Mark Perry

Three randomly chosen districts out of tens of thousands prove little. In addition to lagging behind countries the US outspends on education, greatly increased spending has had no benefits even within its borders: Since 1970, inflation adjusted public school spending has more than doubled. Over the same period, achievement of students at the end of high school has stagnated according to the Department of Education’s own long term National Assessment of Educational Progress [I encourage you to visit the website for the illuminating graph of inflation adjusted per-pupil spending and test scores vs. time] - https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/09/education-spending-doubled-stagna…

And there are lots of people who want to work for $3.75/hour. In particular people who have no experience need to offset that fact by charging less for their labor. For them, getting the experience is much more important than getting $8.75/hour + benefits. Teenagers are the classic example of this type of worker. See http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/03/update-on-wsj-editorial-on-minimum… for some data.

From a systems point of view the changes where dramatic. "Farmers today grow five times as much corn as they did in the 1930s – on 20 percent less land. That is 13 million acres or 20,000 square miles, twice the size of Massachusetts. The yield per acre has skyrocketed from 24 bushels in 1931 to 154 now, or a six-fold gain. And the Agriculture Department expects the average yield per acre to double in the next 25 years." https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/05/corn-yields-have-increased-6x-sin… “From 1866, the first year USDA began to publish corn yield estimates, through about 1936, yields of open-pollinated corn varieties in the U.S. remained fairly stagnant and averaged about 26 bu/ac (1.6 MT/ha) throughout that 70-year period. Amazingly, the historical data indicate there was no appreciable change in productivity during that entire time period (Fig. 1), even though farmers’ seed-saving practices represented a form of plant breeding.” https://agfax.com/2017/05/25/corn-historical-grain-yields-for-the-u-s/ PS: Of of note in 1927 there where 2 billion people worldwide and starvation was still common. Growing from 1 billion in 1804 or doubling in 123 years the difference largely came down to an increase in the amount of farmland and a slow increase in productivity.

No. Rent control does lead to shortages. I have about $6 million to invest in rental properties. San Francisco is not being considered. I'm actually liquidating all my California assets, as the INCENTIVE to operate rentals has been destroyed. Have a read of this: "Due to Rent Control, S.F. Has 31,000 Vacant Housing Units As Frustrated Landlords Give Up" The Bay Citizen -- "In San Francisco, one of the toughest places in the country to find a place to live, more than 31,000 housing units — one of every 12 — now sit vacant, according to recently released census data. That’s the highest vacancy rate in the region, and a 70 percent increase from a decade ago." The reason? The city's pro-tenant, outdated rent control laws that make it difficult to raise rents or evict a tenant. "Increasingly, small-time landlords are just giving up, like one who has left two large apartments on the second and third floors of her building vacant for more than a decade, after a series of tenant difficulties. It’s just not worth the bother, or the risk, of being legally tied to a tenant for decades. “Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.” Perversely, that is hurting the city’s renters…

The 99% are more well off today than at any other time in history. You only need to look at the costs of essentials (such as food) as well as luxuries (iPhones, kindles, big screen TVs, etc) to see how much Americans have prospered. See the article below for a quantitative analysis of what low income Americans can buy now. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/08/young-americans-luckiest-generatio… Capitalism matches products and services to consumer demand. Entrepreneurs find the gaps in current offerings or create completely new offerings that create demand. They find and execute on those ideals. Saying they don't create jobs simply isn't true. Saying they destroy jobs is not true as well. They may make industries more efficient thus lowering the costs and increasing the buying power of everyone. The US used to mostly be an agricultural workforce until the advent of farming machinery. Crop yields increased, labor costs decreases, food became drastically cheaper. People in those industries were forced to find jobs in new industries. Now manufacturing has gone overseas and now transitioning to robots following the exact same pattern as farming tech advances. That is the life cycle of capitalism. As the markets become more and more efficient and technology enables more to get done with less than income will naturally be concentrated in smaller pools. Final note: I am in favor of progressive tax rate structure and a drastically simpler tax code.

Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools. I'm aware of the documentary, and as usual, it completely misses the point. I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of America's public and private schools (both the best and the worst on both sides). For the past several years I've had daily exposure to pretty much all angles of this issue. I suspect you've simply watched a 45 minute Youtube video and liked how microfoundations sounded when it was taught to you in school. I could write for hours on the horrors of private school vouchers alone (did you know when they tried it in Arizona, 3/4ths of the money ended up going to students who were already in private schools? [1]). And lets not even get into the fact that private schools actually don't perform that much better than public schools [2] when you account for the diversity in public schools. Considering that private schools mostly teach to a homogeneous student body, they should be blowing the public schools out of the water. They're actually not that much cheaper either, when you consider that private schools don't need to spend nearly as much money on special education programs and psychological therapy [3]. If I was a school admin I could post the most impressive numbers in the country if I'm allowed to skim from the cream of the crop, but public schools by law are not allowed to do so. However, I suspect at this point…

> Edit: To provide some clarity on the comments below highlighting that housing costs are included in CPI. Each country calculates inflation statistics to various methodologies. CPI in the US includes a rent equivalent value which is independent of the actual cost of purchasing a home. Real monthly mortgage payments have actually been going down relative to inflation: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/12/payments-for-new-house-have-never-…

Harvard professor fired over factually correct claim about IQ variance: https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/07/larry-summers-vindicated-by-new-s… Nobel winning co-discoverer of DNA stripped of honors and removed from function over claim that the lower African IQ is genetic in origin: https://nypost.com/2019/01/14/dna-pioneer-james-watson-stripped-of-hon… Very liberal professor pressured to resign over claim that whites should not be encouraged to stay home from campus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein Published paper on IQ variance suppressed: https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-p… For every academic that speaks up, many others see what happens to them, and decide to keep quiet.

You may be confusing where profits can be made and who makes them vs. where capital is deployed. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/10/trade-deficit-capital-inflow-bop-0… http://topforeignstocks.com/2009/06/13/the-top-net-capital-importers-a… It has to do with the balance of payments. US entities do invest and make profits overseas. However, investments into the US (including loans to the US Treasury, for example) happen in larger amounts than investments from the US into other countries. Regardless of where profits are made or who made them, people prefer to put their money in the US.

Historically, the price of food was much higher than it is now. Thank our farmers for operating more efficient year after year. https://mjperry.blogspot.nl/2010/07/as-share-of-income-americans-have.…

It would look less shocking once one understand US poorest 5% are equal to India's richest 5% http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/01/americas-poor-indias-richest.html

> Who makes high school students' schedules? Parents and teachers, at least in the US. As you were blasting "anecdotes", please note that this isn't even anecdote, just blind assertion, so: "Citation needed". In my experience, high school students largely decide their own schedules according to their interests and abilities. Ahh, speaking of interests, and facts/data: https://scientificfemanomaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/femalestem.pn… Interest by high school students in STEM fields. Girls 15% and falling, boys 45% and rising. More facts/data: http://mjperry.blogspot.de/2009/08/2009-math-sat-scores-are-in-gender-… Gender gap in SAT scores persists. Yes, let's look at the facts!

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-26/lowes-most-powerful-sa… M: https://operationsroom.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/forecasting-store-traf… http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/08/markets-in-everything-parking-lot.…

Many SF landlords have voluntarily removing units unit from the market by simply not rerenting after they become vacant because of all the hassles of rent control. This is one of several way that rent control reduces the number of units available for occupancy, known as "supply". Understand? I'd not, I suggest reading any basic economics text. Rent control in standard economic theory http://homepages.wmich.edu/~u5nwaogu/Overhead/Chapter%206%20-%20Supply… Rent control in practice in SF http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/king-of-my-castle-yeah-right… http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/05/because-of-rent-control-sf-has-310…

The government-backed sugar cartel in the US simply drove up the cost of (cane and beet) sugar, resulting in a comparative cost advantage for HFCS. I am surprised at how many people think HFCS is a corporate conspiracy, and are wholly ignorant of the government's role in the matter. Here's a similar article with an interesting graph: http://mjperry.blogspot.ca/2011/01/big-sugar-cartel-cost-consumers-45b…

Is that why the US has four times as many MRI machines per person? http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/04/02/index.h… And has no queues for MRI scans, where France has a 32-day mean waiting period? http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/09/canadian-medicine-is-sick.html http://sante.lefigaro.fr/actualite/2011/05/10/10863-irm-delais-dattent…

Maybe I'm the ignorant one but are you conflating gas from oil with natural gas, which actually has been driven to record low prices[1], so much so that utilities have switched from coal to natural gas at such a fast pace that it reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by a considerable amount in 2012[2]? "Prices as high as ever and destroy the environment as a bonus" may be doubly wrong. [1]http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/12/abundant-natural-gas-leads-to-reco… [2]http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/us-emissions-idUSBRE8710CB20…

Hearing all that, one could imagine that in countries like France, with >30% corporate tax and high employment cost, no business can take place at all, and it must have fallen in a deep economic depression a long time ago. That is generally the case. Unemployment rates in the 8-12 neighborhood are considered a disaster in the US. In France they are normal. France is as poor as Arkansas and Idaho, two of the poorest US states. If the US in general fell to this level, we'd definitely be calling it a deep depression. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/01/paul-krugman-extols-europes-econom… The only reason France isn't described as being in a recession is because it's always been this way, so they are used to it.

Link to original source - http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2012/09/freefall-adjusted-for-inflation-pr…

Currently, there are substantially more females than males (60/40) among people receiving college degrees: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/06/women-dominate-higher-education-at… Education is the widely recognized source of power. Should we strive for 50/50 and if so, how should we achieve it?

It is the case. Natural gas spot prices are at a low. http://mjperry.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/natural-gas-prices-fall-below-2… As fracking takes off globally they'll probably decline even further. Cars can run on natural gas. Many, perhaps even the majority of taxis do in Australia. When people get self-driving cars whatever is most economic, natural gas, petroleum or electric power will be used.

Nope: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/05/2009-most-energy-efficient-economy… The amount of energy needed to produce $1 of output keeps falling.

“Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” -Milton Friedman I just googled "Fixed pie fallacy" - I was assuming (probably wrongly) that most people were familiar with it. I'm not even certain Friedman was the first to identify it. The first thing I come up with on Google is [1]. It's a decent overview. [1] http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2006/12/fixed-pie-fallacy.html

Note that this has been a "mancession". See http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/06/happy-fathers-day-its-still-mances… and the update http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/male-fe… .

If Sweden would have been a US state, it would have been the poorest of them all. At least that was true a few years ago. EDIT: I only had links in Swedish to sources, but here's one in English: http://www.shsweb.fi/forum/1/28783/28785/ Another: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/11/sweden-mississippi-if-sweden-joine… But do note that Sweden has seen a very strong growth the last year while the US has slowed somewhat. EDIT 2: for those downvoting, see my response below.

Sort of like: 1979 "Gold Always Goes Up" http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/09/chart-of-day-inflation-adjusted-go…

eh, I think more of those jobs than you think have been automated away. Manufacturing technology (and thus manufacturing output per worker[1]) is growing by leaps and bounds. [1]http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/08/manufacturing-output-per-worker-hi…

This link says 1 inch = $30000. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/02/height-matters-income-vs-height-tr…

Private healthcare FTW. You have a better chance of surviving cancer in the US than in Denmark. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-survival-rates.html US healthcare is not a pure market based system, though. The regulations make it very expensive. - an expat Dane

Their higher cost basis is their own fault. Especially with asinine programs like this: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/11/jobs-bank-cost-big-three-15-billio… So people will be coaxed in to buying empirically inferior and more expensive cars? Buying American for the sake of buying American is retarded. The engineering debate can't really be proven one way or the other, but the ratings from places like Car & Driver, Consumer Reports, etc can (even if American cars have improved in recent years).