• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Chris Leithner

  • About Chris
  • Archive
  • Links
  • Books – Australia
  • Books – Canada
  • Books – USA
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Leithner Letter Nos. 179-183

Chris · October 26, 2014 ·

26 October 2014 – 26 February 2015

altogether even the pretence of teaching. … [More generally, English universities have] become sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices found shelter and protection, after they had been hunted out of every other corner of the world. In general, the richest and best endowed universities have been the slowest in adopting those improvements, and the most averse to permit any considerable change in the established plan of education. Those improvements were more easily introduced into some of the poorer universities, in which the teachers, depending upon their reputation for the greater part of their subsistence, were obliged to pay more attention to the current opinions of the world.

Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations (1776)

The free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. … The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower
Farewell Address to the Nation (17 January 1961)

There’s a lot wrong [with American universities]. I’d remove ¾ of the faculty – everything but the hard sciences. But nobody’s going to do that, so we’ll have to live with the defects. It’s amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don’t see the big picture.

Charles Munger
Vice-Chairman, Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. (2002)

A Reviewee Reviews a Reviewer – Part II

The examples are legion, but one will suffice. “The current economic situation is in many ways better than what we have experienced in years,” the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) confidently prophesied in the Economic Outlook it published on 18 July 2007. Seers are usually wrong, and often egregiously so; but they seldom doubt their own prophesies:

Against that background, we have stuck to the rebalancing scenario. Our central forecast remains indeed quite benign: a soft landing in the United States, a strong and sustained recovery in Europe, a solid trajectory in Japan and buoyant activity in China and India. In line with recent trends, sustained growth in OECD economies would be underpinned by strong job creation and falling unemployment.

“Why,” asks Ciro Scotti in Robert Shiller Explains Why Economists Won’t Help Fix the Economy (Business Insider, 9 October 2011), “didn’t economists see the financial crisis coming? And why in the face of joblessness and a floundering economy are they, in the words of one top economist, ‘unable to be helpful’?” Scotti continues:

Yale economist Robert Shiller [one of the winners of the 2013 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which is erroneously called the “Nobel Prize in Economics”] has a very simple answer – at least to the financial crisis question: His colleagues in the dismal science are wearing blinders these days, with most examining only narrow strands of data instead of taking a world view that encompasses other disciplines. Economists are no longer the “worldly philosophers” they once were, argues Shiller. … “The financial crisis that started in 2007 and that continues today is widely taken in the popular press as evidence of a lapse, moral or otherwise, in the wisdom and judgment of the economics profession,” Shiller and his wife, Yale psychologist Virginia Shiller, write in a paper presented to the 9th annual conference of Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society.

To read the entire Newsletter (PDF), click here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe to the Leithner Letter

* indicates required

About this website

About this website

This site hosts newsletters, books, etc., written initially for shareholders of Leithner & Company Pty Ltd and subsequently for anybody who wants to read them. … [Read More] about About this website

Recent Posts

  • The Risk of Higher Rates the RBA’s Overlooking March 20, 2023
  • Why Australia won’t become a “renewable energy export superpower” March 6, 2023
  • Farewell low “inflation” and interest rates? February 20, 2023
  • “Global Energy Transition” – Fact or Fiction? February 6, 2023
  • Will 2023 be beautiful or ugly? January 23, 2023

Archives

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • June 2020
  • March 2020
  • November 2019
  • July 2019
  • March 2019
  • November 2018
  • August 2018
  • April 2018
  • September 2017
  • July 2017
  • March 2017
  • November 2016
  • July 2016
  • March 2016
  • November 2015
  • July 2015
  • March 2015
  • October 2014
  • June 2014
  • February 2014
  • October 2013
  • July 2013
  • February 2013
  • November 2012
  • July 2012
  • April 2012
  • December 2011
  • August 2011
  • April 2011
  • November 2010
  • July 2010
  • April 2010
  • December 2009
  • September 2009
  • June 2009
  • March 2009
  • December 2008

Copyright © 2023 · Chris Leithner