Here’s my proposal to bring Congress’s penchant for imprudent lending to a quick end: All congressional pension assets should be invested in funds backed solely by the high- risk loans mandated by federal housing legislation. I have a feeling that things would change fast.
home prices between 1978 and 2006 increased by “only” a factor of 4.35, while the cost of college has increased by much more than twice that amount since 1978 in the bottom chart. Over the last three decades, college tuition and fees have gone up by a factor of 10.5, and they show no sign of slowing down.
Greece–a nation of about 11 million people, or two million fewer than Greater Los Angeles…Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars [in government debt] for every working Greek.
The Lewis article was recommended by Tyler Cowen, and I concur. No short excerpt can do it justice.
Sorry, I’m not all that concerned with “how individuals, blah, blah, optimal choices, blah, blah, scarcity, blah, blah…” I’m concerned why some people are so rich and other people are so poor. I want to understand why some economies work and others don’t, and why even the ones that work still don’t work for everyone. I want to understand how other Americans and I got 64 times richer than our ancestors.
Which is exactly why Nick Schulz and I wrote From Poverty to Prosperity. One of the economists we interviewed for the book was none other than William Easterly.
READER COMMENTS
Jack
Sep 8 2010 at 2:49pm
@Mark Perry and the higher education bubble, tuition has greatly increased but there is also more financial aid available. The effective cost of tuition is much less than the official cost. But I don’t suppose it would make much of a dent in the bubble.
Fred
Sep 8 2010 at 3:35pm
The existence of aid and loans is a big contributor to inflation of the education bubble. Costs expand to consume the available money.
Comments are closed.