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Educational Ironies

By |2020-04-24T17:22:29-04:00April 24th, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , |

Educational Ironies From First to Worst? There is a strange disjunction in America.  The U.S. has absolutely the finest university system in the world, there is not even a serious disagreement about this judgment. But primary-secondary education in that country is a real state-by-state crap shoot.  Those with enough money insulate themselves from the vagaries of U.S. public education and their kids head on to those good post-secondaries. Perhaps it is about time we redistributed some of Harvard's $20 Billion endowment to K-12 education.  All those Ivy Leaguers must now bow down to a man elected [...]

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Why Are You So Angry?

By |2020-05-03T10:54:08-04:00May 3rd, 2017|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , |

I have an American friend – an estimable person in ever so many ways. A great companion, funny, lively, bright and loyal, the sort of man who’d always have your back if the chips were down. He is a devout Irish Catholic from a large family.  He attended Dayton University where he started all four years as a defensive back.  Now retired, he put in forty years with a small steel fabrication company that moved him to the Carolinas where he still lives with his lovely Canadian wife. My friend’s political stance perplexes me. His rage against [...]

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Free & Fair Trade

By |2020-06-24T17:09:51-04:00May 1st, 2017|Categories: Society|Tags: , , |

Free trade and the global movement of goods and services have been under political attack from the left for quite a while.  Now these ‘socialists’ have been joined by America-Firsters and other ‘My Country, Everyone Else Be Damned’ groups on the Right.  These people, who agree on little else, sing from the same hymn book on free trade and the song they sing most often is the one about the flight of manufacturing jobs  from Frank in Toledo to Pedro in Mexico City or Pho Bang in Vietnam.  This refrain, conjuring up as it does an image [...]

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Healthcare Metrics

By |2020-04-25T13:44:29-04:00November 29th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , |

How does one measure the effectiveness of a healthcare system? (I have stated objections to the term healthcare system in a previous post; but we are stuck with it as the accepted label in policy circles.) Some measures seem fairly obvious, life expectancy, infant mortality, timely access to care, number of healthcare workers per thousand of the national population, etc. The number of metrics appears to be limited only by the ingenuity of statisticians. Harder to measure is the opportunity cost of doing option A rather than option B within the system because if B is never [...]

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Healthcare Myths

By |2020-04-25T19:26:14-04:00November 27th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , |

Some months ago, I posted a short item about healthcare policy, and promised more to come. I have been dancing around this commitment like a bare-foot shaman around a nest of vipers. Healthcare policy in North America is a disheartening and daunting subject for analysis. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry puts it, “…debate often floats in a realm of fantasies, myths, and half-truths — more like a dream or a nightmare about a thing than the thing itself.” However, I return to this subject, putting fear and trembling aside, because it is a hugely important policy tangle and even [...]

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Healthcare Reform

By |2020-04-21T10:38:20-04:00June 30th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , |

Some years ago, I did some work for a think tank called the “Atlantic Institute for Market Studies.” It was founded and run by a brilliant, somewhat mercurial economist named Brian Lee Crowley who has since moved onto other endeavours in Ottawa.  Health care reform was a policy focus at AIMS and I did a little work on this brief and was privileged to partake in a number of very enlightening dialogues with Dr. Crowley and others whose brows were more than a little furrowed by the formidable challenges faced by anyone or any group promoting change [...]

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