Quick Update

Been to busy to comment on the recent machinations of the Obama administration. Here are some of the books I hope to have a review of soon, and hopefully I can find some time to write more on the current political and financial situation in the future.

Capital Ideas Evolving

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

The Myth of the Rational Voter: People Vote Like Idiots, and Why

I’ve recently finished reading The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies which builds a framework for understanding why the electorate commonly vote for such idiotic proposals, especially related to economics. The author, Bryan Caplan, delivers a wonderfully well researched book that is engagingly written, a tough tasks for what is actually an economics book. He tears apart rational voting theory, the idea that the idiots balance out and smart people make the last few % points of decision, and explains an economic take on why voters make poor decisions.

Bryan Caplan explains that in voting most actors are rationally ignorant and rationally irrational. Without going through all the analysis most people are rationally ignorant because they make a rational decision to forgo the effort required to fix their ignorance since voting has such a small expected payoff. People are rationally irrational for much the same reason, taking an easy or socially accepted position rather than figuring out the correct solution out of a rational lazyness. Basically, since we understand that our vote counts so little we make little effort to make vote in an intelligent way.

I highly recommend picking this one up, it will give you a whole new set of tools in understanding politics and participating in debate and it is an incredibly interesting read.

Thomas Frank Says Move the Government Away From Market-Based Outsourcing

This last fellow eventually concluded from his experience that “The interest of a corporation, KBR, not the interests of American soldiers or American taxpayers, seemed to be paramount.” It could be the epitaph for an era.

There have always been government contractors, of course, and no doubt there always will be government contractors. But the way Washington manages its contracting isn’t static or eternally unchanging. During the last administration, in particular, it was soaked in ideology, from the right’s frothing against the federal work force to its cult of outsourcing.

via Thomas Frank Says Barack Obama Moves the Democratic Government Away From the GOP’s Market-Based Outsourcing – WSJ.com.

 

Check out the full article. I’m a fan of Thomas Frank’s  Conquest of Cool but this article is a bit all over the place. It starts out lambasting the Bush government for out sourcing practices with a slant that outsourcing itself was the bad idea. It then comes back around at the end of the article to endorse smarter contracting and stronger oversight of contractors. 

The government under GWB really did screw up when they outsourced functions while still increasing the size of government and allowed no-bid contracts to political cronies. However, outsourcing parts of the government can make a great deal of financial and productive sense when the contracts are properly awarded.

Turning Away Skilled Immigrants Will Hurt the U.S. Economy

From Danos, Slaughter and Hansen Say Turning Away Skilled Immigrants With H1-B Visas Will Hurt the U.S. Economy – WSJ.com.:

And where will all these foreign-born students go? To countries whose leaders recognize their job-creation potential and shape policy accordingly. For example, current British immigration policy welcomes an unlimited supply of the world’s best and brightest business minds. Since 2004, the U.K. Highly Skilled Migrant Programme has maintained a list of 50 of the world’s top business schools. Anyone who earns an MBA from a business school on this list is automatically eligible to work in the U.K. for at least one year.

Quite apart from their contributions to higher education, skilled immigrants have long contributed to American jobs and standards of living. They bring ideas for new technologies and new companies. And they bring connections to business opportunities abroad, stimulating exports and affiliate sales for multinational companies.

Turning away skilled immigrants will hurt, not help, the U.S. It is unlikely that supporters of the Employ American Workers Act saw the link from jobs at companies receiving TARP money to enrollments at American universities and graduate schools. But we ignore at our peril the indirect yet significant harm done by laws that try to wall America off from the global economy

Click on over to read the whole thing. Very good & I completely agree. If the best and brightest want to live in the US to do research, create companys (aka Google), or simply work here then they should and we should encourage it. We’re doing ourselves a great disservices to turn these minds away.