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Open Online Courses Are No Substitutes for Classroom Learning
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2012 CommentJoshua Kim is the Director of Learning and Technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science program at Dartmouth College.
Excitement about the potential for open online courses to disrupt the higher education status quo is coming from all sides of the ideological spectrum. The successful Stanford open artificial intelligence course, with 150,000 "students," and the subsequent $60 million Harvard/MIT edX announcement (not to mention the for-profit Coursera and Udacity spinoffs) are driving great expectations that higher education will finally mirror other information industries in leveraging the Internet to scale. The latest example of this enthusiasm comes from two distinguished educators affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford: John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe.
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Why Nations Succeed
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2012 CommentMr. Hahn is director of economics at the Smith School, University of Oxford and chief economist at the Legatum Institute. Mr. Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute and the economics editor of the Legatum Institute's Democracy Lab. They are co-founders of Regulation2point0.org, a web portal on regulatory policy.
What does it really take to succeed in economic development? Try unfettered trade and a market environment that stabilizes prices, keeps regulation to a minimum, and encourages free enterprise. That, anyway, is the conventional view that emerged after a half century of botched efforts at top-down planning in Africa and Latin America.
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Economists Agree: Tax Cuts Cost Revenue
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2012 CommentChad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
There's an old joke that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they wouldn't reach a conclusion. Well, not quite. A panel of prominent economists recently came to a decisive conclusion: Despite a widely held notion to the contrary in powerful circles, tax cuts cost revenue.
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Supreme Court Healthcare Ruling Dooms Small Businesses
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2012 CommentJohn Allison is the retired chairman and CEO of BB&T, a Distinguished Professor of Practice at the Wake Forest University School of Business and a Job Creators Alliance member.
Small business owners and working families were not served well by yesterday's Supreme Court decision to uphold President Obama's Affordable Care Act as constitutional. Not only is the need for real reform of America's unwieldy healthcare system more urgent than ever, but also there are now far more concerns about the prospect for economic growth. By upholding the mandate as a tax, the court and this administration have ensured that taxes will go up for middle-class working families and small businesses everywhere—when they can least afford it.
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Carterfone Case Showed How Regulations Promote Competition
Tweet Share on Facebook June 28, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
This week marks the 44th anniversary of the Federal Communications Commission's ruling in the Carterfone case. While few remember the device, no one in America is unaffected by the Carterfone decision, which blew the doors off the tightly-controlled telecommunications industry. Without the FCC's courage, we wouldn't enjoy the vibrant, open, ever-changing Internet that we have today.
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Bank Bailouts Are Here to Stay
Tweet Share on Facebook June 26, 2012 CommentGarett Jones is BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. He is the author of Speed Bankruptcy: A Firewall to Future Crises.
As European Union leaders prepare for this week's summit to determine the next steps for easing the continent's financial crisis, Spain formally requested aid for its struggling banks today.
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Why Obama's Deficit Spending Is Making Things Worse
Tweet Share on Facebook June 25, 2012 CommentJames Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis from Portfolio/Penguin. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesGRickards.
J. Wellington Wimpy was one of the most durable cartoon characters ever. Called Wimpy for short, he appeared in the print, animated, and film versions of Popeye for over seven decades. Wimpy was a glutton for hamburgers and was usually portrayed either eating one or preparing his next burger feast. Wimpy was also a con man and devoted enormous efforts to getting others to pay for his hamburger habit. His most famous gambit was the promise, "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."
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Entrepreneurs Must Learn By Doing
Tweet Share on Facebook June 22, 2012 CommentGregg Fairbrothers is an adjunct professor of Business Administration at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and founding director of the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network. Catalina Gorla is a Dartmouth graduate and the founder of the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network chapter in Ohio.
Surveys consistently show that as many as half to three quarters of Americans have thought at least once about starting their own businesses. Half a percent actually do it in any given year. Of those who never do, more say there were critical things they didn't know than said they were worried about the risk. What is it these people don't know?
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How to Safely Cut U.S. Defense Spending
Tweet Share on Facebook June 21, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
In our debates on military spending we miss the forest for the trees. Congress fights over upcoming cuts to the military due to budget sequestration, but these cuts would trim only 4-7 percent from defense budget. Procurement scandals continue: Last month, Americans were shocked to learn of a $17,000 oil pan made by a well-connected contractor.
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Why Obama's Economic Stimulus Worked
Tweet Share on Facebook June 20, 2012 CommentChad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Everyone knows that the stimulus law didn't work, right? Except that it did.
