Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
Who is John Galt? – Atlas Shrugged’s relevance today
Economist reports that there is a big spike in the sales of Atlas Shrugged – the monumental philosophical tome of Ayn Rand – since the start of the credit crisis. They even plotted the book sales against the economic events, and seems every time the government brings some major policy attempting to “solve” the crisis, the sale of the book goes up. Nothing incites as much love and hate as this book. And the book’s tagline – Who is John Galt is forever etched in the popular culture.
I have read the book atleast 5 times and consider it to be one among the greatest literary works ever written and thought I will share some opinion on this. From where I grew up, Atlas shrugged is not a political manifesto, but a kind of rite of passage from teenager into an adult. Almost every major college in India has fan clubs for this book, and since the reading of it was so normal (you don’t need to be a libertarian or atheist or anarchist anything) and so I didn’t go through the stereotyping process that goes on in America.
Where do US Universities spend their money?
Have you ever wondered where do the money from your tuition go? How do the universities spend their money? Why does the cost of tuition grow 2X more than the inflation rate? Why are the US universities extremely inefficient and uneconomical? I didn’t find any other study and workable stats on university spending in the net, so I just made a small exploratory study on how universities spend money.
Organization of this essay:
Part 1 concerns endowments, Part 2 contains analysis on a private University (Harvard) and Part 3 contains analysis on a public university (UW) and Part 4 is the initial conclusion. If there is enough audience interest, I will go deeper into this problem in further posts.
I started from this chart from my earlier post and started digging where the universities spend their money in.
H1b and Innovation
Here is an interesting paper on H1b and the contribution to innovation.
http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-005.pdf
It’s a pretty long paper and some parts of it are too technical. So, I have reorganized into two main themes and summarized the contents below.
Short story: Max Claus goes to New York
I have always wanted to do fiction, but never got around to complete my dreams. Except for a small science fiction that wrote in the college, I have never finished any of my fiction works. I have three novels in various stages but got into writers block every time. This time, I converted an unpublished novel into a short story and I was particular to release it today. Since it was converted in a hurry, I didnt do a lot of proofreading. If you like or hate the story, do send me a mail.
Book Review: 3 billion Capitalists
I was reading through Clyde Prestowitz’s “Three Billion New Capitalists – the Great shift of wealth and power to the east” that came in 2005. Like many of the books of the same era including the “World is Flat” it describes opportunities and challenges that is unfolding for America given the revolutionary changes that is occurring in India,
Paul Erdman’s – The Panic of 89
Last week I was reading through Paul Erdman’s “The panic of 89” a novel about a fictional systemic financial crash in 1988. Though the book is more than 20 years old, it is amazingly close to the current situation. The setting is an America with a Republican president who in his 8 years rule has loaded the country with a lot of debt and the international community has lost faith and dollar is having massive depreciation, while the economy is flirting with recession.
