You can keep making assertions based on a system I think is a product of a failed left-wing Priesthood. Do American Universities attract smart people? Yeah. So did the SS. Neither one of them is an educational system. Especially the Ivy Leagues.
Science and math is better, but pretty much everything in America is tainted by this god awful Social Democratic Enlightenment culture.
Caley McKibbin, really? I couldn’t find it, though.
Krazy Kaju, much of New Delhi’s universities are importers of ideas exported from Cambridge and other British universities. Amarta Sen, a student of Joan Robinson, accepted without question that it’s a good thing if a public sector company loses money, because profits are evil. This was recounted sarcastically by Subramanian Swamy, a fellow colleague at Delhi School of Economics. Swamy himself was a student of Paul Samuelson and his formed Janata Party contains a pretty much Samuelsonian plan for reform. So no, in the local sense, local universities are not better. They are really second-hand dealers in western ideas.
However, two things I like about fellow New Delhi-ites (actually, I am in a Delhi suburb called Gurgaon) - they are extremely apolitical, and they will be pleasantly surprised when they hear about new ideas. It’s not that northern Indians are hardcore and angry believers in social democratic orthodoxy. It’s just that many of us are raised knowing one perspective and are shocked to know there are others. And then we gladly listen. Political passions and anger are very little among Indians, except among a very tiny group of Jawaharlal Nehru University Professors.
South Asian people, being novices to this whole industrial world with angry partisan politics and competing ideologies, are like innocent lamb thrust into a butcher’s game. They are quite innocent in accepting radical foreign ideas without knowing how dangerous they are, and quite innocent and unassuming in also hearing entirely contradictory ideas. Then they say, “I see” and go back to enjoying kebabs.
qft
“Asian cultures are weird as hell”
It’s one thing to say that a culture is less conducive to economic or scientific achievement. But the very word “weird” is so completely and obviously based on the speaker’s given cultural norms, that your statement is basically circular.
“As for vastly more civilized, I don’t know. The west is civilized, and it has been for a while.”
You’ve made absolutely no argument here. The question is whether it is more or less civilized.
Economics is not useless as long as you take the right classes.
Economics in America is worse than useless unless you happen to be part of the handful of people who have been innoculated by prior extensive experience with Clark-Wicksteedian or Austrian economics.
The latter isn’t as applicable but still not that bad. Could be worse.
Could be worse? Is this really the kind of defense you’re marshalling for your contention that American professors and universities are of the highest quality in most disciplines?
It is also true that the top professors go to the top universities, which happen to be mostly in the west.
Why do you keep resorting to a circularity that has already been laid bare?
Better version of addressing this circularity.
In Poland, they used to make American-style westerns. Some Polish directors worked really hard at refining the Polish western and were probably good craftsmen with cinema. The question is, did anybody want Polish westerns?
Similarly, Black, Scholes, and Merton were very good at mathematical models. The question is, do you want to buy those models when they led to the bust of Long Term Capital Management? There is no point in finding the best financial market algorithms when such algorithms are the last thing you would want in the first place, be them the best or the worst.
As someone who has actually attended multiple educational institutions in both the West and in China, I can say with relative certainty that generally speaking, the gap between the two is less than generally imagined, or in some cases, nonexistent.
Does China have biases? Of course; substantial criticism of Mao or serious historical revisionism in general will never occur…but then, neither will criticism of FDR or Lincoln in the U.S.
Perhaps the only difference I can see in favour of the West is that speaking out against ‘common knowledge’ will generally only get you ridiculed in America, while doing so in China (assuming you touch on the wrong topic) can result in more serious measures taken by authorities.
In general, the Chinese system of education is awful, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But the question is, is the Western system all that great?
The US has tariff barriers that have an average rate of ~5 percent; and, if you count non-trade barriers that tariff rate increases to 21.5 percent.
It’s from some Mises book where he complains about not being able to get a job in the U.S. due to the schools being dens of communists.
Uhmm, I’m engaging in the kind of conversation that normally takes place on this forum and others? Are you looking to micromanage the content of every post now?
So there’s one Austrian economist at Beijing U? What about the others? What about the economists at other universities in China and the third world? Just off the top of my head, in the US we have GMU, Hillsdale, Grove City College, Loyola New Orleans, Loyola Maryland, and Auburn University as colleges/universities with a large percentage of free market economists. Jeffrey Miron is the Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard, and he’s pretty libertarian. The University of Chicago is pretty libertarian too, at least in the neoclassical way. Most other “freshwater” schools are probably similar.
The way you make it seem, the intellectual world in the third world is dominated by atheists, anarchists, and Austrians while in the “West” it’s dominated by socialists and despotic, altruistic Christians. You’re setting up a comical dichotomy of almost Randian proportions (“It’s all the Kantians’ fault!”).
The way I see it, Western universities are the center of intellectual and academic thought for the entire world. There’s a reason why the wealthy from third world and developing countries often send their kids to American and European universities.
Though many third world strongmen might’ve been educated in the West (btw, Prateek forgot to mention Pol Pot), it certainly doesn’t make Western institutions “the worst.” If anything, it shows how the developing/undeveloped world trails behind the thought of the West.
How is challenging your post “micromanaging”?
Do they have any illiterate students in high schools?
Of course the Soviet Union educated an enormous number of Africans between 1957 and 1991. Where are their Socialist dictators?
(BTW, Augustino Neto was educated in Lisabon, and Mikhail Saakashvili is a Colombia man.)
It’s one thing to say that a culture is less conducive to economic or scientific achievement. But the very word “weird” is so completely and obviously based on the speaker’s given cultural norms, that your statement is basically circular.
Well which culture is “superior” is really just one opinion against the other anyways.
You’ve made absolutely no argument here. The question is whether it is more or less civilized.
I said I didn’t know which one was more civilized (Even though I would most likely lean to the West). Also, did you notice that the person who made the initial assertion did not provide an argument?
Economics in America is worse than useless unless you happen to be part of the handful of people who have been innoculated by prior extensive experience with Clark-Wicksteedian or Austrian economics.
How so?
Could be worse? Is this really the kind of defense you’re marshalling for your contention that American professors and universities are of the highest quality in most disciplines?
There is really no need to “marshal a defense” in the face of an argument that consists of “Business Uselss. Economics Useless. Philosophy Useless. ect” What I said with regards to business administration was true. It is a decent major. To say that it is useless means you are equating it with something like womens studies, and this is an unfair comparison.
Why do you keep resorting to a circularity that has already been laid bare?
I was restating my assertion without making an argument. Go ahead and search for the top schools for any program, or even search for a list of the top countries for university study. You will find that the West is superior. You can also look at the resume of the professors at the top universities.
Remember that no argument has been made for the claim that the professors at the top universities are simply people who are best at spreading left wing talking points. Also recall that that was the initial assertion.
If “Eastern universities” are more “free market” than Western universities (which is already arguable), it’s not because Eastern people are “culturally superior”, but because they are reacting to the fact that their countries have been heavily regulated, oftentimes socialized, third world countries. They are reacting to different economic events. The West came out of a time of “plenty”, so to speak, and so could afford itself the mistake of socializing, and that’s what we’re seeing today.
You can’t “challenge” a question.
That’s interesting. From my personal experience (perhaps others can comment), “Western” economics professors aren’t particularly ideological. Of course, everyone has their own ideological beliefs, but econ profs are generally willing to listen to and accept other arguments.
There we have it. A verdict on how “Eastern” schools compare to “Western” ones from someone who has actually attended an “Eastern” school.
I am an economics student at what is considered to be “the best” university in Bulgaria. As you know the State here used to be communistic, which changed since 1991. The only change the university undergone then was its name. Before it was called “Karl Marx”, now it is not. But the professors and their assistants are all marxists of some sort. They are clueless State favourists who do not know economics and occupy their time brainwashing students and trying to come up with the next “workable” socialist-based pension, health-care or other system. What do you think about these quotes:
“We need the government to plan our transition from centralised economy to market economy.”
“Taxes are not involuntary, they are obligatory.” (neither the first part is true, nor the second)
So what does that mean, is Bulgaria Western or Oriental?
I am not sure what exactly you mean with “Western or Oriental”. The Bulgarian State is now social-democratic. It has been planning the so-called transition period for 2 decades now. How ironic, huh? To plan not to plan. Till the year 2000 approximately 90 percent of the capital stock in Bulgaria was still State owned… Economists here do not know what the price mechanism is, how it functions and what role it plays in the allocation of resources. The Acadamia here is very poor. It is like a 19th century fan base of Marx.
Edit: There is one Bulgarian economist who I respect. His name is Krassimir Petrov. I believe he got some articles for Mises.org. He frequently writes for financialsense.com.
Obviously there are senses in which you can challenge a question (challenge its perceived underlying assumptions, relevance to the subject, usefulness etc). So again, how is challenging your post “micromanaging”?