Economics links

[erudito]

Harvard has found a way to shorten the average length of Ph.Ds: For the last two years, the university has announced that for every five graduate students in years eight or higher of a Ph.D. program, the department would lose one admissions slot for a new doctoral student. The results were immediate: In numerous departments that had for years had

Comments

[taavi]

You seem to be ignoring FDR's setting up of Fannie Mae in order to provide government-backed mortgages for the poor. Until it was privatised. The more I see of the way banks behave, the more I think Chifley was right.

Even worse

[erudito]

Actually, government banks have an even worse record but in a different direction. VEDC, Tricontinental, SA State Bank, to name a few, local examples. Then there's the rolling disaster of Japan's "managed" finance system.

All systems have problems, but the more information is suppressed and the more dodgy the feedback mechanisms, the worse they behave.

Not that government agencies are entirely innocent in the current fun. First, there is the restriction of land supply for housing, then the IMF injecting lots of moral hazard into the international capital markets via its "welfare for Wall St" activities.

Fannie Mae

[erudito]

I think the point of Fannie Mae is that it wasn't a conventional bank surely. And the link was about attitudes to banks and the poor rather than financing the poor as such.

[quatrefoil]

Harvard has found a way to shorten the average length of Ph.Ds: For the last two years, the university has announced that for every five graduate students in years eight or higher of a Ph.D. program, the department would lose one admissions slot for a new doctoral student.Australia has achieved the same result by paying universities on completions. There has been a concerted effort to push PhDs through in a shorter time frame. Britain has also done something similar. The problem is that the quality of the PhDs has demonstrably suffered