As I reflect upon a long life, one disturbing trend increasingly stands out: Americans seem to work less than they used to. People want time off these days for “parental leave,” or don’t want to have to leave their home…
The news from Moscow is that Russia is likely to abandon the 13 percent flat-rate income tax enacted in 2000, not long after a group of visiting conservative/libertarian American economists, including me, advised newly installed President Vladimir Putin to dramatically…
More than 225 years ago, prominent English scholar and political economist Thomas Malthus made one of history’s most spectacularly wrong predictions: continuous population growth arising from human passions will imperil economic growth and lead to people living on a bare…
These are not the greatest times for university faculty and nonacademic staff. Falling enrollments have squeezed budgets at many schools, leading to small or even non-existent salary increases during a period of enhanced inflation. The salary surveys of the American…
The recent lamentable travails afflicting American academia — falling public support, suppression of free expression, declining integrity of research as evidenced by seemingly widespread plagiarism — mask a longer-term but I think serious problem: American colleges and universities are disseminating…
As I recounted recently in the Wall Street Journal, 20 years ago Milton Friedman wrote me to say, after doing a complete analysis, he believed we should be taxing our universities rather than subsidizing them. The economics involved are pretty…
The first 24 years of the 21st century have been the era of Woke Supremacy in our institutions of higher learning. Universities have downplayed traditional academic standards and expectations while becoming centers for promoting ideologies centered around combatting perceived injustices,…
The Founding Father of this fount of worldly wisdom, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., has written a delightful new memoir (How Do We Get Out of Here?: Half a Century of Laughter and Mayhem at The American Spectator―From Bobby Kennedy to…
College enrollments in the humanities have declined, even more than the general fall in the numbers attending college. West Virginia University recently laid off numerous faculty in the humanities, especially foreign languages, and other schools have done so on a…
Writing in this space a few weeks ago, I argued that in several ways the United States is exhibiting characteristics remarkably similar to that of the Roman Empire during its decline in the Christian Era. Like second century Rome, we…