My Beauty Best Teacher

In "Fear the Boom and Bust" a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem, I wrote:

If you haven't gotten a chance to watch this yet, please do. If you teach economics, fiscal policy, monetary policy, or teach government, show this to the students in your class. It's sweet. The video is 8 minutes of pure awesome.

Click here to watch the original video!

In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Lord Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there's a "boom and bust" cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it. Get the full lyrics, story and free download of the song in high quality MP3 and AAC files at:http://www.econstories.tv/. Plus, to see and hear more from the stars of Fear the Boom and Bust, Billy Scafuri and Adam Lustick, visit their site: http://www.billyandadam.com/.

It turns out that this video was a big hit, and there have been demands for sequels and updating of it. So at a recent event (The Economist Magazine's Buttonwood Gathering), the financial managers and CEOs, politicians, central bankers and nobel prize winning economists there were treated to an unusual experience: a live rap battle between John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek. It's a live rap referencing current economic events- it is blow-your-mind good, and if you have time be sure to also show this in your classrooms! Here is the video:

• NBC Learn and Turning Foundation Grant

  From turning Foundation:
  
  "The Turning Foundation, a non-profit 501(c)3 organization, in partnership with NBC Learn and Turning Technologies today announced the Spring 2011 Classroom Improvement Technology Grant. The goal of this joint effort is to help educators develop 21st Century classrooms and improve achievement by providing effective, engaging technology and professional development tools from multiple industry leading companies.
  
  
  
  Turning Foundation Director, John Wilson stated, “With our third CIT grant, we’ve partnered with the educational division of one of the world’s leading news organizations. NBC Learn’s rich library of historic film and video archives combined with Turning Technologies’ student response system is an ideal solution for teachers to engage students in the learning process. We believe this grant award will positively impact learning outcomes and increase the overall success of students and teachers in the classroom. The Turning Foundation appreciates the contributions and involvement of both NBC Learn and Turning Technologies in our upcoming Classroom Improvement Technology Grant.”
  
  
  
  Grant applications will be accepted from teachers in grades 3 – 12 who are currently teaching in an accredited, non-profit, public school building in the United States. Ten (10) classroom awards estimated at $3,500 each will be distributed. Each will include student response technology and subscriber access to NBC LEARN K-12. "

  tags: education grant

• Uses

  This stuff is amazing. Ideapaint.
  
  THIS WEEK:
  
  "For every 50 square feet purchased on IdeaPaint.com the week of April 17th, 50 square feet will be donated to a school of the purchaser’s choice"
  
  A little bit pricey but think about getting rid of boards of all kinds. Put it in conference rooms, etc. I am thinking about putting it on my wall at school.

  tags: education

• 4th Grade Teacher Looking to Collaborate - Flat Classrooms

  fourth grade teacher, Kimberly Powell, who is looking at global economies. Contact her here if you are interested.

  tags: education learning

• Invitation to international collaboration project: Antarctica Expedition 2011 - Flat Classrooms

  The Flatclassrooms Ning is becoming a place where teachers find each other. The group is small enough that it is really made up of those who are serious about collaborating. This is an example - although it was some time a go - join us and see if you can find projects like this.
  
  "Dear all,
  
  I am writing to invite you to join our new integrated humanities project for a group of Grade 6-7 students (age 11-13), "Antarctica Expedition". (http://www.antarcticaexpedition2011.wikispaces.com : This website is going to be collaboratively built-up by teachers and students.)
  
  
  The objectives of the Project are:
  1. to explore the relationship between the living things and the environment in Antarctica
  2. to explore the effects of ozone depletion on the earth
  3. to develop a sense of global citizenship
  4. to develop global perspectives through collaborating with international students
  
  
  
  Duration of the Project: Jan-Feb 2011
  
  
  
  In this Project, we will use different kinds of web 2.0 tools such as wikispaces wordpress.com to do the collaborative works.
  
  
  
  Your participation is always welcome. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested to join us. :)
  
  
  
  Cheers,
  Sally
  "

  tags: education collaboration flatclassroom

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Public school districts are facing a major budget crisis in Michigan after almost a decade of disastrous fiscal management and poor policy decisions and school budgets are now facing considerable pressure. Almost every school district in the state is looking at cutting teachers salaries and benefits and many are also considering outsourcing or privatizing support services including custodial, food service, or transportation. Although these options likely do need to be considered, very few districts are looking at another potential source of savings- outsourcing school administration services.

In our district, our administration building supports teachers in many important ways, including budgeting and financial reporting, taking care of accounts payable and accounts receivable, managing the payroll, taking care of grant reporting, keeping track of banking and investments, and service the debt in the district. Administration runs the human resources office, which hires employees, keeps their paperwork current so they remain highly qualified, manages benefits, and provides other services to employees in the district. We have a purchasing office which oversees purchases in the district, whether they be big or small, and we have a technology department to provide technical support to teachers and staff. This whole operation is managed by an expensive and highly paid Superintendent, who works with the community and school board and manages the whole operation.

All of these jobs can easily be provided by private businesses that may possibly cost the district less money or provide them with better services.

Private management firms are out there, providing these sort of purchasing, payroll, HR, and management services to small businesses in our nation so that those businesses can focus on doing what they know best. These firms have many clients and because of the large numbers of clients they can provide more efficiency based on economies-of-scale, lowering the costs of providing these services to a district. They also can draw on substantially more experience and resources than found in school districts, potentially providing better services than would be found in-house. And because these firms would be hired by the district, they would always fear losing their contract and thus be more responsive to the concerns and pressures of the district, perhaps more so than the districts own employees, many whom view their jobs as virtual lifetime guarantees.

If teachers and custodians and bus drivers are being asked by administration to consider all options and are being looked at to see if they can be outsourced, administration also needs to know that there are companies out there that can do what they do and that they do not have some sort of monopoly on job security and pay. If I were a union official in a tough bargaining fight, I'd make sure that I brought to the table this line of thinking, because perhaps a district could save vital dollars by privatizing or outsourcing its school administration and spare cuts to teachers and other support staff who actually work with students.

This post was inspired by something that I read on Pamela Hornberger's blog, Pamela Hornberger for L'Anse Creuse School Board, which itself was inspired by a report from the Mackinac Center. One possible company that I found that may provide the sort of services I imagine is The Leona Group.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy I found this highly fasinating analysis of federalism and the nature of government in the Star Trek universe. Read the whole thing and the comments here, but here is a snippet of it:

While teaching my Federalism seminar recently, I made an analogy to Star Trek's United Federation of Planets. That got me thinking about the role of federalism in Star Trek. How much power does the Federation's central government have, and how much is left to the individual planets? Does the central government's Star Fleet have a monopoly of military force, or do Vulcan and other planets have their own local forces? Does the Federation subsidize planetary governments heavily, or are there hard budget constraints? Despite five Star Trek TV series and numerous movies, these questions haven't really been answered. Unfortunately, the academic literature on Federation law isn't much help either (see also this supposedly comprehensive volume on Star Trek and the law, which almost completely ignores federalism issues).

The evidence in the TV series' on these points is contradictory. On the one hand, the Federation seems to have a socialistic economy with a massive welfare state and no currency, which would require a high degree of centralization and planning incompatible with meaningful federalism. In the absence of a currency and price system, central planning seems to be the only way to coordinate a complex economy to even a limited degree. On the other, member planets apparently have considerable autonomy. For example, Vulcan seems to have very different laws from Earth. And Vulcan's economy seems to have a large market sector dominated by family-owned enterprises. In Deep Space Nine, the planet of Bajor applies for Federation membership. Although Bajor is at least a partial theocracy with a government heavily influenced by religious leaders, anti-Federation Bajorans never argue that Federation membership would lead to the end of Bajor's quasi-theocratic political system (as it surely would if the highly secular Federation denied political autonomy to member planets).

How to reconcile the evidence? I would suggest that it is only Earth that is socialistic, while the other member worlds have free market systems or mixed economies. The human-dominated Star Fleet military is the only Federation military force, and is tasked with collecting tribute from the nonhuman planets for redistribution to Earth. But as long as they pay their taxes, which subsidize Earth's welfare state and Star Fleet itself, they are largely left alone to govern their domestic affairs as they see fit. The Federation is essentially a big protection racket (in both senses of the word: providing external security, and also "protection" against its own depradations). There is even a good historical precedent. The 5th century BC Athenian-dominated Delian League also collected tribute from the other member states (which had no independent militaries) and used it to finance government spending on welfare benefits and the Athenian Navy, an analogue to Star Fleet. As long as the allies paid their tribute, Athens mostly left them alone and did not try to influence their domestic policies.

This theory explains a lot. For example, it is now clear why Star Fleet is so completely dominated by humans. I don't think we have ever seen a nonhuman Star Fleet admiral, and there are very few nonhumans serving even as lower-ranking officers. Except for a few collaborators like Mr. Spock (who is criticized by his fellow Vulcans for accepting too many "illogical" human ways), the nonhumans can't be trusted to force their own people to pay tribute. It also explains why the human-dominated Star Fleet military force seems to have near-total control over Federation foreign policy (e.g. - Star Fleet officers such as Capt. Picard make major policy decisions without any significant civilian oversight).

Furthermore, in one of Star Trek movies, a Klingon spokesman denounces the Federation as a "homo sapiens-only club." Taken literally, this is too obviously false to be effective propaganda; the Federation surely does have nonhuman members. But this propaganda line makes sense if it actually refers to the fact that Federation and Star Fleet are tools for expropriating wealth from nonhuman planets and transferring it to Earth.

Why don't we ever see Captain Kirk or Capt. Picard on tribute collection runs? Because the Enterprise is one of Star Fleet's most advanced warships, and is therefore reserved for more difficult missions, such as going "where no man has gone before" in search of new wealthy star systems to occupy and tax. Note the term "no man," which further underscores human control of Star Fleet.

How does the Prime Directive fit into this? On the surface, it seems incompatible with an imperialistic Federation. But remember that the Prime Directive only applies to planets which are at a much lower level of technological development than the Federation itself. That is, only to planets that are not wealthy enough to be worth the cost of occupying and taxing. Star Fleet Command wants to prevent glory-seeking captains like Kirk from taking over underdeveloped worlds that are likely to drain more revenue than they bring in. The Prime Directive serves this goal, while also cloaking Federation imperialism in a veneer of righteousness that has been all too successful in fooling generations of TV viewers.

I highly doubt that this is the interpretation of Star Trek that Gene Roddenberry intended. However, it does account for the available evidence, doesn't it?

If you are intersted in learning more about Star Trek, try reading Star Trek Organizations: Star Trek Governments, Starfleet, United Federation of Planets, Maquis, Dominion, Kzinti Hegemony, Section 31 or Four visions of the century ahead: will it be Star Trek, Ecotopia, Big Government, or Mad Max?(technological optimism and skepticism): An article from: The Futurist or Political Science Fiction.

Keith Hart writing in Memory Bank:

When I graduated to the field of development studies, the picture of West Africa’s cities was just as distorted as one you might get from boorowing a Manchester school perspective. Here the emphasis of the economists was on the new states’ ability to pursue a neo-Keynesian development program. How could ‘we’ (the politicians, bureaucrats and their academic advisers) provide the jobs and other needs of the hordes flocking into the cities at the time? It was assumed that such provision had to come through the bureaucracy and conform to state-made laws. My paper on ‘informal income opportunities and urban employment’ pointed to the wide range of economic activities that were invisible to bureacracy. But even I saw them through a statist lens (“seeing like a state”), hence the term ‘informal’, not regulated by the bureaucracy. At that time I assumed that the bulk of economic progress must come though public and private sector enterprise of a corporate type.
The informal economy was never adequately described or defined, but these days it is commonplace to read assertions that African economies are 70-90% ‘informal’. Certainly the deregulation undertaken over the last three decades of neoliberal economic policies have led to a radical informalization of the world economy, not least in Africa. But to label these activities ‘informal’ is to avoid identifying what they are positively for or how they are organized, by which social principles.
I would say that the last half-century has seen a massive transfer of population to the cities, where most people have been left to generate their own forms of commerce. The informal economy in this sense has been a holding operation allowing many people to survive in the city and some to flourish. Whatever is coming up next will draw to some extent on this sprawling self-organized economic activity. Our task is to find out more about the promising sectors spawned by such a development.

More here

In BeyondBrics

The sharp rebound in emerging economies since the global financial crisis owes much to the recovery in international capital flows. What is less obvious, however, is that a big chunk of new investment is coming from the emerging world itself.

According to a recent report:

FDI outflows from developing countries rose to an estimated $195bn – or 1.1 per cent of their gross domestic product – in 2010. This is only a fraction below the previous record of $207bn in 2008, which they are predicted to smash over the next two years , soaring to $250bn in 2011 and $275bn in 2012.

More here

In Memory Bank:

...Africa’s new leaders thought they were generating modern economies, with ambitions for public expenditure to match, but in reality they were erecting fragile states whose economic base was the same backward agriculture as before. As Frantz Fanon predicted, this weakness inexorably led them to exchange the democratic legitimacy of the independence struggle for dependence on foreign powers. These ruling elites first relied on revenues from agricultural exports, then on loans contracted under dubious circumstances, finally on the financial monopoly that came from being licensed to supervise their country’s relations with global capitalism. But this bonanza was switched off in the 1980s, when foreign capital felt that it could dispense with the mediation of local state powers and concentrated on collecting debts from them. Many governments were made bankrupt and some simply collapsed into civil war.

More here

In the Economist:

MUCH has been written about the rise of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the shift in economic power eastward as Asia outruns the rest of the world. But the surprising success story of the past decade lies elsewhere. An analysis by The Economist finds that over the ten years to 2010, no fewer than six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa...[continue reading]

Sanou Mbaye writing in Project Syndicate:

He speaks on the need to liberalize the remittance channels:

The effects of banks’ hijacking of national payment systems to service only the modern economy are compounded by the exclusive agreements that banks and money-transfer companies such as Western Union have signed with most African countries. These agreements lock out non-banking entities from the highly lucrative market for migrant remittances from the African diaspora, which remain a key engine of growth

Furthermore on how key it is to nourish the informal economies:

African states must now recognize that modernizing their informal sectors by integrating them into the modern economy can be a major development tool. Yet only a few countries have started moving in that direction. Nigeria has refrained from signing any exclusive agreements with Western Union and others, and its newly consolidated banking industry is making significant inroads across the region...

Arguing for the broader inclusion of more financial actors in national payment systems

Giving micro-finance institutions access to national and regional payments systems and electronic retail facilities will go a long way toward meeting the requirements of the retail and business sector in terms of banking facilities. It will also help facilitate access by the poorest to financial services, thus helping to reduce the high proportion of the un-banked population.

All of this will invariably spur development and integration of national financial systems and intra-regional trade. This will be a welcome development, because a large proportion of intra-regional trade is carried out by informal operators and small and medium enterprises that do not have access to the banking system. Moreover, economic integration and increased intra-regional trade are the best entry point into global markets for all countries.

More here

Bombastic Element covers MIT student presentations on African Architecture:

MIT student, Nancy Demerdash's "Before the scramble for Africa: tracing African architecture through trade" goes back to 1200 to understand the historical development of various architectural forms as a function of natural resources in the complex changing societies and trading economies that depended on these resources. Also, how different architectural typologies evolved and were impacted by environmental and climatic changes.

More here

Richard Florida writing in The Atlantic:

Corrupt nations have more traditional economic structures, based on resource extraction or manufacturing; they have not yet made the transition to highly skilled knowledge economies. Corrupt nations are more likely to be intolerant; their citizens not only must endure lower material living standards but lower levels of happiness and life satisfaction.
If we really want to combat corruption we must deal with the broader and much harder challenges of economic development. When less developed nations begin to leverage their knowledge, skills, and human capital to raise their levels of economic output, then the battle is already won.

More Here

Global Warming Believers from around the world met for another conference designed to close ranks, discourage critical thinking, improve groupthink, and provide more evidence to one another backing up their already reached assumptions and theories. These 'scientists' are a real threat to your life, liberty, and property, but don't take my word for it.

Via memeorandum comes this story from the Telegraph called Cancun climate change summit: scientists call for rationing in developed world. Here are some interesting parts...

...In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years...


....Prof Anderson admitted it “would not be easy” to persuade people to reduce their consumption of goods. He said politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the last “time of crisis” in the 1930s and 40s.

This guy looks back for inspiration on how to solve what he sees as a crisis to the command and control economies of World War Two, believing that people need to be persuaded by governmental power to adopt living standards below what they can achieve just so that some people can feel like they control the temperature of the entire globe. This professor of course would be directing these standards from his plush university, controlling who gets how much power in society, while armed men in gray uniforms controlled by him roam the streets beating down freedom-loving patriots who turn on lights to read at night, drive safe cars, operate dishwashers, and fly around to visit family and friends.

It is my hope that the United States is only minimally supporting a conference like this, and that our elected leaders stay away from this situation because, while the goal of protecting the environmental is moral and the desire to create a better society for our future is a good one, the methods that they advocate to achieve these goals and desires runs counter to what America has shown to be successful. Only by supporting and celebrating life, liberty, and property protection can any real and lasting gains be made in making our future and environment a brighter and healthier one.

For those interested in learning more, check out Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam or The Great Global Warming Swindle (DVD).

Paul Collier in Foreign Policy writes:

Sure, some of Asia's "benign" autocrats have turned their ambitions to building strong national economies. But not in Africa and many of the other countries that I call the bottom billion -- quite a number of which crowd the upper reaches of the Failed States Index. There, the most common form of autocracy is anything but benign. These leaders not only neglect to build the economy, they actively avoid doing so.

He contends that:

Bad guys matter, and when they rule, they make weak states weaker. And the countless anecdotes are backed up by numbers: In a celebrated study, economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken looked at whether the death of a country's leader altered economic growth. It did, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Recently, an Oxford colleague, Anke Hoeffler, and I sifted through their results again, distinguishing this time between democrats and autocrats. We found that in democracies, changing the leader does not change growth -- all leaders are disciplined to perform tolerably. But in autocracies, the growth rates are as unpredictably varied as the leaders' personalities. Here lies the difference between good leaders and great ones: Good leaders put right the policy catastrophes of bad leaders; great leaders, like the men who shaped the U.S. Constitution, build the democratic checks and balances that make good leaders redundant.

More here