Drawing up policy blueprints is a task for which there has never been a shortage of eager candidates. We can only hope that those policies will be based on hard facts about the real world, rather than on rhetoric or preconceptions.
If you are not prepared to undergo the extended toil and sacrifice that some particular endeavor may require, then despite having all the native potential for great success in that endeavor, and with all the doors of opportunity wide open, you can nevertheless become an utter failure.
It is a painful irony that people who are promoting the make-believe equality of “inclusion” and “diversity” in schools are attacking charter schools that are producing the real equality of educational achievement.
The 50,000-plus students on waiting lists for admission to charter schools in New York City,1 where per-pupil expenditures average more than $20,000 a year,2 represent more than a billion dollars a year that could be lost by the traditional public school system in New York City alone, if all the students on those waiting lists were able to get into charter schools. And that is just the initial financial loss in one city during one year.
It is successful charter schools that are the real threat to the traditional unionized public schools. No charter school network examined here has been more successful educationally than the Success Academy charter schools in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, the South Bronx and other low-income minority neighborhoods in New York City – and none has been more often or more bitterly attacked in words and deeds.
In the Occident the city has been the greatest opportunity and the worst influence; a place of creation and decay, of freedom and subjection, of riches and poverty, of splendor and misery, of communion and lonesomeness – an optimal milieu for talent, character, vice and corruption. Eric Hoffer.
In other words, the loss of freedom as the reach and power of the government are increasingly extended is an issue kept off the agenda by redefining words. Moreover, government-provided benefits are not net benefits to society, because the government simply transfers wealth, rather than creating it.
Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong.
Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong. But often the fact that some explanation seems too simple becomes a substitute for showing that it is wrong.
This mutual receptivity to each other’s culture in the Middle Ages is now very much part of a long gone past. One revealing sign of today’s lack of cultural receptivity to Western culture in the Middle East is that in today’s Arab world – about 300 million people in more than 20 countries23 – the number of books translated from other languages has been just one-fifth of the number translated by Greece alone, for a population of 11 million people.
The question as to whether flesh-and-blood people of indigenous ancestry today would have been better off had the Europeans not invaded can scarcely be asked, much less answered, because most flesh-and-blood contemporary American Indians would not exist if the Europeans had not invaded, since they are of European as well as indigenous ancestry. Nature is remarkably uncooperative with our moral categories. There is no way to unscramble an egg.
The historic consequences of treating particular beliefs as sacred dogmas, beyond the reach of evidence or logic, should be enough to dissuade us from going down that road again – despite how exciting or emotionally satisfying political dogmas and the crusades resulting from those dogmas can be, or how convenient in sparing us the drudgery and discomfort of having to think through our own beliefs or test them against facts.
You cannot measure opportunities by outcomes.
If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference.
No one likes to admit being mistaken but, under the incentives and constraints of profit and loss, there is often no choice but to reverse course before financial losses threaten bankruptcy. In politics, however, the costs of the government’s mistakes are often paid by the taxpayers, while the costs of admitting mistakes are paid by elected officials.
The intelligentsia have largely ignored or downplayed the things in which Americans lead the world – including philanthropy, technology, and the creation of life-saving medicines – and treated the errors, flaws and shortcomings that Americans share with human beings around the world as special defects of “our society.
People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right – especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.
Although the word ‘economy’ may bring the term money to the minds of many, the truth is that for the whole of society money is nothing more than an artificial instrument that allows real things to be done, otherwise, the government could make us all rich simply by printing more bills. It is not money but the volume of goods and services that determines whether a country is poor or prosperous.
It is easy to give up freedom and hard to get it back.
The fact that work is cheaper in Dubai than in Japan is not just a fluke. Work is more productive in richer countries. That is one of the reasons these countries are generally more prosperous. Selling used equipment from rich countries to poor countries can be an efficient way to handle the situation for both types of countries.