An interestingly put set of observations contra the "Asian Century" meme to which we're all too often subjected: "Think Again: Asia's Rise."
Asia is pouring money into higher education. But Asian universities will not become the world's leading centers of learning and research anytime soon. None of the world's top 10 universities is located in Asia, and only the University of Tokyo ranks among the world's top 20. In the last 30 years, only eight Asians, seven of them Japanese, have won a Nobel Prize in the sciences. The region's hierarchical culture, centralized bureaucracy, weak private universities, and emphasis on rote learning and test-taking will continue to hobble its efforts to clone the United States' finest research institutions.Even Asia's much-touted numerical advantage is less than it seems. China supposedly graduates 600,000 engineering majors each year, India another 350,000. The United States trails with only 70,000 engineering graduates annually. Although these numbers suggest an Asian edge in generating brainpower, they are thoroughly misleading. Half of China's engineering graduates and two thirds of India's have associate degrees. Once quality is factored in, Asia's lead disappears altogether. A much-cited 2005 McKinsey Global Institute study reports that human resource managers in multinational companies consider only 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers as even "employable," compared with 81 percent of American engineers.
See also the comments on autocracy and the "benefits" it has brought to the Asian nations.
The rejected Keynesian first draft of Lord of the Flies.
See also this one and this one.
And fans of Baby Rudin might like this one.
(Hat tip: Peter Cresswell
I've recently bloggged videos of Peter Schiff and of Yaron Brook, but now:
Peter Schiff and Yaron Brook on the same segment of the same program.
"This is the modern world." Paul Weller sang it for The Jam, decades ago. I think this is something guys will recognize and women will admit to. Well, probably not all of you. But it's from The Onion, so you know it's gotta be true: "But If We Started Dating It Would Ruin Our Friendship Where I Ask You To Do Things And You Do Them."
It's just…you're like my best friend, and I would hate for something you desperately want to change that. I mean, sure, we could go on some dates, maybe mess around a little and finally validate the six years you've spent languishing in this platonic nightmare, but then what? How could we ever go back to the way we were, where I take advantage of your clear attraction to me so I can have someone at my beck and call? That part of our friendship means so much to me.
Lots of libertarians get riled up over Mark Steyn, which is probably one reason I like him.
Can't agree with everything Steyn says, nor with everything in his argument here, but he's making a nice point about why the Conservatives (in Canada as well as in Britain) and the Republicans (in the US) won't be saving us any time soon:
More important, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood — and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day — and the latest report on “the seven evils” afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames “poverty” and “individualism,” failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable. In Ontario, Christine Elliott, a candidate for the leadership of the so-called Conservative party, is praised by the media for offering a more emollient conservatism predicated on “the need to take care of vulnerable people.”Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.
t's not going to get any better soon, either.
As Peter Cresswell says (and as you can see for yourself at the end of the video), Dr. Brook received a standing ovation after speaking to the Republican Party of Virginia 2009 state convention. I agree with Peter, too, that Brook deserved it. Unfortunately, Republicans always cheer the language of liberty, and then come out cheering just as lustily for the next guy who promises to make prayer in schools mandatory, or get tough on which plants ought to be illegal, or to "save" Social Security, or to make war all over the globe.
While I agree with Yaron Brook about what America needs to do in order to right itself, and also with what the Republican Party needs to do in order to improve its electoral prospects and to help save the country, I am not as sanguine as he seems to be that anyone in the Republican Party will get serious about making any of it happen. Any of it. Certainly not any time soon.
I'm sorry, but there are still a lot of Mike Huckabees out there, and lots of fellow-traveling statists as well (John McCain, anyone? Rudy Giuliani?). Observe the recrudescence of the careers of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove as "commentators" and ask yourself if it's not earlier than you think.
Anyway, Yaron Brook is right about what needs to be done, and Peter's right about how good the talk was.
(Hat tip: Peter Cresswell at Not PC)
I know that Jon Stewart is pretty reliably liberal-leftish, but he's also funny -- and you can't evade the truth by too much, or too often, and remain funny. Here he is interviewing Peter Schiff and telling him, onscreen, "You were right all along!"