Updates on Education, Principles, and Health Care

Just a few updates to the posts I had over the last couple of months, but first, I read a quote recently that I thought was great.

Robert Murphy – PhD in Economics – “If the press ignored advances in other scientific fields as much as they do in economics, we'd see weathermen advising readers to offer sacrifices to the rain gods.”


On Education –

According to a study by the Independent Women’s Forum (8/13/2007)

“Overall, private-school teachers are nearly twice as satisfied as public-school teachers with their working conditions.”

“At 82 percent, overall satisfaction rates among charter-school teachers are twice as high as their private counterparts and more than three times as high as their district counterparts. Two-thirds of charter-school teachers report high levels of satisfaction with the influence they have over curricula, student discipline, and professional development, as well as school safety, collaboration with colleagues, and their schools' learning environments. On those same measures, slightly more than half of private-school teachers and slightly more than one-third of public-school teachers report high levels of satisfaction.”

On August 9th I wrote and predicted for teachers at independently run schools a whole four days before the study:

“Increased pay, improved discipline, and being in demand should help these teachers feel more respected.”


On Principles and Pachyderms -

Alan Greenspan has written a new book entitled "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World". In the book, he reveals that he is a libertarian Republican. Here are his thoughts on where the Republicans went wrong:

"They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose."

Here are my thoughts on the same subject from July 19:

“The conservatives lost power because they became convinced that winning elections was all that mattered.”

“What they failed to do was establish a core set of principles so that America could accept the downsides because of the goodness of the purpose.”

Save the money and just read my newsletter and blog :)


On Health Care -

Apparently, John Stossel did a report this Friday on ABC’s 20/20 about private health insurance versus socialized medicine in Canada. I say apparently because I did not watch it and it was not made available in it’s entirety on the internet as far as I can tell. There are snippets on their website however. My father did watch it and related some of the stories of eye-popping wait times that occur under Canada’s government run health care plan that John Stossel used in his piece. Two of the stories were originally from the http://www.freemarketcure.com/ website that I mentioned back on July 26. They usually run a lot of repeat stories on 20/20 so I can hopefully catch it again sometime in the future.

I highly recommend keeping a nose out for stories by John Stossel. He is one of the few journalists who do actually keep up with Economic science.