joshuago’s history Bookmarks

"Farming is how Detroit started and farming is how Detroit can be saved."

Why educational performance is critical to a society's wealth and how the modern university is not appreciably improved over the template established in 1088. Proposes some simple changes that should greatly improve the effectiveness of undergraduate education.

Dictators provide strong incentives for the ruling clique; democracies provide more modest benefits for everyone else. For democracy to beat dictatorship, the dispersed population needs to have the skills and motivation to work collaboratively to defeat dictatorial coups and executive aggrandizement.

The members of the committee have also put the young American president in a terrible place. They make it look like all the talk of "The One," the heartthrob of the European elite, the darling of the international left, is true. They make him look prefabricated and inauthentic, an empty structure held up by essentially silly people. Which puts him at a disadvantage in his own country, because Americans don't really like it when flaky European politicians tell them how they ought to see him or the world.

Today, we analyze feverishly whether China will be able to help rebalance the world economy; whether it will play its full part in the Copenhagen negotiations on climate change; and what its position may be on Iran. Imagine we were analyzing the consequences of a threat to China's stability and cohesion. And then be glad we are not.

It wasn't socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students' poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents.

The marketplace in which most commerce takes place today is not a pre-existing condition of the universe. It's not nature. It's a game, with very particular rules, set in motion by real people with real purposes.

These tragedies [of violence] can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence. States can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation.