In my second article on the college problem, I discussed the public policy factors that contribute to the rising cost of higher education. But politics makes its way into education through more than public policy, as professors bring their political views into their classrooms and research.

In my previous article on the college problem, I discussed the cultural factors that have contributed to the falling value of a university degree, which I hoped would show that we cannot reduce the decline of higher education to public policy failures. However, bad policy has been a major contributor to the problems plaguing the university system, both at the federal and state levels.

Jeff Deist recently posed the question “Is College Worth It?” My first thought when I opened the article was that he could have reduced the entire piece to a single word: “no.”

Ask the average person what they believe to be the most economically important innovation of the twentieth century, and they’ll probably point to the internet. The internet has certainly disproved Paul Krugman’s prediction that it would have no greater impact on the economy than the fax machine, but even this transformative technology may only warrant a silver medal when compared to something much more banal: the intermodal shipping container.

It may be years before we fully realize the ramifications of the lockdown policies governments around the world have imposed on their citizens in response to covid-19, but evidence of the costs is starting to trickle in.
A recent study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surveyed thousands of high school students on the effects of the pandemic.

Whenever politicians and media outlets discuss inflation, they invariably use the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as their measure. The CPI is only one of several price indices on top of the various measures of the money supply that underlie aggregate price changes. Strictly speaking, the CPI does not measure inflation per se, but rather the consequences of monetary expansion on consumer products. In macroeconomics, the CPI is one of the key indicators of economic health, and it is this inflation measure that economists use to calculate real GDP. Naturally, the accuracy of the CPI as a measure of the consequences of credit expansion is critically important, yet the measure is controversial among investors. As Investopedia explains, the CPI is “a proxy for inflation,” and “from an investor’s

Whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity,” Abraham Lincoln told a crowd in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838, “the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it.