, Sewin Chan, Charles Freeman, and Joseph Tracy, Housing Partnerships (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Andrew Caplin, Noel Cunningham, Mitchell Engler, and Frederick Pollock, “Facilitating Shared Appreciation Mortgages to Prevent Housing Crashes and Affordability Crises” (discussion paper 2008-12, Hamilton Project, September 2008); and David Miles, “Housing, Leverage, and Stability in the Wider Economy” (speech at the Housing Stability and Macroeconomy: International Perspectives Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, November 2013), available at http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/news/2013/132.aspx. 12.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

As his political model, Trump cited Wendell Willkie, the business executive who in 1940 captured the Republican presidential nomination, only to be defeated in the general election by Franklin Roosevelt. Willkie was a centrist, as was the circa 2000 version of Donald Trump. In The America We Deserve, Trump came out in favor of safe streets, safe schools, new schools, and school choice. He opposed discrimination, whether based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. He was pro-choice, but would prohibit partial birth abortions. He supported gun rights, but also a ban on assault weapons. To get ahead of crime, he advocated “proactive” policing. To promote economic growth, he proposed cutting taxes, cutting bureaucracy, and cutting burdensome regulations.


pages: 231 words: 73,818

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life by Bernard Roth

Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, classic study, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, do what you love, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, school choice, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, zero-sum game

I believe these experiences made me more autonomous and capable than I would have been if I had received the same degree of parental guidance as most of my peers. In addition to the personal, lifelong sense of loss associated with not having my mother, the downside of being on my own was that I received my guidance from the people on the street. Not everything they advised was wise or legal. My high school choice was basically made by Charlie, a senior playing football for Stuyvesant High School. I still recall his words of wisdom, “Go to Stuyvesant; you’re not smart enough to get into Bronx Science.” I allowed guys like Charlie to define the limits of what I could achieve. I could beat myself up for that.


pages: 330 words: 77,729

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Keynes concluded, "It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a greater progress still" (Keynes 1963 [1930], 365). Market forces are on the march. The collapse of the Keynesian paradigm and Marxist communism has turned "creeping socialism" into "crumbling socialism." There is no telling how high the world's standard of living can reach through expanded trade, lower tariffs, a simplified tax system, school choice, Social Security privatization, a fair system of justice, and a stable monetary system. Yet bad policies, wasted resources, and class hatred die slowly. As Milton Friedman once wrote, "Freedom is a rare and delicate flower" (1998, 605). Unless market economists are vigilant, natural liberty and universal prosperity will be on the defensive again.


pages: 274 words: 72,657

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Cal Newport, call centre, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, fear of failure, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, meta-analysis, peak-end rule, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, TED Talk

Frey’s challenge to walk the grounds already added a sense of play to the moment. What if he had also given them a “character” to role-play during their observations? For example, “You are a 28-year-old Hispanic single mother with two children, and you’ve just moved here. You’re anxious about school choices and a friend told you about our day school. You wonder if it’s right for your kids.” That might have made it even easier to see the church with fresh eyes. Add INSIGHT: 1: Trip over the truth. Frey’s activity allowed the vestry to discover insights for themselves. The resulting ideas (adding signage in Spanish, inviting other community groups to use the church’s facilities) became their ideas as a result.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

If you want to see the kinds of fireworks that can explode around educational standards, check out the 2014 Colorado fights about the content of the AP US History exam.2 Republicans, Democrats, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, Americans for Prosperity (a conservative group backed by the libertarian Koch brothers), school choice activists, real estate developers, elected officials of local school boards, and the College Board all entered into in this skirmish that made national news. Education has long been a battleground in America’s culture wars. The case of the school standards failure nationwide is an illustration of what happens when engineering solutions are applied to social problems.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

To date, there’s no national strategy for identifying successful innovations in specific schools or networks and determining how they can scale across our 137,000 schools. Compounding the problem, business leaders generally believe that if we could only introduce free-market dynamics into schools (e.g., charter schools, choice vouchers for parents), our most promising education innovations would thrive. But profound advances in education have impacts that stretch out over lifetimes, not months. Real innovation in education often isn’t readily transparent to those funders or politicians who just want to see numbers on paper.


pages: 369 words: 90,630

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nicholas Epley

affirmative action, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, drone strike, friendly fire, invisible hand, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, pirate software, Richard Thaler, school choice, social intelligence, the scientific method, theory of mind

Not so in cases of true conflict or in politics, where the dangers of defining groups by their differences is even more apparent. Consider politics. Surveys of the American electorate over the last thirty-five years have shown surprisingly stable differences of opinion between Republicans and Democrats on attitudes such as government-run health care, military defense spending, school choice, and funding for government welfare programs. The American electorate has also exaggerated the magnitude of these differences, particularly in recent years, as elected officials have become more polarized in their own behavior.30 Graphical depictions that highlight the differences between “red states” and “blue states” only make matters worse, according to research, increasing the perceived differences between groups rather than merely reflecting them.31 And on specific issues ranging from affirmative action to welfare policies, people on opposing sides of each issue consistently assume that the other side is more extreme than it actually is.32 The sad fact is that real partisanship increases partly because of imagined partisanship on the other side.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

BizWorld also raises money from an annual dinner in which Joe Saunders of Visa, Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm, and Meg Whitman of eBay were honored in the past. Pursuing #54 on my bucket list has led me to build relationships with some of the most powerful people in technology. BizWorld also led me to the California initiative for school choice (school vouchers). When I first taught BizWorld, I noticed how stark the classrooms were in my daughter’s school. I started asking questions, and I realized there were structural issues that made it difficult to teach and manage schools now. I decided to see how I could help change the system.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

Zeckhauser, Collaborative Governance: Private Roles for Pubic Goals in Turbulent Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 9. 24. Bernard Marr and James Creelman, More with Less: Maximizing Value in the Public Sector (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 18. 25. Ibid., p. 55. 26. Anders Böhlmark and Mikael Lindahl, “The Impact of School Choice on Pupil Achievement, Segregation and Costs: Swedish Evidence” (IZA Discussion Paper no. 2786, May 2007), available at http://ftp.iza.org/dp2786.pdf. 27. Stephen Machin and James Vernoit, “Changing School Autonomy: Academy Schools and Their Introduction to England’s Education” (Centre for the Economics of Education discussion paper no. 123, April 2011), available at http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp123.pdf. 28.


pages: 324 words: 93,606

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

In the case of small schools, some school districts had less than three years to show significant improvement before the foundation started signalling a change in direction, slashing funding at the very time when many schools felt they needed more resources to stay the course. ‘In the area of education’, William Schambra, of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, based in DC, said to me, ‘I’m a down-the-line conservative. I’m a believer in school choice and I’m a believer in charters. I’m a believer in anything that can break the monopoly of public sector unions in the field of education’. The problem with the Gates Foundation’s increased role in public education, he went on, is that large-scale efforts to reengineer education systems end up circumscribing rather than expanding choice at the community level.


pages: 307 words: 88,745

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

He also issued a flurry of memoranda promoting the construction of a series of oil pipelines—including one that crossed key waterways and which Native Americans claimed threatened the environmental integrity of their sacred sites—as well as a memorandum aimed at easing regulations for manufacturing. The president took the next day to proclaim the entire week, by means of a presidential proclamation, National School Choice Week in recognition of nonpublic and charter schools. He also issued executive order 13767, “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” calling for the immediate construction of a physical wall along the U.S. southern border with Mexico and the acceleration of processing and deportation of illegal immigrants.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

But contemporary parenting standards mean that children become the work. You must work outside the home to get enough money to pay for their concerted cultivation, but also all the actual labor of concerted cultivation itself. The books I’d need to read, the groups I’d need to join, the stultifying group music classes I’d need to attend, the school choice stress I’d need to resist, the judgment I’d internalize and let expand within me until it devoured me entirely. Work, work, work. That’s why I couldn’t see myself doing it: I was already working myself into the ground, spreading myself thin, barely getting by. More work—without support, without accommodation, or understanding—felt like it would disintegrate me entirely.


pages: 304 words: 95,306

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis by Dr Dominic Pimenta

3D printing, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, fake news, global pandemic, iterative process, lockdown, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, school choice, Skype, social distancing, stem cell

When I originally moved up from the quiet South Coast to go to medical school in London, many of my friends and family took a pretty dim view, Mum especially. She’d banned me from applying to more than one medical school in London and would have much preferred that I went to Southampton and lived at home. Needless to say, I didn’t apply to Southampton. In fact, I changed my medical school choice on a whim on the day of the UCAS application from Imperial to UCL, the only university that actually accepted me and the place where I met my wife. So much of our lives hinge on such seemingly small decisions. In my first year a friend of mine from school came up to visit, arriving at King’s Cross at 5 p.m. on a Friday.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

For an even more negative viewpoint of the effect of foreign aid in Africa, see Moyo (2009), who argues that it has actually hurt Africa, not helped. For a more hopeful alternative viewpoint see Sachs (2006). 19. See Jacobs (1961, p. 4) 20. See Venkatesh (2002). 21. See Ravitch (2010) for a discussion of how popular, commonsense policies such as increased testing and school choice actually undermined public education. See Cohn (2007) and Reid (2009) for analysis of the cost of health care and possible alternative models. See O’Toole (2007) for a detailed discussion on forestry management, urban planning, and other failures of government planning and regulation. See Howard (1997) for a discussion and numerous anecdotes of the unintended consequences of government regulations.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

http://www.sakshat.ac.in. NPTEL http://nptel.ac.in 15. ‘47% of graduates of 2013 unemployable for any job: Study’. 27 December 2013. Economic Times. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12-27/news/45626762_1_employability-aspiring-minds-graduates 16. Voucher schemes in India, School Choice, Centre for Civil Society. http://www.schoolchoice.in/voucherschemeindia.php 17. Hebbar, Nistula. 29 August 2014. ‘PM Modi’s big plan: Get education, medical & birth records online in a Digital Locker’. Economic Times. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-08-29/news/53362935_1_prime-minister-narendra-modi-suggestions-government-offices 18.


pages: 329 words: 103,159

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M Scott Peck

Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, profit motive, school choice, the scientific method

I began with the case of Bobby and his parents because of its obvious clarity. To give a child his older brother’s suicide weapon is an act of such gross outrageousness that anyone would think, yes, that is evil all right. But there was no such grossly outrageous act committed by Roger’s parents; we are dealing only with trip permissions and school choices—the ordinary kind of decisions that parents routinely make. Simply because the judgment of Roger’s parents in these matters differed from my own may not seem grounds for labeling them evil. Indeed, might I not be guilty of evil myself by so labeling clients who disagree with my opinions and fail to take my advice?


The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alvin Roth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business cycle, compensation consultant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Garrett Hardin, global village, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Network effects, positional goods, prisoner's dilemma, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Shoshana Zuboff, Stephen Hawking, stock buybacks, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy

Paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association, Washington, D.C., January, 1995. Freifeld, Karen. "College Promise Pays Off." Newsday, June 24, 199 1 , p. 4. Fuller, Wmship c., Charles F. Manski, and David A. Wise. "New Evidence on the Economic Detenninants of Postsecondary Schooling Choices. Journal o/Human Resources 27, 4 ( 1982): 477-98. Fullerton, Don, and Diane Lim Rogers. Who Bears the Lifetime Tax Burden? Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1993. Gabler, Neil. Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture 0/ Celebrity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1 994. Gabriel, 'llip. "Donovan Leitch: He's It!


pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Or, in Frederick Douglass’s words, DeAngelis objects that children mostly start kindergarten at “the nearest school house, and the best school house in their own neighborhood.” When I spoke to DeAngelis in the spring of 2021, he, like many anti–public school conservatives, saw opportunity in the crisis: “2021 could be the year of school choice, partially because of the teachers’ unions’ influence on keeping the schools closed for so long.” His dream is a universal voucher program, where taxpayer funds are parceled out directly to families to spend as they wish, with no public school “monopoly.” Meaning, no collectively funded infrastructure to provide education as a public good.


pages: 332 words: 104,587

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

agricultural Revolution, correlation does not imply causation, demographic dividend, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

Because girls didn’t matter and traditionally were outside the networks, they were allowed to choose English-language schools. Once the girls learned English, they were able to compete for well-paying jobs. Kaivan Munshi and Mark Rosenzweig, “Traditional Institutions Meet the Modern World: Caste, Gender, and Schooling Choice in a Globalizing Economy,” The American Economic Review 96, no. 4 (September 2006): 1225–52. 210 Sweatshops have given women a boost: A feminist critique of trade has emerged that disputes our arguments; it asserts that young women are often exploited and preyed upon in sweatshops. There is an element of truth to such charges.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

By the 2003–2004 school year, for instance, 73 percent of black students attended schools with a student body made up primarily of minority students (Orfield and Lee 2006). Much of the resegregation that exists today is between school districts and is due to the abandonment of integration measures such as school busing. In addition, the rise of charter schools, magnet schools, and other alternate school choice settings have accelerated the trend toward resegregation as white families seek alternatives to sending their children to school districts with high minority enrollments. Finally, official segregation figures often underestimate the actual amount of segregation because calculations are typically based only on public school data.


pages: 430 words: 111,038

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

Just as British food was seen as the best, and just as David Gilmour reports that colonialists fetishized other British items like Vaseline, Pears Soap and Anadin,20 there was a feeling among imperial Britons that British was best when it came to education. The feeling is echoed today, with Yvonne McNulty, an expat academic specializing in expatriation research, remarking in 2017 that school choices abroad are often a consequence of parental emotion (‘There’s a lot of guilt linked to moving abroad so [parents] want to make it up to their children’), just as it is echoed in the advice issued by the Council of International Schools to the Daily Telegraph in 2012 that ‘sticking with the British national curriculum will make any move back to the UK less problematic … A child may feel more secure in their home environment, so a UK boarding school is worth considering.’


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

If the group studied isn’t representative, then the results may not be applicable overall. Essentially, you must be really careful when drawing conclusions based on nonrandom experiments. The Dilbert cartoon above pokes fun at the selection bias inherent in a lot of the studies reported in the news. A similar selection bias occurs with parents and school choice for their kids. Parents understandably want to give their kids a leg up and will often move or pay to send their kids to “better schools.” However, is the school better because there are better teachers or because the students are better prepared due to their parents’ financial means and interest in education?


Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Davis, K. and Moore, W.E. (1945) ‘Some principles of stratification’, American Sociological Review, 10(2), 242-49 (https://doi.org/10.2307/2085643). Dean, D. (2005) ‘Recruiting a self: Women performers and aesthetic labour’, Work, Employment and Society, 19(4), 761-74 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017005058061). Dearden, L., Ryan, C. and Sibieta, L. (2011) ‘What determines private school choice? A comparison between the United Kingdom and Australia’, Australian Economic Review, 44(3), 308-20 (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8462.2011.00650.x). De Benedictis, S., Allen, K. and Jensen, T. (2017) ‘Portraying poverty: The economics and ethics of factual welfare television’, Cultural Sociology, 11(3), 337-58 (https://doi. org/10.1177/1749975517712132). de Graft-Johnson, A., Manley, S. and Greed, C. (2005) ‘Diversity or the lack of it in the architectural profession’, Construction Management and Economics, 23(10), 1035-43 (https://doi. org/10.1080/01446190500394233). de Keere, K. (2014) ‘From a self-made to an already-made man: A historical content analysis of professional advice literature’, Acta Sociologica, 57(4), 311-24 (https://doi. org/10.1177/0001699314552737).


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

Eventually, a smaller number of physical schools might come to function as primary learning hubs, with learning “spokes” found at home, in libraries, museums, community colleges, clubs, enrichment programs, and elsewhere in the community. We can expect that already heated debates about school consolidation and school choice will likely accelerate as public schools adapt to a more personalized approach to education and as a variety of adults (coaches, counselors, college students, homeschooling parents, online experts) assume greater responsibility for children’s learning. The disarray prompted by the pandemic is likely to provide an impetus for such a rethinking at higher levels of education too.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

It invested in organizations like Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), now known as Enactus, which sponsors programs at universities to teach students about the beauties of “free enterprise,” otherwise known as capitalism. It poured money into small Christian colleges, from which it harvested management trainees loyal to the company and its professed values and willing to put in long hours. And through the Walton Family Foundation, it directed funds to “school choice,” the euphemism for privately owned charter schools. According to the foundation’s own documents, one in every four charter schools created in the United States has received Walton Family funds. Such an investment in education has ideological goals; it aims to reshape schools and what and how they teach.


Django Book by Matt Behrens

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), book value, business logic, create, read, update, delete, database schema, distributed revision control, don't repeat yourself, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, full text search, loose coupling, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, revision control, Ruby on Rails, school choice, slashdot, SQL injection, web application

Note that this is different than null. null is purely database-related, whereas blank is validation-related. If a field has blank=True, validation on Django’s admin site will allow entry of an empty value. If a field has blank=False, the field will be required. choices An iterable (e.g., a list or tuple) of 2-tuples to use as choices for this field. A choices list looks like this: YEAR_IN_SCHOOL_CHOICES = ( ('FR', 'Freshman'), ('SO', 'Sophomore'), ('JR', 'Junior'), ('SR', 'Senior'), ('GR', 'Graduate'), ) The first element in each tuple is the actual value to be stored. The second element is the human-readable name for the option. The choices list can be defined either as part of your model class: class Foo(models.Model): GENDER_CHOICES = ( ('M', 'Male'), ('F', 'Female'), ) gender = models.CharField(max_length=1, choices=GENDER_CHOICES) or outside your model class altogether: GENDER_CHOICES = ( ('M', 'Male'), ('F', 'Female'), ) class Foo(models.Model): gender = models.CharField(max_length=1, choices=GENDER_CHOICES) You can also collect your available choices into named groups that can be used for organizational purposes in a form: MEDIA_CHOICES = ( ('Audio', ( ('vinyl', 'Vinyl'), ('cd', 'CD'), ) ), ('Video', ( ('vhs', 'VHS Tape'), ('dvd', 'DVD'), ) ), ('unknown', 'Unknown'), ) The first element in each tuple is the name to apply to the group.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Over a quarter of all California’s immigrants—who themselves constitute over one-quarter of the state’s current resident population—entered and remained in the state without legal sanction.36 Again, few of these outcomes affected the very wealthy classes that had supported the policies and laws leading to these crises and had the resources to ensure their consequences fell on others. The Bay Area, until recently a bastion of opposition to charter schools and school choice, witnessed an epidemic of expensive new and enlarged private academies as the per capita wealth of the rich soared. Meanwhile, the public schools increasingly enrolled the impoverished children of immigrants from Central America and Mexico.37 What did the beleaguered and shrinking middle class say in opposition to all of these state policies and socioeconomic trends?


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

Sukhtankar (2014), ‘Payments Infrastructure and the Performance of Public Programs: Evidence from Bio-​metric Smartcards in India’, NBER Working Paper No. 19999, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. Muralidharan, K., and V. Sunderaraman (2013), ‘Contract Teachers: Experimental Evidence from India’, NBER Working Paper No. 19440, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. References [ 331 ] 332 Muralidharan, K., and V. Sunderaraman (2014), ‘The Aggregate Effect of School Choice: Evidence from a Two-​Stage Experiment in India’, NBER Working Paper No. 19441, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. Nagaraj, R. (2013), ‘India’s Dream Run: Understanding the Boom and Its Aftermath’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 48(20), 39–​51. Nataraj, S. (2011), ‘The Impact of Trade Liberalization on Productivity: Evidence from India’s Formal and Informal Sectors’, Journal of International Economics, Vol. 85(2), 292–​301.


pages: 636 words: 140,406

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Schools—primary, secondary, and tertiary alike—should be funded solely by fees and private charity. Such policies (lack of policies?) are extreme even by libertarian standards. Most libertarians dream of a voucher system, where schools are private but funding is public.41 Yet to my mind, vouchers—and “school choice” more generally—only marginally improve over the status quo. Since education is mostly signaling, the chief problem is not low quality, but high quantity. America’s schools, like its sport stadiums, are white elephants. The main drawback of massive government backing isn’t that these white elephants are poorly managed or uncompetitive, but that they’re far too numerous and lavish.


pages: 386

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 by George Anthony Selgin

British Empire, correlation coefficient, flying shuttle, George Gilder, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, large denomination, lone genius, profit motive, RAND corporation, school choice, seigniorage, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen

Fred Singer JUDGE AND JURY: American Tort Law on Trial Eric Helland & Alex Tabarrok I LESSONS FROM THE POOR: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit I Ed. by Alvaro Vargas Llosa REGULATION AND THE REAGAN ERA: Politics, Bureaucracy and the Public Interest I Ed. by Roger Meiners & Bruce Yandle RESTORING FREE SPEECH AND LIBERTY ON CAMPUS I DonaldA. Downs RESURGENCE OF THE WARFARE STATE: The Crisis Since 9/11 I Robert Higgs RE-THINKING GREEN: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy I Ed. by Robert Higgs & Carl P. Close SCHOOL CHOICES: True and False IJohn Merrifield STRANGE BREW: Alcohol and Government Monopoly Douglas Glen Whitman I STREET SMART: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads I Ed. by Gabriel Roth TAXING CHOICE: The Predatory Politics of Fiscal Discrimination I Ed. by William F. Shughart, II TAXING ENERGY: Oil Severance Taxation and the Economy I Robert Deacon, Stephen DeCanio, H.


pages: 434 words: 150,773

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

Further choice, as outlined in the 1987 Conservative manifesto proposal to allow schools to ‘opt out’ of local education authorities – giving mobility to the already mobile – would lead to greater polarization between the best and the worst in the schools. Those who could ‘work’ the system would do so, adding another tier of opting-out parents to the six per cent who now pay: the children of those who couldn’t exercise that ‘right’ would be more thoroughly segregated in sink schools. Choice, said Mrs Joan Sallis, the national organizer of the Campaign for the Advancement of State Education, means that he with the longest arm reaches the highest shelf. ‘It is a nice word for a nasty process.’ A few parents are candid enough to admit that choice is about advantage – the right school tie, influential friends, an acceptable accent – as well as about a decent education.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

., 2019, accessed June 18, 2019, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/milton_friedman_412621. 15 Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Jordan Kyle, Benjamin A. Olken, and Sudarno Sumarto, “Tangible Information and Citizen Empowerment: Identification Cards and Food Subsidy Programs in Indonesia,” Journal of Political Economy 126, no. 2 (2018). 16 Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman, “The Aggregate Effect of School Choice: Evidence from a Two-Stage Experiment in India,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 130, no. 3 (2015): 1011–66. 17 Luc Behaghel, Bruno Crépon, and Marc Gurgand, “Private and Public Provision of Counseling to Job Seekers: Evidence from a Large Controlled Experiment,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 6, no. 4 (2014): 142–74. 18 Mauricio Romero, Justin Sandefur and Wayne Sandholtz, “Outsourcing Service Delivery in a Fragile State: Experimental Evidence from Liberia,” working paper, ITAM, accessed June 18, 2019, https://www.dropbox.com/s/o82lfb6tdffedya/MainText.pdf?


pages: 598 words: 150,801

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

By the mid-1990s, middle-class children were more likely to be educated in well-resourced schools, helped by covert school selection policies designed to attract children who were likely to perform well in examinations, and by parents’ ability to chauffeur their children to schools a long distance from home.15 Although successive governments presented these reforms as responding to public demand, many parents regretted the changes. A survey conducted in Scotland found that parents found choosing schools confusing and time-consuming. Most compared the situation unfavourably with the 1970s when local authorities had allocated children to a school.16 Researchers found that children in areas and in families where school choice was a matter of anxiety and concern picked up on these worries. They were particularly likely to see schooling as immensely important to their life chances.17 Among them was Lucy Young. Born in 1978, Lucy was the daughter of an upwardly mobile couple – her father was the print-worker-turned-computer technician who was able to buy the family’s council house in the 1980s.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

It paid for some six hundred graduate and postgraduate fellowships, right-wing think tanks, conservative journals, activists fighting Communism abroad, and its own publishing house, Encounter Books. Continuing the strategic emphasis on prestigious schools, the foundation gave both Harvard and Yale $5.5 million during its first decade under Joyce’s management. It was an activist force on the secondary-school level, too. The Bradley Foundation virtually drove the early national “school choice” movement, waging an all-out assault on teachers’ unions and traditional public schools. In an effort to “wean” Americans from government, the foundation militated for parents to be able to use public funds to send their children to private and parochial schools. When Joyce took over the Bradley Foundation, he continued to fund many of the same academic organizations he had at Olin, including half of the same colleges and universities.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Much as Boomer economic neoliberalism provided a nothing-for-nothing “third way,” so educational neoliberalism would provide its own third way, to similar effect. The charge was led by Bill Bennett, the nation’s third secretary of education, appointed two years after ANAR came out. Rather than pursue ANAR’s recommendations, Bennett (a Boomer, naturally) and his successors held that the market would improve education, in the form of vouchers, school choice, charter schools, the federalist laboratory of the states in edifying competition with each other, and all the other neoliberal nostrums manufactured from the 1980s on and embraced by both parties. It was a risky bet, but then again, Bill Bennett, erstwhile educator and moral crusader, was nothing if not a risk taker, as his $8 million in gambling losses would subsequently reveal.15 However convenient it would be to dismiss Bennett as a Reaganite anomaly, the neoliberal experiment accelerated as Boomers gained power, under Democrats and Republicans, in states, blue, red, purple, and all the other dismal colors of the Boomer political rainbow, starting with charter school initiatives, passed in many cases by direct referendum—and thus not attributable to politicians alone.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

You have to tailor your advice to what people want to hear, and then shade it in the direction of common sense.”156 In the same period, Cochrane pursued agnotology most directly by denying that his Cato-blessed position was ideologically right wing, or that it unsubtly served as a shill for the financial sector: “Milton Friedman stood for freedom, social, political, and economic. He realized that they are inextricably linked. If the government controls your job or your business, dissent is impossible. He championed economic freedom as much as a means to political freedom as for its own sake. He favored, among other things, legalizing drugs, school choice, and volunteer army. To call him or his political legacy ‘right wing’ is simply ignorant, and I mean that also as a technically accurate description rather than an insult.”157 Agnotology delights in preaching everything you thought you knew about politics was wrong. Cochrane, as already mentioned, went on to become president of the American Finance Association in 2010.


pages: 924 words: 198,159

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Since laypersons rather than pastors may run these groups, they may not have a high profile even in the church community outside the Family Forum network.”46 The MFF also established the Michigan Prayer Network, which consisted of “prayer warriors” assigned to nearly every legislator in the state.47 While the groups were prohibited from expressly lobbying, the effect of asking legislators to “pray” for issues like school choice and against gay rights made it, as one Michigan legislator put it, “just another lobbying gimmick.”48 While opening his wallet to the Christian right, Edgar Prince also became a patron to the entire community of Holland, investing millions of dollars into Hope College, founded by Albert Van Raalte, and its equally devout rival Calvin College, Edgar’s wife’s alma mater.49 He and Elsa almost single-handedly reengineered and brought a boom to Holland’s downtown, saving it from the fate hundreds of other small towns had suffered throughout the Midwest as they gradually slipped into economic oblivion due to poor urban planning coupled with outsourcing, downsizing, layoffs, and the overall decline of U.S. manufacturing.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

Inner-City Schools WOMAN: Noam, a number of activists I know are on welfare, and their children are going to public schools that increasingly are resembling prisons: there are armed guards in the halls, there’s a high level of violence. And I know some of these kids, they’re really brutalized—if they’re not chronically depressed, then they’re violent: violent in language, violent in fact. One of the mothers recently told me—and she’s a pretty radical person—that the conservative “School Choice Movement” [whereby the state would subsidize tuition at private institutions instead of administering public schools] really is appealing to her. It surprised me, but she said, “The left isn’t addressing the problem of the schools, the left is sentimental about public education.” I’m wondering what you think about that?


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

For the purposes of this study, private schools included parochial schools, and data came from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 Senior Class of 2004 First Follow-Up survey, National Center for Education Statistics. only 7 percent from the bottom half: For a compilation of these data, see Michael T. Owyang and E. Katarina Vermann, “Measuring the Effect of School Choice on Economic Outcomes,” Regional Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (October 2012). The study bases its calculations on data from the National Center for Education Statistics. from the top 4 percent of the income distribution: Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez, The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 35.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Effective preschool education is devoted not only to vocabulary and other learning skills, but also to “character skills such as attentiveness, impulse control, persistence and teamwork.” 12 Secondary and Higher Education Preschool comes first, because each level of disappointing performance in the American educational system, from poor outcomes on international PISA tests administered to 15-year-olds to remedial classes in community colleges, reflects the cascade of underachievement that children carry with them from one grade to the next. No panacea has emerged in the form of school choice and charter schools, although there has been much experimentation—with some notable successes in which children from low-income backgrounds have earned high school diplomas and gone on to college.13 An important component of the inequality and education headwinds is the U.S. system of financing elementary and secondary education by local property taxes, leading to the contrast between lavish facilities in rich suburbs which coexist with run-down, often outmoded schools in the poor areas of central cities.