The College Curious Need New “ESG” Ratings
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
4M ago
The publication of this two-parter by the Martin Center reminded me that I had drafted something on the topic of college ratings but dropped it. Here it is for your edification and "enjoyment": Those interested in attending, or sending their children, to university must decide if the time and monetary investment is worth it and, if it is, where to spend their precious dollars. Strident claims by presumably knowledgeable government officials that student loans should be wholly or partially forgiven suggest that many students made the wrong decision and shouldn’t have gone to school at all, or a ..read more
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Let's Ban Professional Sports *2nd Amendment SATIRE*
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
4M ago
NB: Tried this at several satirical websites but some of the humor was too high brow. I mean who jokes about the Ninth Amendment? The government should ban sporting events forthwith because they encourage the consumption of alcohol and other inebriates, gambling, harming animals, idleness, and violence. It doesn’t matter that millions of Americans love to watch sporting events live or on television because sports are not explicitly protected by the Constitution, they divert resources away from BIPOCs, and they emit literally tons of carbon into the atmosphere.   Anti-sporters like my ..read more
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Worker Productivity Through the Ages
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
8M ago
NB: 100% sure I wrote this but I don't recall when or why! Found it on my Google Drive. Pretty sure it isn't published anywhere. Worker Productivity Through the Ages Productivity is generally defined as total output divided by total input, which can be stated in terms of time or some unit of currency. If output increases (decreases) while input stays constant, or if output increases faster (slower) than inputs, productivity rises (falls). Productivity is related to, but should not be confused with, efficiency, which is the expected input divided by actual input needed to achieve some level of ..read more
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How the New Deal Subdued Private Charity
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
8M ago
 N.B. Another belated entry from FreedomFest. Gave a PPT instead of this speech on this one. Would copy the slides but I always found that difficult. So here is some text on the matter, which melds ideas from my forthcoming Liberty Lost (on nonprofits) with my almost finished New Deal ms. If you think you have it bad today, exactly 90 years ago the U.S. was in the depths of the Depression and there was a progressive Democrat in the Oval Office pushing through a set of radical policies that dramatically and permanently transformed America, largely for the worse. His name was Franklin Dela ..read more
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It's a Trick Question! Who Is More Important, Smith, Marx, or Keynes?
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
8M ago
 N.B. I started this speech before realizing it was a panel session! Made many of the same arguments in the discussion at FreedomFest Memphis 2023. Obviously, the question is a trick or trap because the clear winner is Alexander Hamilton. I realize that might be a dangerous proposition to espouse at a libertarian convention but several other classical liberal scholars, like Richard Salsman, also have lauded Hamilton’s grasp of economics. In fact, I learned just yesterday that Salsman has an article on Hamilton as economist forthcoming in The Independent Review. Interestingly, except on in ..read more
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US Debt Closer to Junk
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
8M ago
 Sirs, I channel through policy historian Robert E. Wright from the Great Beyond to warn that the recent debt downgrades by Mr. Fitch is much too sanguine. America’s debt today should be rated closer to junk than to top notch. The situation is not quite as dire as when I accepted General Washington’s request to serve as the nation’s first Treasury Secretary, but reforms akin to those that I implemented in the early 1790s must be made lest the nation’s public credit be impaired further. A dozen years ago, Mr. Poor also downgraded the nation’s public securities a notch, leaving only Mr. M ..read more
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California's Reparations Conundrum
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
1y ago
The state of California and some of its municipal subdivisions currently contemplate paying reparations to their Black residents. This reparations measure is not for chattel slavery per se, as slavery was historically illegal in California dating to its admission to the union in 1850. Rather, it is a supposed recompense for creating slavery-like conditions that activists ascribe to under-elaborated injustices of California’s past. It is reparations for repression, in other words.  The sums being discussed, $5 million per person in the case of San Fran and half a million per person by the ..read more
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"UBI Pilot" Is Another False Frame
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
1y ago
 America’s airwaves, blogs, and podcasts are awash with praise for, and criticism of, so-called “UBI pilots.” The problem is that none of the pilot programs, which multiplied like bunnies after the Covid scare began to subside a year ago, can rightly purport to inform the debate over the likely costs and benefits of the universal basic income policy (UBI) currently pushed by proponents in the US and around the globe. Journalistic misrepresentation, whether due to economic illiteracy or incentives to promote Woke causes, threaten to pollute the policy debate over real UBI proposals. Journ ..read more
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Positive Quarterly Real GDP During Recessions
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
1y ago
Three months ago, many scholars, including myself, argued that two consecutive quarters of shrinking inflation-adjusted GDP met the government’s technical definition of recession. A third negative number would have sealed the deal for sure but the estimate for the third quarter, which is weak but positive, muddies matters. A recent study shows that the U.S., U.K., and Swedish governments produce overly optimistic GDP growth estimates in election years. Even if the numbers are not subsequently revised downwards, the slight growth should not be interpreted to mean that the American economy is i ..read more
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Revisiting the Nacirema
Finance: History and Policy - Robert E Wright
by Robert E. Wright
1y ago
  In the American Anthropologist of June 1956, noted anthropologist Horace Mitchell Miner (1912-1993)  described the bizarre “body rituals” of a relatively primitive people known as the Nacirema. Well into the  1990s, the classic description remained a staple of undergraduate anthropology courses, where I first  encountered it. Traveling recently by automobile from the wilds of Montana to the wilds of Georgia, I was reminded of  the Nacirema and decided to interact with some of them, dangerous as that has become. They still live  on the same territory described b ..read more
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