China Closer Than Chicago but Hawaii is Further
How far away is China from the United States? If you live on America’s west coast and buy or sell goods, China is usually closer than Chicago. Factories across the U.S. ship goods by...
Economic Thinking Posts on Debate Topics
Air Transportation Safety is Global, Delays National
Why Flying Has Never Been Safer (Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2018) reports on the amazing worldwide 2017 safety record for air transportation. For Stoa policy debaters and NCFCA LD debaters, air travel safety has...
Nevil Shute Novels on Entrepreneurs Back in Print
In move to new website some older posts on books were left behind, including this post on the compelling novels of Nevil Shute. Nevil Shute was a successful aircraft engineer and businessman who wrote...
Catalonia a Nation or Barcelona a City-State?
The NSDA Public Forum topic for January: “Resolved: Spain should grant Catalonia its independence,” opens students to a range of complicated politics, economics, and history. The 2020 NCFCA topic on E.U. immigration reform also...
Stability and Prosperity from Nationalism or Globalism?
It is very, very good news for the coming decades for hundreds of millions to find the path to prosperity. That path usually with a bus ticket to a city to look for work....
Federal Transportation Subsidies: Why Not Steam Cars Instead of Electric?
Economists have long been skeptical of national industrial policies, where politicians and bureaucrats try to pick and subsidize winning technologies of the future. Congress is currently debating tax reform and considering dropping federal subsidies...
The Race to Space and Mars: Let Private Firms Compete
Past posts have outlined problems with the federal government’s continued rocket planning and contracting. See “Federal Space Transportation: Time for Reform,” for example. The benefits of federal space transportation planning and rockets tends to...
Economics for Extemporaneous Speaking
Overheads for presentation at University of Houston for UIL students. Some overheads were updated since emailing to UIL. Click for PDF of updated overheads (links should work to various articles and videos): UILEconExtemp2017new.key
K-12 Policy Reform August News
August news items and notes for the K-12 education reform topic. • “The newest advantage of being rich in America? Higher grades Escalating grade inflation at wealthy high schools is another blow to poor...
National service: sharing the dirty work by Martin Anderson
[Article by Martin Anderson for the Sept./Oct. NSDA LD topic: “Resolved: In the United States, national service ought to be compulsory.”] Today an understanding of what national service is all about is obscured by...