National Review Online has posted its latest installments of NRO TV. This time Peter Robinson hosts a fascinating discussion with Thomas Sowell Ph.D. Sowell is an economist and fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Economic Facts and Fallacies, which I am presently reading. This is so worth your time to watch. Sowell is a man who has very much mastered his area of study and it affects all of us. There’s a particularly delightful part of the interview where Robinson asks Sowell what he thinks about Barack Obama’s proposal for a tax rebate of $4,000 for college student and Sowell responds by saying he doesn’t like it because government subsidy is precisely what’s escalating the cost of higher education at a rate far faster than inflation, adding that college tuitions would be certain to rise by about $4,000 almost immediately after such a law were enacted. Enjoy. I know I did.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
1 thought on “Economic facts and fallacies”
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I remember reading a book of his about the education system, “Inside American Education” I think it was called.
He documented how the people who go into the teaching profession are, on the whole, the academic dregs. Their math and science scores were lower than those who majored in history/humanities and their history/humanities scores were lower than those who majored in math and/or science.
This is not to ridicule the teaching profession, far from it. There are genuinely sharp wonderful teachers out there who are driven to do what they do, but for some reason the profession seems to attract a lot of people who aren’t really good at anything in particular and aren’t driven.
For what it’s worth, my suspicion — and it’s just that, a suspicion — is that the best of this group actually ends up in the classroom and the rest who can’t cut it as a teacher end up as administrators and denizens of the education bureaucracy or education union hacks and goons. It would sure explain a lot anyway.