Yes it is possible to end poverty
17 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
Here’s everything that could wipe out humanity ranked in one handy infographic – ScienceAlert
14 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
Roger Congleton on why democracy emerged neither from revolutions nor the threat of revolution
06 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
FA Hayek on the market as an engine of liberation, tolerance and social peace
06 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
Too easy: halving between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day – Millennium Development Goal 1a
03 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth miracles Tags: capitalism and freedom, millennium development goals, The Age of Milton Friedman, The Great Fact
The Treason Of The Clerisy: Capitalism And The Intellectuals After 1848
02 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, growth disasters, growth miracles, Marxist economics Tags: capitalism and freedom, Deirdre McCloskey, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
Deirdre McCloskey is of the view that the “the clerisy” has been, with notable exceptions, hostile to capitalism and downright contemptuous of the morals and attitudes of the middle class that has flourished under capitalism:
The Germans called it the Clerisei or later the Bildungsbürgertum, the cultivated and reading as against the commercial and bettering bourgeoisie. In the eighteenth century the members of the clerisy such as Voltaire and Tom Paine had courageously advocated our liberties.
But in the 1830s and 1840s a much enlarged clerisy, mostly the sons of bourgeois fathers, commenced sneering at the liberties the fathers exercised so vigorously in the market and the factory.
On the right the clerisy under the influence of Romance looked back with nostalgia to an imagined medieval time without markets, in which stasis and hierarchy ruled…
On the left, meanwhile, the clerisy, likewise influenced by Romance, and then by historical materialism, developed the illiberal idea that ideas do not matter.
What matters to progress, they declared, is the unstoppable tide of history, aided (they declared further, contradicting themselves) by protests or strikes or even violent revolutions directed at the thieving bourgeoisie, movements to be led of course by the clerisy.
Later, in European socialism and American progressivism, the left proposed to defeat bourgeois monopoly of markets by gathering under regulation or central planning or ownership of the means of production all the monopolies into one big monopoly of violence called the state.
Yet the commercial bourgeoisie so despised by the clerisy left and right made the Great Enrichment and the modern world.
The Enrichment gigantically improved our lives, showing that both social Darwinism and economic Marxism were mistaken. The genetically inferior races and classes and ethnicities proved not to be so. The exploited proletariat was not immiserised but enriched.
and
Forcing in an illiberal way the French style of equality of outcome, cutting down the tall poppies, treating people as sad children to be engineered by the experts of the clerisy, we have found, has often had a high cost in damaging liberty and slowing betterment. Not always, but often.
On the other hand, introducing the Scottish style of equality of liberty and dignity, as in Hong Kong and Norway and France itself, has regularly led to an astounding betterment and to a real equality of outcome—with even the poor acquiring automobiles and plumbing denied in earlier times even to the rich, and acquiring political rights and social dignity denied in earlier times to everyone except the rich
Why Senator Elizabeth Warren supported school choice and school vouchers
02 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of education, entrepreneurship, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: capitalism and freedom, Elizabeth Warren, School choice, The meaning of competition, vouchers
It is not a coincidence that Warren’s support for school choice dropped through the floor once she decided to run for public office as a Democrat. In spite of large cash infusions from wealthy environmentalists and trial lawyers, teacher unions remain the party’s largest and most influential donor base.
…In recent years, Warren has bent over backwards to qualify what she “really meant” by school choice.
In a rather astonishing reinterpretation of her own work, it turns out she never supported vouchers for religious school or even for non-sectarian private schools, just the ability to go to a public school in an adjacent district.
The Left and Right approaches to poverty
01 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, liberalism, poverty and inequality, welfare reform Tags: capitalism and freedom, Leftover Left, poverty and inequality, The Great Enrichment
The first fridge for a family and whole village
31 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles Tags: capitalism and freedom, global poverty, India, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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