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Why hai there!
Did you have a nice new year? I am back to the work grind but my body is not happy about it, what with the snooze tastic, late night filled Christmas and New Year break. Plus I am ill! Feeling so weak it's unreal, but you gotta do what you gotta do. I had a bit of a rest from blogging and am not more or less back on it!
So, Mr C has been a diamond and has been helping out with blog sale photos (I estimate 700 items or so in the final sale so it's the biggest ever), I have been working on the shop, and trying to make 2012 an organised year!
Upcoming Reviews…well boy do I have a lot of stuff to try out. Have the Revlon Lip Butters to review, some seriously pink lips from MAC, my sale make up hauls, the Tom Ford bronze/highlight compact, Mr C's Armani haulage for me and loads of Korean make up! I can't get close to a camera at the moment because Mr C has hijacked it all.
I also started a new diet – based on this book called the In a nutshell…
It's a LOW CARB diet. There are loads of smaller rules and things but the stuff I have been paying attention to are:
8 glasses of water (er, make it 4)
Lots of Green Tea
Meat (low fat) and Fish is allowed freely
Lots of vegetables are allowed freely (not starchy ones like Potatoes)
Fruit is allowed before 2pm
4 Cups of coffee is allowed
Avoid all sugar
Do 17 minutes exercise a day
I admit, I have been only doing this for 2 days and I have got the mother of all head pains. I have taken lots of paracetemol and still it hurts. I am craving sugar so much that I took extra cough syrup because it's sweet.
On the upside, to me it's still easier than Dukan because you can have fruit, and vegetables. Also you can lose up to 15lbs in thefirst 17 days.
So far, apart from the pain of detoxing, I am finding it irritatingly hard to find carb free lunches cos even salads tend to have noodles or potatoes or pasta chucked into them (I always buy my lunch – I hate tupperware, but it looks like I might have to do packed lunches) and too much meat makes me feel queasy. So extra veg it is.
I'll let you know in 17 days time how much weight I lose. Would be fab to get into shape in 2012!
Kisses x


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Sanford Health RN Inpatient - 2S Medical Specialty in Fargo, North Dakota
Job Title: RN Inpatient | 2S Medical Specialty | Fargo
City: Fargo
State: North Dakota
Department : 2S Medical/Specialty-Bdwy
Job Schedule: Part Time
Shift: Varies
Hours Per Shift: Other
The Registered Nurse is responsible for utilizing the nursing process (assessment, diagnosis, outcomes/planning, implementation & evaluation) to provide individualized nursing care to designated area. The RN collaborates with other inter-professional colleagues, including physicians, to plan, implement and evaluate care. Documents patient history, symptoms, medications and care provided in compliance with applicable standards/regulations. The RN is expected to utilize technology to enhance quality patient care, to collaborate with physicians and inter-professional team members, effectively delegate to and supervise unlicensed personnel, assume overall nursing accountability for a patient assignment and serve in leadership roles on department/organizational tasks forces and committees. The RN demonstrates competency and practices within the full scope of nursing expertise/knowledge and utilizes appropriate age and population specific standards as designated in the specific care area or unit. Must have effective communication skills to collaborate, negotiate and resolve conflicts, situations, and/or issues with peers, inter-professional colleagues, patients and families. Must have strong clinical reasoning and critical thinking skills to analyze data and appropriately respond to changing situations. The RN functions within the scopes and standards of nursing practice as outlined in the Nurse Practice Act and Administrative Rules in state of practice and licensure. The Sanford Professional Nursing Practice recognizes the Scope and Standards of Practice (2015) and the Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements (2015) as published by the American Nurses Association as the foundation of nursing care delivery and professional conduct.
This position is a day/evening rotation with every other weekend
Requires current licensure as a Registered Nurse in state(s) of practice and/or possess multi-state licensure privileges as required by position. Nurses performing nursing practice over the telephone require licensure in the states where the patients being served reside. Obtains and subsequently maintains required department specific competencies and certifications (ACLS, PALS, TNCC, NRP, etc.). For the Medical Specialty unit, BLS certification is required. Must have graduated from an accredited school or college of nursing. Bachelor's degree in nursing is preferred. Specific services/positions may have additional education, training or experience requirements. Must have attended a pre-licensure nursing program that included supervised clinical experience across the life span as part of the curriculum or have had a minimum of 400 hours of experience as a RN (or LPN) at another facility.
About Sanford Health:
At Sanford Health, we are dedicated to the work of health and healing. Every day, we show that commitment by delivering the highest quality of care to the communities we serve. We are leaders in health care and strive to provide patients across the region with convenient access to expert medical care, leading-edge technologies and world-class facilities.
In addition to strong clinical care, we are also committed to research, education and community growth. We engage in medical research to not only discover innovative ways to provide care, but also cures for common diseases. We continuously seek new ways to achieve our vision of improving the human condition here in your community, across the region and around the world.
The entire team at Sanford Health recognizes the value of healthy families and communities. We continue to gain momentum and expand our reach. Together, we can make a positive difference now, and in the future.
Sanford is an EEO/AA Employer M/F/Disability/Vet. If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request an accommodation for help with your online application, please call 1-877-243-1372 or send an email to email@example.com .
In compliance with federal law requiring employers to verify new employees' U.S. employment eligibility, Sanford participates in E-Verify. To learn more click here for English Version at https://e-verify.uscis.gov/emp/media/resourcesContents/EverifyPosterEnglish.pdf or here for Spanish Version at https://e-verify.uscis.gov/emp/media/resourcesContents/EverifyPosterSpanish.pdf .
City: Fargo
State: North Dakota
Job Function: Nursing
Job Schedule: Part Time
Shift: Varies
Req Number: req17221

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Looking for Swedish native speakers, preferably from Sweden
Budget $2-8 USD / hour
Few months ago I've posted similar project, but due to fact there's huge delay in launch, most of the bidders don't reply anymore to my messages and I was forced to create it once again.
I was hired by international company, which is going to launch huge website with tutorials and different materials from all over the world, to find native speakers for various tasks. On this website users will find articles, videos, tutorials, "life hacks" and much more content related to different aspects of our life. We'll need cost effective translators for translating articles and subtitles for videos, transcribers for preparing subtitles and voice over specialists for creating videos.
For this project I'm looking for Swedish native speakers, preferably from Sweden, but we're opened to freelancers from other countries as well. We're interested in translators, transcribers and voice talents. Please start your bid with information of your native language, nationality and country of residence, and then list services you can provide according to the scheme below:
TRANSLATION: all your language pairs that you can translate, how many words per hour and per day can You translate, rate per word.
TRANSCRIPTION: how much time do you need to transcribe an hour of a video, how many hours per day can You transcribe, rate per 1 hour recording.
VOICE OVER: how much time do you need to record an hour of an audio recording, how many hours per day can record and rate per 1 hour recording.
We're looking for mix of lowest prices and good quality, so we're open to new freelancers, even those without reviews. But please remember to bid accordingly to your experience. I've received many expensive offers from absolute beginners. Another thing is that if I'll receive proposals from translators with similar skills for particular language, I'll obviously choose the one with lowest rates per word.
Thank You!
5 freelancers are bidding on average $9/hour for this job
Hello. I'm a 19 year old student from Sweden and am currently studying rhetorics at a University in Sweden. At the moment I write articles and category descriptions for a Danish company along with a Swedish chiropracto More
Dear Sir or Madam As I'm born and raised in Sweden Swedish is my native language, I am a Swedish national and I live in Sweden. TRANSLATION: Swedish <-> English. 500 words per hour. 2500 per day. 0.12€/word. More
I'm a professional English to Swedish translator with over 8 years in the business. If you want a fast translation with a professional outcome then i'm the guy you seek.


text:
Follow RFF News on your cell phone. Text follow rff to 40404 you will receive txt messages with RFF News
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
I'm just curious, how do you play/run it? You said it is teams right? I had played elsewhere, but it was individually submitting answers for the week.Can you let me know please?
welcome Beachgal Quotem too scared to post over at Sucks though I feel the same way , they can be meanies ..as far as the CBS Fantasy I say lets try to kick butt from the get go ..and you are most certainly welcomed to join our fantasy league when it comes up :jumpy:Hey Rudy & CJ ready for another season of fighting with the CBS webmonkeys over bad scoring ??
Why write to someone who OBVIOUSLY can't read ?
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Share and Explore the world in photos. This is what Panoramio is all about.
We started 2012 with a revamp of the sharing experience in Panoramio with the new Panoramio uploader, so it was about time to change the exploring story with the new Panoramio photo explorer.
The new Panoramio photo explorer has many entry points. You can access it by clicking in a photo from a photo page, you can also access it from any photo from the photo list in Panoramio Groups, or by clicking the "Explore" button from the user page and tags page, with many more options to come. The photo explorer allows you to navigate between photos from a group, photos from a user or photos with a specific tag.
Explore Panoramio photos
Imagine you are exploring photos of Barcelona. If you find a photo you like a lot, you may want to see more from that photographer. In that case -- just click "Change" and select the photographer's name. Later, while exploring this photographer, maybe you will find a photo made with a peculiar technique; you click "Change" and see if the photo is in a group that you could explore, or a specific tag you are interested in. And this can go on without end.
Lean back and enjoy
On top of exploring and navigating, the new photo explorer provides you with a lean back experience with millions of amazing photos. Do you have guests for dinner and want to impress them with an amazing frame in your living-room? Then look for your favorite combination of photos in groups, tags or Panoramio photographers and set up the photo explorer in Slideshow mode with full screen view in your TV. You can configure it so photos change every 2sec, 5sec, 10sec, 1min or 5min.
Share your photos with your friends
Do you want to share your latest trip with your friends? Give a tag to the photos you took, open the tag page (example: album of my trip to Schwyz), and click on "Explore" to open the photo explorer. All the URLs can be shared, so just copy it from the browser and send it to your friends.
Did you find already your favorite Slideshow combination? Then share it with us in the comments, in the Panoramio Sightseer section of the Panoramio Forum, or just send it to your friends so they can enjoy it too.
Happy exploring!
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager


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Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Resources
A selection of resources (publications, webinars, videos, conference presentations) available from initiatives spanning national organizations and government.
Public Sphere Pedagogy
CSU Chico developed the Town Hall Meeting and Great
Debate, now adopted by other colleges and universities around the
state, as part of a broader effort to bring entering college students into
full-fledged community participation. The practices, which Chico groups under
"Public Sphere Pedagogy," result in measurable gains in engagement, persistence,
and student success. See the online toolkit or recorded webcast.
Organizations and Governmental Initiatives
Below is a small representation of information available on this topic. We encourage our web users to access the links in the national initiatives section above for a full breadth of available resources.
Additional resources can be found using the Corporation for National and Community Service's National Service Learning Clearninghouse.


text:
Formerly home to the Vanderbilt family, this grand Victorian townhouse with an imposing frontage is now part of the Radisson brand. Located on the bustling Cromwell Road in fashionable South Kensington, the Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt is well-positioned for the Royal Albert Hall and London's many museums. Room sizes vary from small and compact to big suites.
Rating: 80% of LondonTown customers would recommend to a friend - 1970 recent customers surveyed out of 5 based on
Booking multiple rooms?
Visit our group bookings page or call 020 7437 4370 for assistance
Room 1
Map for Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt Hotel
Underground Stations
Railway Stations
Car Parks
Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt Hotel
LondonTown customer reviews for Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt Hotel
Edited summary of customer comments
Q: "Based on your recent experience, would you recommend this hotel to a friend?"
Most recent 100 guests:
Most recent feedback from actual LondonTown.com customers
|We have stayed here before when the resturant was being done up and didn't have breakfast. This time we had breakfast which was really tasty and in lovely surroundings. The room was clean and the bed very comfortable. Would go back.
Anonymous from Barford, United Kingdom would recommend this hotel to a friend
|Early check in with a smile plus free WiFi. I thoroughly enjoyed my stay.
Ian from St Saviour, United Kingdom would recommend this hotel to a friend
|Excellent breakfast in the mornings. The room was basic, but clean and tidy! The staff are very courteous and helpful at all times.
from Wakefield, United Kingdom would recommend this hotel to a friend
|Our room was not ready to check in at 3pm. Had to wait until 3.30pm. Should have been offered a complimentary drink in bar.
Elizabeth from Holland On Sea, United Kingdom would not recommend this hotel to a friend
|Really great hotel and brilliant location. Hopefully I will be back next year when Ireland come over to win the rugby world cup. ☺
Robert from Drimnagh, Ireland would recommend this hotel to a friend
TripAdvisor User Reviews
Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt Hotel Hotel Facilities
Hotel services
Fitness centre
Swimming Pool
Business facilities
Business centre
24hr porter
24hr reception
Laundry services
Dry cleaning
Passenger lift
Accept dogs
Airport shuttle service
Room facilities
En suite bathroom
Satellite and cable
In-room direct dial
Room service
24hr room service
Mini fridge
Tea/coffee making
Air conditioning
In-room safe
Wifi - FREE
215 rooms
For children
Baby cots - FREE
Wheelchair access rooms
Guide dogs welcome
|Check-in from:
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All rooms
Some rooms
Telephone reservations
To book the Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt Hotel by phone, call the telephone booking department on 011 44 20 7420 4982. The hotel reservations call centre is open seven days a week from 8am until 11pm (UK time) seven days a week. From USA call 011 44 20 7420 4982
Group booking discounts
Are you booking for a group of people? If you are making a booking for a group of people and require over 10 rooms, you may prefer to speak to the Group Booking Department for Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt Hotel bookings. Special deals can be arranged for groups, including discounts and arrangements for adjacent and inter connecting rooms if required. Call the Groups Reservations Department on 0207 292 2307. The best way to book a group deal is to complete the online form for group reservations at Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt Hotel .
Customer Service - Speak to a London hotel expert
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011 44 20 7420 4982
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Suggestion 1
Grange Strathmore Hotel London
Near the Natural History & Science Museums
Customer rating: 82%
Ideally located in London's affluent and fashionable Kensington area, the Grange Strat.. more
Suggestion 2
Crowne Plaza London Kensington
Near Natural History Museum
Customer rating: 89%
Though it looks like a traditional town-house hotel from the outside, with its attractive .. more
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Holiday Inn London Kensington Forum
Near to the Natural History Museum
Customer rating: 87%
The location, two minutes' walk from Gloucester Road tube station, is the major draw o.. more
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In Japan, Family Adoptions Offer a Competitive Edge
Passed down through the years, family businesses often flag at the hands of a founder's less talented or motivated descendants. But in Japan, family firms are robustly competitive across the generations.
A new study points to adult adoptions as the reason. Roughly 98% of adoptions in Japan are of adults, mostly young men. When chosen for their potential to take over a family business, as is often the case, they take on their new family's name and often marry into it. If necessary, biological children are elbowed aside to make way for a more talented outsider. Promising daughters traditionally don't rate.
The system, which the researchers find unparalleled in the developed world, seems to work; the study reports that, in Japan, family firms outperform non-family firms—and "adopted heirs' firms outperform blood heirs' firms."


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Three times in United States history, the person who became president did not receive the most votes — 1824, 1876, 2000.
Polls have consistently shown a large majority of Americans want the system changed. The National Popular Vote bill would change the way we elect presidents; it has passed in nine state legislatures.
So why do we have this system and how does it work? Permit me to go back a couple of hundred years. Stay with me, this won't take long.
How the System Works
The main framework of the Electoral College comes from Article II Section 1 of the Constitution and was revised by the 12th Amendment in 1804.
When you vote for the President in the United States, you are not actually voting for your favorite candidate. You are voting for a slate of electors. There are 538 electors, typically people who are active in state and local politics. Oddly, even for a federal election, each state can have different rules about how to elect the electors. Usually they are elected at a state political convention. It would be a rare voter who could name more than one or two electors, even though the electors are the core of the voting process.
Each state gets one elector per member of Congress. So some states like Florida have more electors than Wyoming. (See state-by-state list.) It is a winner-take-all system, so whoever wins the popular vote in a state wins all of that state's electors. There are two exceptions, Nebraska and Maine, where the electors are doled out differently. In those states, whoever wins the popular vote gets two electoral votes. Then the rest are awarded by whoever wins each Congressional district.
States can decide if they are winner-take-all states, or if they are proportional by Congressional districts or if they want to dole out electors by popular vote. It is a state decision. But the federal government requires electors and decided how many each state gets. So states could meaningfully change the system without Congress changing the Constitution.
Even though Washington, D.C. is not a state, the District gets three electoral votes as set out in the Constitution.
The Constitution does not allow electors to be sitting Members of Congress.
In some of this country's earliest elections, the popular vote didn't even elect the electors. In 1824, for example, one fourth of the states used a system where the state legislature, not voters, chose electors.
On December 17, 2012, the electors in each state meet to sign the "Certificates of Vote." Then on January 6, 2013, the state's certificates are examined and electoral votes counted. Whomever has 270 electoral votes is the new President.
There are lots of electoral systems around the world. Look at this list of systems. Some make our system seem logical.
What if Election Day produces a tie?
In a tight election year like this one, the "tie" is a "what if" parlor game worth playing. If President Obama won Ohio, Wisconsin and New Hampshire, and Romney won all of the other "swing states" and other states went as expected, it would result in a dead-on electoral tie: 269 to 269. The Washington Post has concocted five ways a tie could happen.
The first thing that would happen would be recounts and legal challenges in the most contested races. Think of the 2000 election on a larger scale. It could last months and cost many millions of dollars.
Then, if the courts and recounts don't solve the issue, we turn to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution. A few key parts:
"The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;–the person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President."
So, in a tie, the 12th Amendment tosses the election into the hands of the House of Representatives.
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr got equal numbers of electors and the House of Representatives had to vote 36 times to break the tie. In fact, the 12th Amendment was a direct product of that debacle. Before that election, the top vote getter was President, the guy who ran second was Vice-President.
In 1824, Andrew Jackson got 151,271 votes, John Quincy Adams got 113,122. Jackson got the most electoral votes, but not enough to win a majority since there were three other contenders in the race. The election went to the House to resolve and John Quincy Adams won the election there. According to election lore, Adams cut a deal with Henry Clay, the fourth place candidate. Adams appointed Clay to be Secretary of State. Four years later, Jackson got his revenge and beat Adams handily.
But when an election goes to the House, things get weird. Under the 12th Amendment each state gets one vote. That's right, Rhode Island's vote is equal to California's. Read it for yourself:
"But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice."
The House members from each state must agree on who will get their vote. What a fight that would be.
You might assume that House members would vote for whomever carried their state, but that is not required. Some states might say they are unable to reach a consensus and not vote at all.
So, a candidate needs 26 electors to win. The House can vote again and again to break the tie.
While the House is locked up in a 25 to 25 tie, the U.S. Senate steps in to choose a Veep. Each Senator gets one vote. So, once again, all states are equal regardless of population. The candidate who gets 51 Senate votes is the new Vice-President.
Then, if the Senate cannot come to an agreement on a Vice-President before Inauguration Day, the Speaker of the House serves as acting President.
If the Senate reaches agreement on a VP and the House remains deadlocked, the Vice President acts as President.
Why the system works
The National Archive says in the last 200 years more than 700 bills have been introduced in Congress to change the system. After the 2000 election, a flurry of bills floated around Congress and went nowhere. Some suggested we just do a direct vote, whoever gets the most votes wins. Some said it should be based on Congressional district, more like what Maine does. Some said it should be a coalition based majority system, more like Canada.
Some proposals said a candidate should have to get 40 percent of the national vote or face a run-off. Imagine that, a primary, a general election and then a run-off? The rationale is that a president should have at least 40 percent support or the country would be too divided to stand behind him or her.
Many of the proposed reforms did away with electors.
The strongest argument for the current system is that it forces candidates to build a national coalition of voters. They have to stitch together big and small states to get the needed electors.
Eleven states account for more than half of the population. California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas have the majority of voters.
In a popular vote system, small states might never see the candidates, who would spend their time in vote-rich, highly-populated states. But those who favor changing the system point out that the most populated states are evenly split. The big 11 states are split between Democrats and Republicans. So the smaller states would be necessary to break a tie.
Some argue the electoral system is right for a country of our size because in a tight election it would take forever to recount and litigate every state outcome. The nation would be thrown in a tizzy. The electoral system, even with its flaws, settles the matter with a system that has worked for two centuries.
There is also a state's rights argument. Each state currently makes its own rules and counts electors and sends them to the federal government. A national popular system would be more of a federal election.
How the system fails
The more than 200-year-old system is clearly not one-person-one-vote. Sometimes the person who gets the most votes doesn't get elected. The electors get adjusted after each census. But population shifts happen faster than that.
Plus in a winner-take-all state, the people who vote for the losing candidate lose all of their voice. It might as well have been a 100 percent vote, even if the winner won by only one vote. Opponents of the Electoral College say the current system allows candidates to write off states where they have no chance of capturing a majority. But if they could pick up pieces of states, Congressional districts for example, they might visit more states during the campaign.
Under the current system, third party candidates are marginalized. But under a proportional system, where electoral votes are doled out based on the proportion of votes you receive, a third party candidate could get enough electoral votes to become a significant power broker. A candidate who got say 5 percent of the electors could toss the entire race into the House to decide.
Under the current system, states appear Bluer and Redder than they actually are. There is no room for nuance.
In almost half of the states, electors don't have to vote for the candidate they were elected to represent. Seriously. Even though a candidate wins the electoral vote, in those states the elector is not bound by law to vote for the winning candidate. The U.S. Archives website explains:
"There is no Constitutional provision or Federal law that requires Electors to vote according to the results of the popular vote in their States. Some States, however, require Electors to cast their votes according to the popular vote. These pledges fall into two categories—Electors bound by State law and those bound by pledges to political parties."
"The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution does not require that Electors be completely free to act as they choose and therefore, political parties may extract pledges from electors to vote for the parties' nominees. Some State laws provide that so-called "faithless Electors"; may be subject to fines or may be disqualified for casting an invalid vote and be replaced by a substitute elector. The Supreme Court has not specifically ruled on the question of whether pledges and penalties for failure to vote as pledged may be enforced under the Constitution. No Elector has ever been prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged."
"Today, it is rare for Electors to disregard the popular vote by casting their electoral vote for someone other than their party's candidate. Electors generally hold a leadership position in their party or were chosen to recognize years of loyal service to the party. Throughout our history as a nation, more than 99 percent of Electors have voted as pledged."
It is rare, but it does happen. Project Vote Smart says, in fact, it happens for all kinds of reasons:
"On 158 occasions, electors have cast their votes for president or vice president in a different manner than that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represent. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone."
The Congressional Research Service said "the faithless vote" has never influenced the outcome of the election.
The U.S. Archives assembled a list of which states require electors to vote for a specific candidate. Check the list to learn more about your state's law.
Learn more from some of the places I went to flesh out this story:
- The Congressional Research Service has written briefings on the Electoral College system, including citations to various proposed reforms over the decades.
- I learned a lot from this Smithsonian Magazine article on the Electoral College vote of 1800. The craziness of that vote set the stage for the passage of the 12th Amendment, but it also gives insight as to the kind of chaos that a locked up vote would cause.
- The Washington Post calculates as many as 32 ways the election could end in an electoral tie. But if it did, the Post concludes,"a tie, in all likelihood, would lead to President Mitt Romney."
- Harper's Weekly set up a special website that explores the awful election of 1876-77 in which Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York seemed to have gotten more votes than Rutherford Hayes of Ohio. But questions arose over the legitimacy of many elector votes and in an effort to resolve the problems, a special commission was formed. The commission dissolved into a political quagmire of corruption and even offers of vote selling.
- The AP explores various "nightmare" scenarios that could develop Election Night.
- See how other countries elect leaders. This essay from a Georgetown professor describes the difference between the "plurality" system and the "majority" and "proportional" systems. Throughout history, some states have changed how they award electors.
- A list of election resources worldwide, useful in comparing systems.
Correction: This article initially misused the term majority when it meant plurality.


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The Society for Mathematical Psychology promotes the advancement and communication of research in mathematical psychology and related disciplines. Mathematical psychology is broadly defined to include work of a theoretical character that uses mathematical methods, formal logic, or computer simulation. The Society journal is the Journal of Mathematical Psychology.
|Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality
|Tuesday, 24 December 2013 21:48
Subject: Call for Applications for the Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality at the Max Planck Institute Berlin directed by Gerd Gigerenzer & Ralph Hertwig
Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality – June 10-17, 2014
Gerd Gigerenzer & Ralph Hertwig: Decision Making in a Complex World
Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin, Germany
Application deadline: March 9, 2014.
The annual Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality will take place at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, from June 10-17 2014.
Talented graduate students and post-doctoral fellows are invited to attend the Summer Institute hosted by Gerd Gigerenzer (Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition) and Ralph Hertwig (Center for Adaptive Rationality). The Summer Institute will gather distinguished scientists and 35 talented young researchers from diverse backgrounds for an interdisciplinary summer school on the importance of simple solutions to the complex problems of the modern world.
Participants will be given access to the fundamentals, methodology, and recent findings on bounded rationality in talks and workshops. They and the invited faculty will present their own research and learn, practice, and discuss how the simple can outperform the complex during participants debates and workshops, allowing to network with internationally renowned researchers and fellow young scholars.
Planned highlights of the program include talks and workshops by:
Gerd Gigerenzer ++ Ralph Hertwig ++ Thorsten Pachur ++ Henry Brighton ++ Jan Woike ++ Shenghua Luan ++ Mirjam Jenny ++ Uwe Czienskowski ++ Hansjorg Neth ++ Odette Wegwarth ++ Juliane Kämmer ++ Tim Pleskac ++ Jens Krause ++ Peter Todd ++ Florian Artinger ++ …
For more details on the Summer Institute and on the application process visit the website: https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/de/forschung/adaptives-verhalten-und-kognition/summer-institute-on-bounded-rationality-0


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Education in developing countries is facing problems at all levels:At the primary level, despite gains in enrollment, the quality is appallingly low. In Tanzania and India, some 20-30 percent of students in 6th grade could not read at the 2nd grade level. Not surprising since in these countries, teachers in public primary schools are absent 25 percent of the time. When present, they are in-class teaching only 20 percent of the time.
At the secondary level, the performance of students from the Middle East and North Africa in international tests such as TIMS is significantly below the developing country average.
At the tertiary level, universities are chronically underfunded and not training students for jobs that the market is demanding - reminiscent of the Woody Allen line, "The food in this restaurant is terrible and the portions are too small."
All of these problems have a common root. Education is largely a private good. Most, if not all, the benefits of education accrue to the individual in terms of their being able to earn a higher wage as a result of being educated. I say "largely" a private good because we believe that there are also externalities associated with education, that society as a whole benefits from having a literate and numerate population. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence of these externalities is rather thin. (Most of the people who believe in the externality are university professors, which led Bob Lucas to remark that, if we were aluminum siding salesmen, we would claim that aluminum siding had externalities.) Even the empirical evidence suggests that the externality does not dwarf the private benefit from education. In short, education is more like food and clothing than like street lighting and national defense.
Yet, governments in developing countries assume education is a public good. They finance it out of public funds. In most cases, education is also provided by public sector employees. By ignoring the private-good element of education, governments have contributed to the problems with education. When teachers are paid by the government, they become accountable to the government, and not to the students or their parents. But if education is a private good, the provider should be accountable to the customer. This lack of accountability leads to teacher absenteeism. Parents, even poor ones, show that education is a private good by sending their kids to private schools, often bypassing the free public school nearby. In urban areas in Africa and South Asia, about half the children are now in private schools. In Punjab, Pakistan, parents in rural areas pay about $3 a month to give their children a private education. The large and pervasive phenomenon of tutoring in countries like Egypt is another demonstration of the private demand for quality education.
Worse, public teachers have become a lobby that tries to protect their rents in the system. In many countries, teachers run the election campaigns for local politicians who, when elected, give the teachers a job from which they can be absent. In Uttar Pradesh, India, about 20 percent of the state legislators are either current or former teachers. In Latin America, teachers have been known to protest attempts at improving learning outcomes by strengthening their accountability to the client.
The system seems to be stuck in a low-level equilibrium. Despite ASER's five years of testing and publicizing student learning outcomes in India, learning outcomes have been declining. In countries such as Sri Lanka that have succeeded in achieving high enrollment rates (something the public good model can deliver), it is difficult to shift to a private-good model to improve learning outcomes.
Note that the argument for public financing and provision of education is often made in terms of helping poor people. But it is the poor who are losing out on quality education. The rich will educate their children no matter what--because education is a private good.
The diagnosis of higher education is different because it costs about educating a student at university costs about 200 times what it costs at the primary level. When government provides higher education for free, it creates a huge rent (the different between private benefits and private costs) that is of interest to rich and poor alike. The rich are able to capture these rents by sending their kids to private secondary schools that prepare them to take exams to enter university. The result is that most university students come from the top quintile of the income distribution. In Africa, 47 percent come from the top decile.
Meanwhile, the quality of university education suffers because, when students don't pay, they are less demanding about what they learn (and there is less pressure to recoup the costs in the labor market). In fact, it can be worse, where in some countries, the universities become prey to political parties. Some years ago in Bangladesh, each political party had captured a different university.
Again, the system is resistant to change. Current students don't want to lose their rents. I once arrived in Dakar to give some lectures at the university only to discover that the students had gone on strike (they assured me it had nothing to do with my anticipated lectures). The issue was that the students would no longer have their own dorm room--they would have to share. The rector turned to me and said, "Shanta, you used to teach at Harvard, the richest university in the world. Do the students there have their own dorm rooms?" The answer was, for the most part, "no."
What can be done?
There are two ways to approach this sorry situation. The first, which I will call the "polite approach," is to continue pretending that education is a public good, and try to improve service delivery by strengthening accountability in the public sector. Efforts such as getting teachers to take date-stamped photographs with students in return for a bonus or hiring teachers on performance-based contracts are steps in this direction. Information campaigns about the importance of quality education could also make politicians more accountable to citizens. Some of these approaches have been shown to work in randomized control trials, but scaling up has been a challenge. In other cases, even the control trials have failed to produce results or even backfired.
The second, "less polite" approach is to acknowledge that education is a private good and regulate education markets. Like other markets, education markets have lots of distortions, including information asymmetries (parents don't know the quality of the school), some schools may have monopoly power, equity considerations, etc. By allowing private schools to develop by themselves, we have allowed these distortions to persist. Yet, we can regulate these markets. We could require private schools to register, and make information about their quality transparent. We can monitor and formalize private tutoring. And we should regulate the quality of private and public universities to prevent political capture.
By not acknowledging that education is a private good, we are in the worst of both worlds. Public education is failing, and so people are turning to private markets. But these markets are unregulated. And the losers, as usual, are the poor.
Interesting.. Education can
Interesting.. Education can solve many problems – and I personally believe that India could have progressed much better if we were half this population - something that could have been achieved if it has put focus on education soon after independence. Better late than never. Even now, there is much to gain by focusing on education – polite approach or less polite approach – Action is the need of this hour.
Balu, thanks for your comment
Balu, thanks for your comment. In fact, India has been focusing on education over the past decade or so. My concern though is that it has been the polite approach, which has yielded very little in terms of quality. So it may be time to shift to the less polite approach especially given, as you say, the large number of young people who will be entering the labor force soon.
Education is the main problem
Education is the main problem which explain the situation of unemployment of young in developing countries and the weakness of income. I agree with the former solution about improving the quality of education. Because in developing countries (Saharan African countries), most of poor don't have a sufficient income to buy the private services of education . In addition with the weakness (corruption etc...) of institutions in these countries, it would be more difficult to create a regulated market for private education.
Thanks for your comments,
Thanks for your comments, Camara. On your last point, if institutions are too weak to regulate a private market for education, why do we think they are strong enough to deliver quality education in the public sector? Sometimes, regulation requires less monitoring and enforcement than public service delivery. Of course, the possibility of political capture is there in both cases, so we must design the systems to minimize this. Note also that, whether we like it or not, a private market for education already exists, so the point is how we can make it more effective, especially for poor people.
It is quite true that
It is quite true that education is a private good due to the individual benefits that come from its investment (time, supply and transportation costs, and most certainly stress). However, the long term and aggregate benefit of producing an educated population is reflected on a county's productivity growth, GDP growth, and indeed other vital externalities. The main problem seems to be the structural weaknesses of public education regarding infrastructure, lack of technology, and lack of adequate teachers and their indifference towards students' progress. Wouldn't you argue that education is for the most part public and that governments should have a more "private" approach to it? An approach that would tackle the public structural problem while at the same time providing public funding for a private education would be a voucher system. This way poor students can be provided a private level education without incurring the unattainable costs of a private institution. What do you think would be the implications of this voucher system regarding public spending as compared to the current ineffective public school system?
JFG, thanks for your
JFG, thanks for your questions and comments. First, the impact of education on GDP and productivity is not evidence of an externality. The increase in productivity is captured by the individual who was educated. It's only when the education of one person increases the productivity of another person that there is an externality. As I said in the post, there is some evidence of this, but the size of that externality is not bigger than the private benefit.
On your second point about vouchers, this is precisely the situation when we need to regulate these markets. A voucher system is a subsidy to the private sector. When we introduce vouchers, all sorts of private providers crop up (to make use of the subsidy). But there is very little research (much less policy actions) on the market structure and behavior of these providers. Yet, it is this behavior that will determine whether vouchers lead to better learning outcomes for schoolchildren.
Human capital does have
Human capital does have externalities - i am better off with an educated spouse , educated neighbors and colleagues. There is more knowledge and progress for everyone. But you are right that the educated person will, on average, internalize most of the benefits through higher wages and happiness.
What you argue is also true for health care, isn't it? It is mostly a private good. But governments spend a lot on it and the WHO has announced a goal of providing it free of charge by 2030 to all poor who cannot pay. While more and more public funds are diverted to health care for the already ill, services to prevent spread of diseases are more and more underfinanced.
Very small public goods investments in prevention and prepared disease control authorities could have nipped in the bud the now raging ebola outbreak in West Africa . But the investments were not done. They will never be done if history is our guide. Look at cholera in Haiti. Donors will just build more hospitals and clinics there, staffed with mostly absent government health care workers.
So I believe that The World Bank should impose conditionality on countries that do not provide basic public goods to prevent rising disease burdens in the future. The first use of public money should be public goods, goods which can be provided only by government and that give the largest benefit to the country.
According to the World Bank, it is not access to health care, but rather educating girls that is the most efficient and effective way to improve population health status (health of the girls and their families and communities). Girls' education is then in large part a public good because the girls and their families do not get ill and so do not need the health care services that all governments consider increasingly to be their responsibility.
Annabella, you're absolutely
Annabella, you're absolutely right that there is a similar problem in health care, where governments under-spend on genuine public goods or goods with externalities! such as immunization, and therefore over-spend on private goods such as clinical and curative care. I'm not sure World Bank conditionality will solve the problem (or any other problem for that matter), but it's certainly worth highlighting the extent to which government spending patterns are biased in favor of the non-poor.
On your second point about the externality associated with girls' education, to the extent that the main beneficiaries are the young woman's children, the beneficiaries are within the same household, although not the same individual. It's also interesting to note that this effect does not seem to depend on the quality of education but simply on the girls' being enrolled in school. There is some work on Bangladesh that shows that a girl's having completed secondary school has a significant, negative effect on child mortality, even if the quality of that education was poor. This only strengthens the point that the learning benefit of education is largely a private good.
I think the point about girls
I think the point about girls's education being a public good was made because health care costs are being increasingly socialized. If the girl's children get sick, it's no longer her household's problem but the government's problem.
Governments are to provide access to quality health care by 2030 to everyone , and without financial payments from those who are poor.
The World Bank already has developed conditionality (measurement and reporting system) for this universal health care agenda and will preferentially help countries that accept reaching these targets (universal access and free health care for the poor by 2030). Countries that will be seeking to improve prevention of disease through public health measures will therefore be lower priority for World Bank assistance in health. This drive by the World Bank to socialize health care costs also makes girls' education (regardless of quality, apparently) a public good.
Helenka, I think there is
Helenka, I think there is some difference of definition here. A public good is a good that is both non-rival (my consuming it does not prevent you from consuming it--think of national defense) and non-excludable (I cannot restrict your entering and consuming it). None of the characteristics of girls education make it a public good in this definition. There is an externality associated with girls education, as we have been discussing. But that externality is independent of whether there is a government policy to provide free health care or not. I think what you have in mind is what economists call second-best effects. That is, when there is a distortion in another market (in this case the market for health care), then increasing girls' education may reduce the size of that distortion. That is certainly a possibility, but the question that needs to be asked is: if there is a distortion in the market for health care, why not fix it directly, rather than try to fix it indirectly?
I agee with the definition.
I agee with the definition. The socialization of health care (as opposed to provision of public health goods like prevention of contagion) means that the taxpayer is on the hook for financing its supply. Reducing the demand for health care by schooling for girls lowers the burden on taxpayers ("the public") and so is a public good in that institutional set-up . That's what I meant - that the public has an interest in reducing the demand for health care, since they have to pay for much of it , and increasingly so under the universal health care agenda. This agenda is now a given...
Universal Health Coverage
Universal Health Coverage doesn't just include curative health services but preventive services too (as well as palliative and rehabilitative services). So in helping countries achieve UHC the Bank and other donors will not be encouraging countries reallocate their public financing from PHC services to hospital services. Take a look at the UNSDSN Health Thematic Paper for more on this.
A dichotomy like this is
A dichotomy like this is surely too simple ? The returns referred to are different for different countries at different stages of development. So education may have greater social returns for a poor country than a rich one. The effectiveness of the investment by government is often the crucial difference.
Andy, the private and social
Andy, the private and social returns to education definitely do vary across countries (and over time within countries), but that doesn't mean the dichotomy between private and social returns is too simple. Indeed, it is fundamental, in order for us to be able to measure the two rates of return and, more importantly, design public policy accordingly. The problem is that we have not asked the question, "what is the private rate of return relative to the social rate?" And our public policies are structured as if all of the returns were social and none private. Yet people in developing countries, including poor people, behave as if it's the reverse. It is this disconnect that we need to rectify.
Education As If People
Education As If People Mattered
Steven J. Klees
University of Maryland
Shanta Devarajan is known for his antipathy to public education, in general, and teachers, in particular. His recent blog, Education as if Economics Mattered, on the World Bank website, should therefore come as no surprise. In it, he argues that education, at all levels, is a "private good" and it is best to eliminate government funded schools and let the private sector provide, subject to some government regulation.
This argument reflects a poor understanding of economics. A private good is, by definition, a good that can be efficiently provided by a private market because it does not have any externalities, public good dimensions, impact on economic growth, information asymmetries, monopoly power, imperfect capital markets, etc. For 50 years, since the advent of human capital theory in the early 1960s, literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mainstream economists have argued that education has these features in spades. Even higher education, according to a major World Bank study (done with UNESCO) in 2000, was argued to have such major externalities that one could no longer trust rates of return based on individual income effects and that the Bank had been wrong to recommend against public investment in higher education.
Shanta argues for the privatization of education with only minimal recognition of how economically inefficient that would be. And his only recognition of the major inequalities that this would yield is a throwaway comment about "equity considerations." Perhaps the most significant public policy investment that tempers the inherent inequalities of our market system is public education. While public education is very unequal in a myriad of ways, privatization will make education much, much, more unequal.
I was surprised that Shanta argued that "universities are chronically under-funded." This is true. But Shanta does not acknowledge that the major cause for under-funding is the World Bank which has recommended cutting public funding for higher education for decades, as it has for all education and most government activities as part of its privatization agenda.
And, as usual, Shanta blames the brunt of education's very real problems on teachers and proposes coercive and demeaning "solutions" that any professional, e.g., World Bank staff, would be aghast at if it were applied to them. Teacher absenteeism is the result of the abysmally low salaries teachers are paid, again, in part, a result of Bank policy. I was recently working in Uganda where primary and secondary teacher salaries were below the poverty line, yet a Bank study argued they were too high.
We need an education policy that focuses on the needs of children and teachers. Successful educational systems treat students and teachers well, hold them in high esteem, and provide equal opportunities through public education.
Steven, While I welcome
Steven, While I welcome comments on this blog post, I wish you had read the post more carefully, because I think there is quite a lot of common ground. First, just because something is a private good, it doesn't follow that a private market will provide it efficiently. There can be a lot of distortions in the market for private goods. That is why we have, for instance, safety inspection of restaurants. Secondly, I too believe there are externalities associated with education, but there are also huge private benefits (as reflected by the behavior of poor people, who bypass free public schools and send their children to fee-paying private schools). In a situation where a good has both private benefits and an externality, economic theory tells us that the solution is to subsidize the good (where the size of the subsidy is the difference between social and private marginal benefits) and have the private sector provide it. This is what several countries have tried to do with voucher schemes. But even in this case, we should study and regulate the private market that provides the service because, as mentioned above, it can be subject to distortions. Finally, rather than a throwaway comment, equity is central to this argument. Poor people are the ones who are losing out from the publicly-funded, publicly-provided education system (the rich are either educating their kids in private schools, or capturing the rents from free tertiary education). We have to make the system work for poor people, which is why I favor giving them the means and ability to hold service providers accountable. Shanta
Not all university students
Not all university students are equally costly. You write: "The diagnosis of higher education is different because it costs about educating a student at university costs about 200 times what it costs at the primary level. "
An English or even economics student costs far less to educate than someone in natural sciences or experimental physics. There are VERY costly equipments and laboratories. The English major just needs some pencils and paper... The English professors are in abundant supply compared to the ones in sciences, so they have lower salaries.
Helenka, you're right that
Helenka, you're right that the average figure I was citing masks a huge variation in the cost of educating university students across various disciplines. But this variation raises several questions. Should universities charge different fees for different disciplines, depending on the costs of educating the students? (You might then get even more under-employed English professors). Or should you charge more for engineering and business studies, say, because they have higher earning potential after graduation? These are tricky issues that many universities grapple with. My sense though is that, in the end, they decide to charge a uniform fee across disciplines. Shanta
Interestingly, the existing
Interestingly, the existing proposals go in the opposite direction. Some policy makers want to charge students LESS if they choose a major with the largest private benefit: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/should-science-majors-pay-less-for-college-than-art-majors/264417/
"Yet, we can regulate these
"Yet, we can regulate these markets." Who is this "we"? The politicians? In whose interest will they "regulate these markets"?
Jagdeep, a good question. If
Jagdeep, a good question. If governments are doing so badly at delivering education, why can we expect them to do any better at regulating education markets? First, I think this is an empirical question, which we should investigate. I'm sure that unregulated markets (which is the current situation) is worse than some regulation, although I agree that regulation may also be subject to political capture. Secondly, regulation may economize on government's scarce resources--managerial capacity--in a way that provision doesn't. It may be easier to write contracts and enforce them than to manage a large labor force of schoolteachers. Also, remember that with markets, parents and students (as "customers") are also plays a role in enforcing accountability.
This is a very interesting post on a hugely important area. There'd be a lot to comment. Let me just point out to two things.
First, your whole piece is based on the assertion, which you get rid of in one paragraph, that education is "largely" a private good. I don't know whether there is a lack of evidence to show that it is a public good, and I'm sure many empirical researchers - from both the economics and from other fields would dispute that. But then you give the counter-argument to your argument: most governments (and not only in the developing world - in fact, I would say that this is mostly the case in the developed world) assume education is a public good. It may be that it is so obvious that no one even bothers looking for evidence. The public being made of a sum of private entities, if the private entities improve, it is clear that the public will hugely benefit. In fact, the public and the private are so inter-linked, that I'm even wondering what the point is in making such a distinction, and trying to know whether education is 40% a public good or 60% a private good, or conversely, or anything else. Fact is that education benefits so hugely to a society, that societies have, to a huge extent, decided that it was a public matter.
Secondly, the kind of discussion you're having, is mostly based on consequentialist arguments. This is what the title of your post involves (economics matters...), but you regrettably don't mention any more this limit in the post itself. Maximising the value per what-children-learn is a valid approach, but it's not the only one. Thinking about what we consider as education, what is education, what place do we want education to take in our societies, etc., are as valid entry points, which we need to equally consider.
And for those crucial choices - privatising education? making it a private good? -, hearing the voice of the people is essential. You also forget to mention that in most parts of the world, collective choices of people, wherever they were given a choice, has been to keep education a public good. Should your arguments about it being a wrong choice, in terms of economics, even be right, it is not all what matters.
For more information on other approaches, worth looking at other empirical arguments from a more social justice perspective, but more holistically, worth lookin at http://www.periglobal.org/, http://globalinitiative-escr.org/advocacy/privatization-in-education-research-initiative/, and http://www.right-to-education.org/issue-page/privatisation-education.
All best,
Sylvan, thanks for those
Sylvan, thanks for those thoughtful comments. First, by a public good, I mean a good that is both non-rival and non-excludable. Education does not have these characteristics. Yet, societies behave as if education is a public good (under this definition) by financing and providing it for free to everybody. This is the appropriate policy for genuine public goods like national defense. Education, on the other hand, has a large private-good element (in the sense that the benefits accrue to the individual), although--as I suggested--there are externalities associated with education. The appropriate policy for such goods is for the government to subsidize education and allow the private sector to provide it. But the problem here is that the resulting education "markets" may have many distortions, in which case--like with other markets with distortions--governments should regulate them. In the current situation, these markets are cropping up organically (reinforcing the point about the private-good element in education) and, instead of regulating them, governments are either ignoring them or trying (unsuccessfully) to make the flawed "education-as-a-public-good" model work better. And the losers are the poor children, for whom education is critical to escaping poverty.
This brings me to your second point. While I agree that there may be more to education than getting children to learn, I hope you will agree that the latter is fundamental, and if we are failing at that, something needs to be done.
Thanks for your response.
Thanks for your response.
I agree that education has a private dimension, i.e. that a private one is education, the private one does get a private benefit out of it. But I'm sure you'll agree that education also has a large public dimension. If the private members of a society are not education, they may be more violent, less productive, participate in a less informed way in elections, etc. - the list is long, and I'm sure you know it better than I do. These are all consequences that have a huge impact on society. Now I don't know whether the ratio of public/private in education is 60/40, 90/10, or 50/50, but again, I wonder whether this is relevant at all. What is certain is that the public dimension of education is so high (at least in absolute, and in my view, relatively as well), that it fully makes sense that societies take their decisions in their hands and decide to provide free primary education - and don't leave such a crucial part of society (as crucial as is an army, police, etc.) to the market.
Besides, there is no clear evidence to prove that it would be more efficient.
But this is for the consequentialist argument. There are also plently of principled-based arguments to support a public, free, mandatory education system, not least rights-based arguments. Of course, all arguments have to be wieghed, considered together. But similarly as making a principle based argument in favour of public education should not be considered alone, getting children to learn cannot be considered out of the context and other arguments that are made (plus, I don't see why children would learn more in private than in public schools, but that brings us back to the discussion above...). Yet, you don't mention any of those other arguments and necessary nuances (for the least) they bring to the debate. I know it's a short blog post, but I think it may still be careful about not presenting the economist argument as being the absolute one.
Sylvain, on your first point,
Sylvain, on your first point, I think we are saying the same thing. Education has both a private good element and an externality, which is why it should not be left to the market. The economic solution to such goods is for the state to subsidize the good, but leave provision to the market. I was suggesting that these markets should be regulated because they could be distorted (even if the private good element of education is high).
But education is not a public good in the sense of its being non-rival and non-excludable. The practice of the state's providing goods free of charge applies only to these pure public goods. That is why I was questioning why governments intervene in education as if it were a public good, whereas they should intervene as if it were a private good with externalities.
On your second point about principle-based arguments that support free, mandatory education, I would support them if they actually delivered quality education especially to poor people. The problem is that the current system is not delivering to poor people. And the reason may be that we are delivering as if it were a public good something that is really a private good with externalities.
Why should we privatise
Why should we privatise education?
There are several important reasons to make education private and for the state to wash its hands from providing education. The author referred to some but let me make a quick shortlist:
1. Teachers in public schools are lazy and have high level of absenteeism. Some people may say that teachers behave in that way because they have low salaries, inadequate training and no motivation or career prospects. But really, why do they want money and career? They better look for private schools or just serve their communities for free. Let's not bother about reasons for bad teaching that require massive reforms in the educational systems including decent public financing. Let's blame teachers for the failure of the system
2. Parents- even poor people have a say in the private schools. Really? My experience is that parents pay but have no say in how the school is run. Oh yes they can change schools and thus force quality. Well! this may be the case for upper class people choosing between top 5 stars schools. Poor and even middle class do not have this choice simply because all the schools they can afford are of similar quality
3. Take Egypt as an example of people going for private education. The writer says that people chose to go to private teachers because of the bad state schools. Actually the norm is that kids in both state and private schools take private lessons. The only difference is that kids are free not to attend private schools every day, sometimes even in for a month or a whole year! This is not a joke. I personally know non-rich kids whose parents pay the fees of the private school and even the fees for the bus, but miss the whole year of their A level so that they can spend their day going for private lessons. In Egypt, the cost of health and education are a huge burden on parents who would take on more jobs, borrow money and live in debt to afford education.
4. Quality of private schools is better than public schools: unfortunately the evidence works against that. The majority of the top performers in Egypt' A level this year and I dare say every year come from state schools. Two of my young friends are studying to be pharmacists; one in a state university and the other in a private university (she didn't have high marks in her A level to join the state university and was lucky to have a relative abroad who was pays for her education). The girls agree that the state university teaches wider range of subjects and require higher standards of achievement in exams. In the private university, they study less subjects and it is easy to attain high marks. Obviously the private university want to attract more students every year by making their results more glamorous.
5. Education is a private good? Does that mean that it is OK if 90% of society decided not to send their kids to school, or just be satisfied with their kids able to read and write? Can somebody explain to me how the society will get its future doctors, engineers, IT people, scientists, managers, entrepreneurs, planners, ministers?
Thanks to my government' commitment to free public education, my poor family was able to send me not only to primary but up to tertiary education, and now I can write to defend the right of all kids for free, high-quality education.
Mogha, thank you for those
Mogha, thank you for those thoughtful comments and questions. To be clear, I was not advocating that education should be privatized, nor that the state should wash its hands from education. I was saying that the way the state intervenes in education should be aligned with the rationale for public intervention which, in this case, is one of externality rather than education being non-rival and non-excludable (I.e. A public good). And the reason I am concerned is that poor people are the ones losing out on the current education system. Nevertheless, let me address some of your points.
1. No one said teachers were lazy. The absenteeism rate is a fact. I agree that the reason is that the education system is dysfunctional and in need of reforms. That said, the evidence points to the fact that it is not low salaries per se that are driving teacher absenteeism, but the way in which teachers are paid and held accountable. For instance, when teachers are paid on contract (so that their pay is dependent on performance), absenteeism is less and learning outcomes higher (controlling for teacher qualifications, etc.). We also find that, on average, teachers in private schools are paid less and absenteeism is lower.
2. Your point about parents' in poor areas not having a choice is precisely why I was advocating that these markets need to be regulated. There is asymmetric information (parents don't know the quality of the school but the school does). We find that publishing information about schools' performance (in an accessible manner) can enforce some improvement in school quality.
3. The point about private lessons was an illustration of the clear demand for quality education in the face of a free public education system. Your illustration of students skipping school to attend the private lessons only reinforces the point. These private lessons are also hugely regressive.
4. I agree that the free public university is often of the highest quality. But this is precisely the reason why rich people send their children to prestigious secondary schools and succeed in getting them admitted to these universities. The share of students at these universities from the richest quintile is usually around 80 percent.
5. Because education is largely a private good, people are sending their children to schools and making sure they can read and write. That is why poor parents send their kids to fee-paying private schools, even if there is a free public school in the area. Society will get its engineers and doctors because students have an incentive to study and become doctors and engineers; we need to make sure the education system provides them with that education.
Great, thought-provoking
Great, thought-provoking piece. Two and half questions.
First, under your second "impolite" option, would the poor be stuck with lower quality schools that they could afford? First and a half, what are the implications for transmission of poverty and for inequality?
Second, what is the rationale for why governments should subsidize education under this regulated education market?
And a final comment, realizing that this is a think piece rather than a policy recommendation. The politics of education reform are such that, as you've pointed out in previous blogs, the poor are stuck in a low-level equilibrium of dire service delivery- so how do you shift it from one state to another? Too many folk benefit from the status quo.
Max, good questions. On the
Max, good questions. On the first, it is because the poor could get stuck with low-quality schools that these markets should be regulated. There is asymmetric information in these markets (parents don't know the quality of the school as well as the school does), and there are ways of regulating such markets (transparency of information about quality, etc) to avoid the low-level equilibrium.
On the second, the rationale for subsidizing education is the externality associated with education. That externality exists whether or not you regulated the market. The rationale for regulating the market is that, even with the subsidy, the education market may be distorted (for reasons of asymmetric information and others).
Your last point is, of course, the crucial one. I'm hoping that debates like this can at least help us make progress in dislodging the low-level equilibrium and get poor people the quality education they are due.
Thanks Shanta. Loving the
Thanks Shanta. Loving the discussion on this post. In your original post you said that the evidence that there are positive externalities is pretty thin. But in your response to my question as to why govts should subsidize education for the poorest, you say this is because of the social returns to education. Could you elaborate a bit more? Specifically how do you know the social returns to education are large enough to justify such a huge public subsidy? Perhaps there's a more normative reason for suggesting govts ensure all citizens can access a quality education i.e. fairness.
Max, I too am learning from
Max, I too am learning from this discussion. There are two, separate justifications for a subsidy to education. One is the externality. The rationale here is efficiency (I am better off if you're educated, and vice-versa, so a private market will lead to a socially suboptimal level of education). This subsidy should go to everybody, rich and poor. The secondjustificaition is equity. The rationale here is that education is one of the most powerful ways of escaping poverty, but poor people may lack the means to send their children to school. Even if education were free, the opportunity cost of sending kids to school may be too high. But we should be careful about this subsidy. The state is intervening in an intra-household decision and requiring that the subsidy be used for education only. Why not give the household a cash transfer and let them decide on spending it on education, health, etc.? While there are arguments in favor of an education subsidy targeted at the poor, those arguments should be articulated, and assessed, before going ahead with the policy. The arguments usually have to do with imperfect capital markets (so households can't borrow to finance their children's education) or the fact that parents can't get their children to commit to taking care of them in old age, and so there will be a suboptimal investment in children's education. There are responses to these arguments (for instance, if there are imperfections in the capital market, you should fix these, rather than subsidize education). But on balance there are enough compelling arguments that I would say a subsidy to encourage poor people to send their kids to school is justified. Remember, though, that this begs the question of who should supply the education, which in my view is the bigger issue. If, by the subsidy, we are forcing poor children to get a low-quality education, we are not doing the best we can.
Please try to read my
Please try to read my comments again – for example first point questioning why teachers must be paid (any sane person would agree with what I am saying there?) Also please re-read my last sentence. Then you will get my real point of view.
Mogha, I re-read your comment
Mogha, I re-read your comment and agree that teachers must be paid, but I hope you also agree (since the evidence points this out) that the way teachers are paid (fixed salary versus performance-based pay) makes a difference. On your last point, again, I share your goal of all children, especially those from poor backgrounds, getting a quality education. But I don't see why students from rich backgrounds should also benefit from free education (thereby taking resources away from poor people). Shanta
The debate about whether
The debate about whether education is a private or a public good is, at best, unhelpful. The benefits of education for both individuals and societies are clearly immense, and the interplay between the two, impossible to separate. As Sylvain rightly points out, does it really matter whether one is greater than the other? Societies have overwhelmingly decided the public benefits of education are substantial enough to merit public action.
What's more, when large segments of the population are too poor to pay for education, does it really matter whether economic theory believes the individual or the state should pay? (Should the poor be denied the "private good" of education?) This debate is, more than anything, a clever way of re-framing a much older debate about the relative merits of public and private sector involvement in education.
Your blog calls attention to several of the most critical and troubling problems facing the education sector: low education quality, poor learning outcomes, exclusion of the poorest children, teacher absenteeism, weak accountability to parents and communities, elite capture of education resources. You conclude on the basis of these challenges that "public education is failing" (and that private education doesn't suffer from the same problems). But you have it the wrong way around. We – governments, donors, policy-makers, citizens – have too often failed public education!
The problems you have identified are the symptoms of years of underinvestment and neglect of public education systems. In the global push to expand access to basic education in the 2000's, many governments failed to invest adequate resources beyond just seats in classrooms, including adequate numbers of trained teachers, relevant education materials, and reforms to make schools more accountable and responsive to their communities. The proliferation of private schools is also a symptom of this lack of investment, not evidence that parents somehow prefer paying for private schools.
In fact, the evidence base in favor of private schools as a solution to these systemic challenges is remarkably weak. A recent review (http://bit.ly/1ujVi1L) found little evidence to support the idea that private schools can reach the poor geographically, nor evidence that the poor can afford them, that they are more accountable, or that they have positive effects on the overall education system. Although the same review found better learning outcomes and teaching quality in private schools, it acknowledges that private schools are often only marginally better than public schools, particularly when you exclude the elite private institutions that are out of reach for the vast majority of students.
The legitimate problems in public schools should not be used as a reason to abandon our public education systems; instead they should be fixed! Much more research, analysis and funding must go into answering the more pressing question in education: what can we do to improve public education systems so that they deliver high-quality, relevant education to all children, especially the poor and marginalized?
These questions must be urgently addressed, and the World Bank should be playing a leadership role by throwing its substantial research and analytical capacity into finding the answers – as well as providing financial support for building public systems. It is deeply disappointing to see its energy devoted to such unhelpful and polemical discussions. We should expect more constructive engagement from the Bank on an issue so critical to achieving its goals of ending poverty and promoting shared prosperity by 2030.
Katie, The issue is not how
Katie, The issue is not how much of education is a private good and how much is an externality. As long as there is some private benefit to quality education, providing it for free to everybody by providers who are only accountable to the government is neither an efficient nor an equitable solution. This is why governments don't provide food and clothing free and control their supply. Because there is a private benefit to education, you would want the beneficiary to have a say in the delivery of the service. Instead, what we have now is a primary education system that delivers--in principle to everybody--low-quality education (with the rich, and increasingly the poor, opting for private provision); and a higher education system that, because of resource constraints, rations places in university that are overwhelmingly captured by the non-poor. That is the sense in which the model of government-financed and -provided education (with little or no ability of the beneficiary to influence service delivery) has failed. The question is how to improve the system. It's clear that simply increasing resources, without changing the institutional arrangements so that students and parents can have greater voice will not solve the problem. In the 2004 World Development Report, and subsequent work, we explored and assessed ways of strengthening students' ability to hold providers and politicians accountable. The results have been mixed. In the meantime, the private sector has grown, sometimes in response to policies such as vouchers that aim to increase accountability, and sometimes through the sheer desire of parents to give their children a quality education. But these private markets are not perfect; they have many distortions that could lead to inefficient and inequitable outcomes. That is why I was calling for more analytical work and policy action in regulating these markets. Shanta
The accountability in
The accountability in education is accepted as the key. However, not all the benefits of education go to the individual, the state and communities also share the bounty in the form of higher tax revenue and peace/tolerance respectively.
The solution offered is incomplete. The regulation of education has not been elaborated and the community participation has been ignored. Free technical/higher education is definitely ends in student lethargy, political takeover of educational institutions, teachers ineptness etc.
Who pays for this "private
Who pays for this "private good"? Parents? But they are not the primary beneficiaries, it's society that gains from having you and me learn properly in school. I think. But perhaps we can link school fees to future employers or tax future earnings? C'mon, it's a public good.
Tosin: Education has two
Tosin: Education has two benefits. There is a private benefit, which is the higher earnings that the recipient enjoys from being educated. This should be borne by the recipient (or his or her family), unless they can't afford it in which case government should give them cash with which to buy this benefit. But there is an additional benefit, which is that society gains from having a numerate and literate population. This social benefit should be borne by the state. Note that this is in addition to the private benefit, so that it should be a subsidy, rather than the state's paying the whole cost of education. Also, this subsidy should go to everybody, regardless of their income, since it is society as a whole that benefits. Shanta
In INDIA the main problem is
In INDIA the main problem is weakness of income.....thats why poor childreans can;t afford higher education....If anybody want computer education free of cost in hindi then you can visit our website http://www.gyanyagya.info


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Low-Impact Woodland Home
If you missed this one when we blogged about it last year, check out the hobbit-like eco-house that Simon Dale built for himself and his young family in just four months, with the help of his father-in-law, passersby and visiting friends...
posted originally from: AT:New York
He estimates that it took 1000-1500 man hours and cost about £3000. Read all about how they did it with detailed before and after photos at Simon's website.
Now he's trying to help build a low-impact eco-village project in Wales. You can read more about the Lammas Eco Village project here.
Related: Green Ideas: Hillside House
- Kristin Hohenadel blogging from Paris. She can be reached at kristin @ apartmenttherapy . com


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The Beantown Swing Orchestra, an elegant and energetic 18-piece orchestra lead by two fabulous vocalists, including American Idol alum and top 10 finalist John Stevens, will perform at The Kent Center's 2nd Annual Swing into Spring Celebration on May 4 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel's Garden Pavilion.
Beantown Swing is the future of big band swing. Their appeal is universal—entertaining to both lovers of and novices to the swing genre; the young, the young-at-heart, and the not-so-young; and anyone who just likes to have a good time. They have been playing venues in Boston and beyond for several years and have attracted quite a following. They released their first album entitled "Trolley Songs" in 2011. In summer 2012, their latest album, entitled "Stevens Swinging Session," will debut.
Tickets are $75 and my be purchased online at ww.thekentcenter.org/swingintospring.htm or by calling 691-6000, x335. The evening includes a gala reception, concert and dancing. Professional swing dancers will entertain and dance with members of the audience. The reception begins at 6:30 and the music at 8 p.m.


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Photo #64677
Last Name: Richards
First Name : Rachel
Middle Name: Elizabeth
Subject's City: Big Springs
Subject's State: WV
Subject's County: Calhoun
Subject's Country: USA
Date: 1851-1900
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Nee: Norman
Type** : B&W
Comments: Rachel Elizabeth Richards (Nee: Norman) | Big Springs WV USA | 1851-1900 | Comments: Rachel Elizabeth Norman Richards is the wife of Henderson Richards who was the son of Michael Richards who was the son of Rev. War soldier George Richards. George buried near Pennsboro IGA, WV. Rachel is buried beside her husband at Big Springs, Calhoun Co. WV.
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Diane Dupuis 2/21/2005 5:22:19 PMThis is gorgeous! Congrats to you on your well deserved win! #217710
Bonnie C. Lackey 2/21/2005 6:06:19 PMCongratulations on your win - this is such a unique beauty! #1124133
Kristi A. Howson 2/27/2005 12:01:09 AMLove this frosty effect Yi-Lin. Congratulations on this winner!!!!! #1136048
The last leaf fell down on the ground in the Autumn. It symbols the end of life. However, the winter morning frost gives the leaf a new form of beauty. This is a renewal beauty.
Uploaded on 1/29/2005 3:17:46 PM
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