It often seems unfair that referendums are used to decide weighty questions of national policy, says Bruno S. Frey. We Swiss know all about this: we have a long history of big decisions made by tiny margins. Switzerland would be part of the European Economic Area had a proposal to join not been defeated in …
We regulate public utilities like gas and electricity to ensure they don’t abuse their power. But Google and Facebook are different in so far as they cost us users no money directly and it doesn’t make sense to break them up, since the point of them it that everyone is on one network. At the …
Continue reading ‘Facebook and Google: unregulated monopolies’ »
The very size of the endowments of top US universities should be a political issue, because these endowments make inequality worse and their sizes become ends in themselves. Harvard has a tax-exempt endowment of $35 billion, Yale $26 billion. The endowments and fees paid to money managers are tax deductible. The per student annual taxpayer …
Continue reading ‘More on American universities: their endowments are engines of inequality?’ »
At a time when voters are raging about greedy, self-serving elites, you’d think those in power would want to avoid playing to type. You’d be wrong. José Manuel Barroso, former president of the European Commission, has a new job at Goldman Sachs, the bank that “helped Greece mask its fatal debt problems”. He has nor …
According to a study from the University of California, Berkeley, the US economy values pre-school teachers at between $8.63 and $20.99 per hour. This contrasts with, for instance, a minimum wage for fast food workers of $15 an hour in New York state, a figure that took 3 years to campaign for. Pre-school teachers have …
