Art

Immigrant culture, race, and education

More data showing that culture, not race, is crucial to educational performance: “Africans outperform African-Americans in Seattle schools: Even the children of destitute Somali refugees do better.” From the Seattle Times report: “African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black students who speak another language at home

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Subprime mortgage crisis — history flowchart

Here is a simplified flowchart, developed for my business ethics courses, reflecting my understanding of subprime mortgages’ contribution to the crisis. Let me emphasize that this is only about the subprime contribution of the overall crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enabled much spillover into non-subprime mortgage sectors, government-set capital requirements and other regulations enabled

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Seminar: Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy

One of my talks at Francisco Marroquín University was on making sense of our mixed economy–an unwieldy combination of market and socialist elements. The 28-minute talk integrates themes from my intellectual heroes–Smith, Mill, Mises, Hayek, Rand, Popper, Friedman, Buchanan, and Tullock–and connects market economics, politics, ethics, history, and public choice to explaining our semi-coherent mixed

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My interview for ReelNews on art and free markets

I was interviewed recently by Prodos Marinakis, Secretary of the Australian Council of Film Societies, on the theme “Two Views on Cinema & Capitalism.” From the interview’s description: “The highly articulate pioneers and founders of the Film Society Movement of Australia, like Ken Coldicutt of Melbourne and Beatrice Tildesley of Sydney, were critical of Capitalism

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Michael Strong on Socratic teaching

I like this paragraph from Michael Strong’s The Habit of Thought: “The effort of Socratic Practice is to develop students’ own standard of intellectual judgment by means of placing the onus of responsibility for understanding entirely on them and providing them with the tools and experiences necessary to develop their intellectual judgment. ‘Does it make

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Kindle edition of Explaining Postmodernism, Expanded Edition, now available

The Kindle version of the new, Expanded Edition of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault is now available. The hardcover will be out next month. The expanded edition also includes my Free Speech and Postmodernism and From Modern to Postmodern Art: Why Art Became Ugly essay. Images of the art works

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