1. Chart of the Day (above). This is an update of a chart I’ve featured before on CD, showing the phenomenal rise in the price of college textbooks over time – up almost 1,000% since 1978 – compared to an overall increase in consumer prices of only 266%, an increase in new home prices of 476% and 616% for medical services. As I wrote last summer, we’re now officially in the “era of the $400 college textbook,” which I think is unsustainable now that we’re also in an era of free and low-cost educational online resources, see next item.
2.University of Minnesota takes the lead in promoting free college textbooks, — that’s the headline of a Twin Cities Star Tribune article today, here’s a slice:
Three years ago, Professor David Ernst (Chief Information Officer in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota), created the Open Textbook Library at the University of Minnesota to serve as a national resource for the burgeoning roster of online texts. Now it has 184 titles on its virtual shelf.
With that amount of competition, I predict that the “era of the $400 college textbook” is doomed….
3. Technology to the Rescue for Big Taxi? Taxi groups unite to fight Uber with a $250 million start-up called Karhoo, according to an article in the Financial Times. Karhoo will launch its taxi app in January next year in NYC, London and Singapore with the support of several high-profile partnerships and backers. Good luck, but I think it’s too late to rescue Big Taxi….
4. Gett vs. Uber: Meet Gett, the app that’s trying to kill Uber in NYC with $10 flat fee rides and no surge pricing. Business Insider does a comparison test in Manhattan, and guess which ride-sharing service wins?
5. Quotation of the Day, from Thomas Sowell on black self-reliance, progress and achievement:
As far as liberal Democrats are concerned, black self-reliance would be almost as bad as blacks becoming Republicans. All black progress in the past must be depicted as the result of liberal government programs and all hope of future progress must be depicted as dependent on the same liberalism.
What blacks have achieved for themselves, without the help of liberals, is of no interest to liberals. Achievement is not what liberalism is about. Victimhood and dependency are.
6. Chart of the Day II (above). On the End of the American Dream blog, Mike Snyder recently wrote a post in the spirit of the blog’s name titled “Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year,” here’s an excerpt:
We just got more evidence that the middle class in America is dying. According to brand new numbers that were just released by the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers in the United States make less than $30,000 a year. Let that number sink in for a moment. You can’t support a middle class family in America today on just $2,500 a month – especially after taxes are taken out. And yet more than half of all workers in this country make less than that each month. In order to have a thriving middle class, you have got to have an economy that produces lots of middle class jobs, and that simply is not happening in America today.
Looking at household income instead of average wages, the chart above paints a much different picture of an America with rising incomes for many American households and lots of upward income mobility, using recently updated Census Bureau data through 2014 available here. In 1967, nearly six of every ten US households earned $50,000 per year or less (in 2014 dollars), about one in three earned $50,000 to $100,000 per year and only about one in eight households earned $100,000 per yer or more. By last year, fewer than half of US households earned less than $50,000 per year, 28.5% earned $50,000 to $100,000, and most remarkably about one in four American households now earn $100,000 or more. Or stated differently, the share of American households earning $100,000 or more per year increased more than three-fold from 8.1% in 1967 to 24.7% in 2014. If the 8.1% percentage in 1967 hadn’t increased over time, there would only be about 10 million households today earning $100,000 or more, instead of the actual number of nearly 31 million households in that income category. Thanks to America’s economic dynamism and upward mobility, there are more than 20 million American households earning more than $100,000 annually compared to a static economy with limited opportunities for upward mobility and rising incomes that would have been reflected in maintaining the 8.1% share of high-income households that prevailed in 1967. Carpe America.
7. We Will Know Soon Exactly Where Republicans Stand on Crony Crapitalism, based on how they voted today on a motion to revive the apotheosis of crony crapitalism known as the Ex-Im Bank, according to Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy.
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8. Venn Diagram of the Day (above), inspired by this story “EEOC wins discrimination case for Muslims fired for not delivering beer.”
9. Blame the Government, Not the Free Market, for High Drug Prices: a) Government protectionism, not the free market, caused an insane increase in the price of this HIV drug and b) The free market didn’t cause that HIV drug price to spike—but it did offer a $1 alternative. From the first article, about the FDA drug approval process:
This system is quite literally, the opposite of a free market. A government agency is granting exclusivity to politically favored companies, and through this monopoly enacted by force of law, banning the type of market that would yield lower-priced alternatives.
So the next time you hear capitalism being blamed for this type of scenario, make sure to politely remind the offender that corporations are empowered to behave this way precisely because the government bans their would-be competitors from entering the market in the first place.
10. Video of the Day (below), a new Factual Feminist video from AEI’s Christina Sommers titled “Campus sexual assault: Bad statistics don’t help victims.”
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1ibr8cf
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