Technology in Education

From the article "In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores" in the The New York Times, 3 Sept 2011.

One broad analysis of laptop programs like the one in Maine, for example, found that such programs are not a major factor in student performance.

“Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring — for better or worse,” wrote Bryan Goodwin, spokesman for Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, a nonpartisan group that did the study, in an essay. Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.

A review by the Education Department in 2009 of research on online courses — which more than one million K-12 students are taking — found that few rigorous studies had been done and that policy makers “lack scientific evidence” of their effectiveness.. A division of the Education Department that rates classroom curriculums has found that much educational software is not an improvement over textbooks.

Larry Cuban, an education professor emeritus at Stanford University, said the research did not justify big investments by districts

“There is insufficient evidence to spend that kind of money. Period, period, period,” he said. “There is no body of evidence that shows a trend line.”

Debt Crisis in Pics

Republicans claim it's out of control government spending associated with the "Obama agenda" that is to blame for the "debt problem", but recent government spending has not significantly changed other than the one time expenditure of the stimulus and spending related to the economic downturn.

Source:  The Atlantic

Source:  New York Times

Source:  TPM




Rather it is the Republican policies of deficit financed tax cuts and spending which is responsible for much of the debt.

 Source: The Big Picture 

 Source: The Big Picture



And NO, the Democrat Congresses are not responsible for the deficits under Reagan and Bush I. 

Source:  Brad Delong





Republican policies and the economic downturn resulted in a decade of surpluses being turned into a decade of deficits.

Source:  Pew Economic Policy Group




And future debt, likewise, is primarily the result of Republican policies and the economic downturn.

Source: CBPP






The Republicans claim we have a "debt crisis," but if Congress does nothing, debt will decrease as a percentage of GDP all the way out to 2050.

Source:  Washington Post

In summary, Republican fiscal recklessness is responsible for the current large amount of debt.  Republicans believe the solution to this problem of their own creation is to jeopardize the US credit rating by abusing an antiquated method of raising the debt level.  Even though this could lead to billions in additional interest payments and billions in lost revenue from an economic downturn, Republicans think that the inability to pass a simple bill giving the Treasury permission to pay for spending that has already taken place will calm the markets and show the world that the US is serious  and capable of handling the more complex issues associated with its "debt problem."  Or they could just do nothing and the debt problem would take care of itself.

Academic turns city into a social experiment

From Harvard University Gazette, 11 March 2004:

The distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task," Mockus said. "Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.
....
Mockus noted that his administrations were enlightened by academic concepts, including the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North, who has investigated the tension between formal and informal rules and how economic development is restrained when those rules clash; and Jürgen Habermas' work on how dialogue creates social capital. Mockus also mentions Socrates, who said that if people understood well, they probably would not act in the wrong way.

The ARRA created 1.503 million jobs

From billy blog ... alternative economic thinking, 17 May 2011, commenting on the paper "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled." 

"The other point is that they depart from the convention and use 10 per cent significance levels for their analysis. Why do they do that? Perhaps to lay claim to more than their results can provide at the conventional level (which is a much more robust test on a model)? Further, why in earlier papers (not about ARRA) do the authors use conventional significance levels?

"The later results that the authors present (Tables 7 and 9) do not alter these conclusions.

"Further, if you then examine their elasticity results (Table 5) which they say is a “second way to report the jobs eff ect” you will find that most of their estimates are not statistically significant by conventional standards. That means the estimated coefficients are not different to zero – meaning no statistical effect is found.

"The point is that the authors are not entitled to make the conclusions they provide based on the results presented in this paper."

Origin of Republican Deficits

From Brad Delong, in 1993 Treasury memo posted on blog, April 19, 2011:

In figure 1 the "presidential" and actual deficits are almost the same. Had the Congress been a rubber stamp and taken no action to change the president’s budget at all, the 1982–91 years would have seen total budget deficits more than ninety percent as large as actual deficits. Figure 1 shows us that the federal government has not run large budget deficits over the past decade because "Congress…rebuffed" presidential plans to control federal spending. Instead, the large deficits have been there from the beginning in presidential spending plans.

....................

Either way, the conclusion is the same: the U.S. has had large budget deficits over the past decade not because Congress has rejected presidential spending restrictions, but because large budget deficits have been implicit in every single year’s presidential spending plan. Congress has largely played a passive role: delivering by and large the level of spending that the president proposed.

Niall Ferguson Critique

From the Spectator, 22nd February 2011:

Naturally, envy plays its part. Basking in the bright lights of New York was never going to endear him to Britain’s mustier academes. But envy is only a constituent of contempt. Ferguson's bumptious style is resented. He carries himself with the brash deportment of a nabob – a self-regarding parvenu who has absolute certainty in the merit of each and every one of his opinions.

And he has lot of opinions. His reputation as a financial historian is confirmed. And with good reason: The Cash Nexus is an involved masterpiece of gritty number-crunching. But his discursive meditations on the history of Western culture and empire are intellectually diaphanous. Specialists decry his shallow research, his tabloidese and his insistence on structuring arguments according to the dictates of a six-part television series.