The Columbia Economics Club

Next Columbia Economics Club meeting: 9/28/11

2011-09-04T17:27:00.010-04:00

Next Meeting: Wednesday September 28th, 2011 @ 12 noon

300 Senate Street restaurant

Our Speaker will be Dr. Nick Capaldi

His topic will be:

"Is America Facing Economic and Cultural Armageddon?"

Next Columbia Economics Club Meeting: July 13, 2011

2011-07-07T07:41:00.003-04:00

Please join us for our next Columbia Economics Club meeting where Les and Tyler Watts will be speaking on the topic of:

FARM SUBSIDIES: WHAT WILLIE NELSON DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW!

When: Wednesday, July 13 2011

Where: The Summit Club (top of Wilbur Smith building)

Time: Noon

Need More info? contact matthew.mcfadden@ms.com

Next Columbia Economics Club Meeting: March 2, 2011

2011-02-25T21:07:00.010-05:00

Jodi's topic will be:

"Behavioral Economics and the Creation of Value"

Jodi Beggs is best described as a freelance economist. She has taught economics at both the undergraduate and graduate level, is an editor for an online learning company, and writes about economics on her web site "Economists Do It With Models" and for various other publications. Her overall goal is to make economics an interesting and accessible topic of discussion both in the classroom and in the media, since it is her view that understanding basic economics is crucial to running an effective household, being a smart voter, and generally not sucking at life. Jodi has a Master's degree in Economics from Harvard University.

Our next meeting will be held at Hennessy's Restaurant & Lounge:

Hennessy's:

1649 Main Street

Columbia, SC 29201

ph: (803) 799-8280

http://www.hennessyssc.com/

(Hennessy's is on Main Street, across from the Tapp's building in downtown Columbia)

to RSVP to this meeting, please e-mail Matthew McFadden at matthew.mcfadden@ms.com or you may call him at (803) 251-3264

Next Meeting: Wednsday, Feb. 9 2011 at 12 Noon

2011-02-08T08:38:00.001-05:00

Taking the Initiative: Public Choice Economics at the College of Charleston

Peter Calcagno is an Associate Professor of Economics at the College of Charleston. He earned his B.S. in Economics and History from Hillsdale College and Ph.D. in Economics from Auburn University. Professor Calcagno has previously worked at Wingate University, Jacksonville State University, and Georgia State University. He is particularly interested in Public Choice Economics, and Political Economy. In 2008 he received the School of Business and Economics Distinguished Teaching Award. He is currently the founding director of the undergraduate program the Initiative for Public Choice & Market Process, which seeks to advance the understanding of the economic, political and moral foundations of a free society.

Where: The Palmetto Club (formerly the Summit Club)
When: 12 noon lunch -- please arrive before noon
Non-members and guests: $25
RSVP: Kathryn Robinson

Dr. Frank Machovec: July 15th 2010

2010-07-07T15:05:00.004-04:00

Please join us for our next meeting which will be held on Thursday, July 15^th, at the Summit Club. The meeting will start promptly at noon. Our guest speaker will be Dr. Frank Machovec, from Wofford’s Department of Economics, and his topic will be:

An Updated Appraisal of Schumpeter's 1942 Forecast of Capitalism's Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

For more about Dr. Machovec click here:

About Dr. Machovec’s topic:

Joseph Schumpeter, champion of the entrepreneur and longtime professor of economics at Harvard, in 1942 predicted that capitalism's demise would be the product of the undermining effects of the incentive-destroying termites bred by welfare-state policies whose collective goal is not merely to provide a general increase in opportunity through a minimum level of social insurance and impartial treatment under the law, but rather, equal opportunity by repealing, via compensatory schemes, all of life's random sources of 'unfairness', thereby radically broadening the classical notion of justice to include that which is otherwise unattainable without a divine rescripting of human existence….

The Conventional Wisdom on Higher Education – Not Just Wrong, but Harmful

2009-11-11T14:52:00.004-05:00

By George Leef
Reprinted with permission of the author

The case I’m going to present began taking shape in my mind in September of 1980.

After having foolishly devoted three years to earning a law degree, I realized that I would rather teach than practice law. While job hunting in the summer of 1980, I was lucky enough to hear about a small college with a decidedly free-market perspective that was in desperate need of someone who could teach economics, business law, and a few other courses.

I was hired in July and started preparing for the courses I’d be teaching. One of them was an ethics course for juniors and seniors. About two weeks into the semester, one of the readings in the text raised the issue of “social justice” and I figured that the students should read F.A. Hayek’s attack on that concept. I copied a few pages from his book The Mirage of Social Justice and handed the material out at the end of a Thursday class, telling the students that I wanted them to have read it and be ready to discuss it on Monday.

In Monday’s class, I asked several questions intended to catalyze discussion of Hayek’s argument that “social justice” is not just meaningless but a dangerous idea. But each question drew only puzzled looks, yawns, and downcast eyes. It began to dawn on me that the students had either not bothered to do the reading, or if they had, nothing from it had stuck in their heads.

At last, after much painful silence, one young fellow raised his hand. I called on him eagerly. He said, “Couldn’t you just, y’know, tell us the main point?”

I tried to gently rebuke him and the whole the class, saying that college isn’t about simply memorizing a few “main points” but rather should be about learning to pry out meaning on your own. You can’t go through life waiting for others to always tell you “the main point,” after all.

That incident made a big impact on me. I had already begun to suspect that many of the students I had were not much interested in learning and that class confirmed it. As I got to know the students better and better, I discovered that few of them had any sparks of intellectual curiosity. Most were academically weak and disengaged, with reading and writing skills that would have been thought poor for grade schoolers back when I was in grade school. Mostly, they were in college because it was fun to get away from home and because they assumed that having a college degree was the ticket to a good career and prosperity.

I began to see, in short, that college had been oversold.

My teaching career came to an end in the fall of 1989 and the reasons why are also pertinent to my case. For years I had ignored suggestions from the administration that I was too hard on the students. My grade average was one of the lowest at the school – only a few hard-nosed accounting professors were usually lower – and some students were choosing to take Business Law at a community college where the amount of work was less and it was easy to get at least a B. The school was concerned about the loss of revenue. Therefore, I was given an ultimatum: either I had to make my courses more “user friendly” or else my contract would not be renewed.

I didn’t think that I was too hard on the students. Those who made any decent effort passed. The problem, as I saw it, was that a large percentage of the students were used to passing without putting forth the least bit of effort. They hated the few courses where their enjoyment of college life was hampered by the need to read and study. Instead of caving in, I decided to quit.

Ten years later I was hired for a think tank job involving higher education, director of the Pope Center, then a branch of North Carolina’s John Locke Foundation. As I immersed myself in the world of American higher education and especially its problems, I came to see that there is a conventional wisdom about higher education – a galaxy of ideas that’s overwhelmingly accepted by education leaders, politicians, and most of the public. At the center of that galaxy, to continue the astronomical allusion, is a pulsar that keeps sending out the core idea. MORE EDUCATION IS GOOD. MORE EDUCATION IS GOOD. MORE EDUCATION IS GOOD.

The “education” there means formal education. Excluded is education that occurs on the job or is undertaken individually. It’s not that such education is bad, but that we must place our trust in organized education that’s overseen by experts.

What I want to do with my remaining time is to take a critical look at some of the main ideas in the galaxy of conventional wisdom. I’ll argue that those ideas are mistaken and that their acceptance by policy-makers has some adverse consequences for the country. Here’s the first:

College education adds greatly to a person’s knowledge and skill base, thereby increasing his lifetime earnings.

We hear constantly that getting a college degree is a great “investment” for both the individual and the nation because people with degrees earn much more than do people without them. It’s almost always assumed that the years of college work is responsible for this high level of success and that if only we could get more people into and through college, we would have a more prosperous society.

It is true that on average, people with college degrees earn substantially more than do those without them, but it does not follow that this higher earnings level is caused by the human capital gains from college studies. Nor does it follow that putting anyone who has not gone to college through to a degree will give him any earnings boost at all, much less the million dollar figure that is carelessly tossed around.

Now, I’m emphatically not saying that college education never does any good for any student. I’m confident that I learned some useful things in my college years. I’m even more confident that my son at Duke with his dual major in mathematics and biology, is adding to his stock of human capital. My contention is that it’s a mistake to assume that every college student gains in useful knowledge and skills from his college courses.

We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that high-income people who are college graduates enjoy that success because they went to college. Most of them already have an abundance of knowledge, skill, and ambition before taking any college classes. Whether their studies enhance their productivity or not, they’d still have greater financial success in life than those who have less natural ability and drive.

And on the other hand, it’s clear that many of those who have graduated from college derive little or no benefit from it. Several years ago I discovered that the Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps track of the level of education of workers in a vast number of occupations. For years I had been hearing anecdotes about PhDs delivering pizza and the like, but the BLS provides hard numbers to show that lots of Americans with college credentials are employed in mundane jobs that could be done by almost any moderately bright high school kid.

Here are just a couple of data points I recently pulled from the BLS site. In the job category of “baggage porters and bellhops,” 33 percent have “some college” (that is, they took some classes but did not graduate) and 16 percent have a BA degree or higher. In the job category “ushers, lobby attendants and ticket takers,” 30 percent have “some college” and 17.5 percent have a BA degree or higher. There is much more information like that, showing that we have such a glut of college graduates that they are spilling over into work that demands nothing more than basic trainability.

It isn’t true that college adds a lot of “human capital” to every student and it also isn’t true that there are good-paying jobs for every graduate. Believing that we can make everyone better off by sending him through college is like believing we can make everyone better off just by printing up more and more money.

Here’s a second belief:

Economic growth and competitiveness depends on an increasing level of educational attainment.

It is widely believed that our national prosperity hinges on maintaining a high level of formal education in our labor force – and best of all to have the position of international “leadership.”

For example, in his speech to Congress last February, President Obama asserted that the country needs to regain the place we once held as the nation with the highest percentage of college graduates in its workforce in the world. The president’s idea is perfectly consistent with the pulsar: MORE EDUCATION IS BETTER.

The trouble here is that there is no necessary relationship between the level of formal education and prosperity in a nation. Just as there is no necessary connection between an individual’s educational level and his income, so is there no necessary connection between the general level of education in a country and its prosperity.

In her excellent and iconoclastic 2003 book Does Education Matter? Alison Wolf, who teaches at King’s College in London, examined the assumption that there is a direct relationship between a nation’s educational level and its standard of living. She found that the assumption does not hold. There are prosperous and economically advanced countries (for example, Switzerland) that have less “investment” in education than other countries with poorer economies but more “investment” in education (for example, Egypt).

Maximum prosperity in a nation does not come from pushing more and more formal education. Rather, it’s a result of finding the optimal level of investment in both physical and human capital. Individuals and firms are quite good at discovering the level of knowledge and training that maximizes productivity, and much of that comes from personal and on-the-job learning rather than formal courses.

It is often said that America’s great post-war economic surge was due to sending many veterans to college under the GI Bill, but that proves nothing because the US had the world’s most vibrant economy back in the 19th century and early 20th century when there was comparatively little college education.

Back when my grandfather was a young man starting a business just about a century ago, the US was a highly skilled and educated country, but most of that skill and education was derived outside of formal education. We had no shortage of excellent engineers, architects, accountants, lawyers, teachers, and so forth, but few of them had college educations. The GI Bill did not give the nation a “more educated” workforce; all it changed was to put a college degree in front of the process of learning many occupations.

Eventually, having college credentials would become a requirement for a great many fields, but that is not because only individuals who’ve been to college could possibly learn what’s needed to do the job. Rather, it’s because college is now treated as the proving ground that high school used to be. When people say that most good jobs now require a degree, that just means that companies won’t consider high school graduates. I recently learned, for example, that Enterprise Rent-a-Car only hires college grads for its service positions. Obviously you don’t have to completed college to learn that work.

But what about the fact that several other nations now surpass the US in terms of the percentage of the labor force that has a college education? Belgium and Finland already have a higher percentage, at least of younger workers, but what many are really worrying about is China and India, which are said to be investing heavily in education, producing more scientists, engineers, and mathematicians than we are.

We should stop worrying. If it really makes the Belgians and Finns and Chinese and Indians more productive to push higher education – and I’m very skeptical about that; I suspect this is just rent-seeking on the part of the higher ed establishments in those countries -- that doesn’t tell us anything about what we should do. Since we already have large numbers of people with college degrees in mundane jobs, it’s clear that further expansion of higher education would be a poor use of resources. That’s something that truly would damage our economy.

Third:
College education leads to good social outcomes such as better health and civic participation.

Advocates for the higher education establishment often haul out the argument that the nation benefits from having more and more people go to college because there are ancillary social benefits. For example, a report called the national report card on higher education put out by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education claims that besides the supposed economic benefits of promoting higher education, there are also social benefits including higher voting percentages, more volunteerism, and increased charitable giving. And I’ve even heard it said that college is good because college grads are less likely to smoke.

No doubt, all of those outcomes correlate with college, but it isn’t true that college is their cause. People who are more inclined to civic participation and disinclined to smoke are apt to choose to go to college, but there’s little reason to believe that being in college changes people in any of these respects. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that it doesn’t do so, starting with a well-known smoker who went to Columbia and Harvard Law and now resides in the White House.

If there are behaviors we want to encourage or discourage, putting people through college is a very costly and ineffective way of doing so.

I’d like to turn now to some harms that stem from our mania for higher education.

Credential inflation.

One of the consequences of overselling college education is credential inflation. That is, once a certain level of formal education becomes commonplace, it takes a higher credential for top people to distinguish themselves.

Stanford University professor David Labaree hit the nail on the head in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, writing:

“The difficulty posed by the glut of graduates is not that the population becomes overeducated (such a state is difficult to imagine) but that it becomes overcredentialed, as people pursue diplomas less for the knowledge they are thereby acquiring than for the access that the dipomas themselves provide. The result is a spiral of credential inflation, for as each level of education in turn gradually floods with a crowd of ambitious consumers, individuals have to keep seeking ever higher levels of credentials in order to move a step ahead of the pack. In such a system, nobody wins….At all levels, this is an enormously wasteful system.”

Work that used to be done by people with a high school education or less is now often restricted to those with BA degrees, and many jobs that used to be done by college grads are now open only to those with MBAs. All of that formal education is often irrelevant to the work involved, but with a glut of people in the labor market with these educational credentials, employers can afford to screen out people with lesser ones. As James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield put it in Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, “ The U.S. has become the most rigidly credentialized society in the world. A BA is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years full-time training, let alone four.”

Credential inflation means we’re wasting resources. People spend great amounts of time and money pursuing pieces of paper just so they can get over the credential hurdle and have a shot at employment that only calls for trainability, not advanced academic coursework in preparation.

Dumbing down the educational system.

Another adverse consequence of our overselling of higher education is that we dumb down the whole educational system.

As colleges have sought to keep growing by accepting increasing numbers of weak and disengaged students, they have chosen to accommodate the preference of such students for courses that aren’t rigorous by allowing (or as in my case, encouraging) professors to lower their standards and water down the material. Temple University English professor Stephen Zelnick writes that academic standards “went slack” in the 1990s “when Temple decided to open its doors to all and sundry in order to pay its bills.”

Not only have standards plunged and grades been inflated, but we now find the curriculum at many schools cluttered with courses on pop culture and leftist manias like global warming and “sustainability.” As a result, employers find that many college graduates can’t write a clear paragraph or do simple math, but can hector you on the imperative to recycle everything.

Furthermore, since so many high school grads (around 70 percent) now end up in college, the pressure that high schools used to feel to ensure that their students were well educated has eased. With most colleges doing remedial education, the K-12 system can slide into the easy path of passing students along even if they haven’t learned much about reading, writing and math.

Bad influences

I’ll add just one more point before closing. Higher education often has a bad influence on young people. For every professor like my two compatriots here, there are dozens who use their classrooms to push their collectivist, anti-market beliefs on students. Rarely do those beliefs have any relevance to the academic subject matter of the course. Even that well-known leftist intellectual Stanley Fish has complained that, for example, composition courses are often far more about the highly ideological reading material than they are about the competence with which the student writes about that material.

Overwhelmingly, American higher education promotes and reinforces ideas that are hostile to limited government and the market order. The longer students are in the presence of the professoriate, the more they’re apt to absorb at least some of their belief system, which embraces a host of socialistic notions while rejecting capitalism. That, I believe, is the unspoken reason why Obama and his allies want to expand college education. They know that it tilts the political playing field in their favor.

At the root of all this waste and educational degradation is government subsidization of higher education. It plays the same role as government subsidization of home ownership, changing people’s incentives, distorting the market, and wasting resources. I’m convinced that the change that would do the most good of all would be for the federal and state governments to withdraw from the financing of college education so that all costs would be borne by voluntary payers.

I’ll conclude with this thought. It is frequently said that the United States is such a prosperous country because it has spent so much in educating its citizens. The truth, I submit, is exactly the reverse. Only a very prosperous country could afford to squander so much on an educational system as wasteful and inefficient as ours.

The Piedmont Economics Club

2009-08-20T14:25:00.003-04:00

Now entering its 40th year, the Piedmont Economics Club is South Carolina's oldest civic organization dedicated to the promotion and discussion of economic ideas and thought.

Holding dinner meetings at the Poinsett Club in Greenville, SC, the Club offers its members and their guests the opportunity to hear leading economists, financial analysts, journalists, and government policy makers.

The Club meets six to seven times a year, and always begins its meetings with a 6:00 pm reception and time of fellowship. This is followed by dinner and the speaker's presentation. A time for questions and reflection rounds out the club meeting.

In addition to promoting economic thought and discussion among its members and their guests, the Club seeks to enrich the teaching of economics at area universities. Faculty members at Clemson University, Furman University, and Wofford College enjoy a standing invitation to attend meetings as guests of the Club. The Club also hosts university students as guests.

Fall Programs for 2009-2010

September 8 – Susan Bies. Dr. Bies is former Governor of the Federal Reserve with a career career spent in academia, banking, and as member of key national financial policy organizations. Susan will share insights on the Fed, on activities that led to the 2007-08 financial collapse, and on future prospects for the economy.

October 7 – Robert Lawson. Dr. Lawson leads a center for economic freedom at Auburn University. Robert was the coauthor and project director for the first Economic Freedom Index of the World. He continues to be the leading world figure in measuring and analyzing economic freedom. Robert will discuss his work and what he sees happening to economic freedom around the world.

November 11 – Larry White. Dr. White is the Frederich v. Hayek Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri--St. Louis and a leading scholar in monetary history and policy. Larry has published widely on the relative merits of commodity money and is currently completing a book on history of economic thought. He will share ideas about money and the economy.

January 19 - Doug Woodward. Dr. Woodward is director of research and lead economic forecaster at the University of South Carolina's Moore College of Business. Doug is widely known for his work as a forecaster and for his research on economic development. Dr. Woodward will share his thoughts on the 2010 outlook for the nation, region, and state.

February 16. Robert Ariail. Robert Arial is a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist. His widely published cartoons capture the essence of the risks and uncertainties of economic policies embraced by politicians. Robert will give a presentation on the history of cartooning and will show and comment on a sample of his artistic renderings

March 16. Susan Dudley. In December 2008, Susan Dudley ended a two-year stint as Director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. As the nation's regulatory czar, Susan oversaw the regulatory activities of the federal government. Susan will tell us about what is going on with regulation in the United States and beyond

Last Season’s Speakers

Michael Schermer -- The Mind of the Market: Evolutionary Economics

Karol Boudreaux -- Enterprise Africa: Can Capitalism Work in Africa?

Richard Ebeling -- Why the Specter of Communism is Still Haunting the World

Mark Vitner -- The Outlook for 2009

Scott Baier -- The Economic Council of Advisors

Gerald O’Driscoll -- Life after the Sub-Prime Mess

Bill Poole -- Monetary Policy Effects on Today’s Economy

Membership Information

Membership is open to all who are interested in the discussion of economic ideas, trends, and related topics.

The membership fee for 2008-2009 is $475.00. Members may bring guests for a fee of $50.00. The regular guest fee is $85.00.

For more information, contact:

Piedmont Economics Club
PO Box 1805
Greenville, SC 29602

Sydney Taylor at sydney@canal-ins.com

August 2009: Alexei Marcoux

2009-06-30T13:00:00.004-04:00

Our next meeting will be on August 5, 2009. Our speaker will be business ethicist Alexei Marcoux of Loyola University (Chicago).

Meeting June 2009: Promoting Prosperity

2009-06-22T16:46:00.007-04:00

Our June speaker will be Jo Kwong of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Her topic will be:

"Promoting Prosperity Around the World – Is There a Recipe for Success?"

Why are some nations rich, while others seem trapped forever in poverty? Many authors and great thinkers have tackled this subject, offering a fascinating variety of explanations. One small non-profit organization called the Atlas Economic Research Foundation believes it has something to contribute to this debate.

Atlas believes that economic freedom sows the seeds for prosperity. When people are free to develop and act on innovative ideas, entrepreneurship develops and wealth is created. Institutions that unleash human action, creativity, and ingenuity offer the best hope to lead millions out of poverty. Join us to hear how Atlas is actively working to promote economic freedom around the world, and why it sees this freedom as vital to human flourishing. Unless you travel the globe regularly, you are likely to leave feeling grateful for the many freedoms Americans take for granted on a daily basis. Come hear how people are working in countries around the world to fight for the freedom to work, produce, consume and invest the fruits of their labor.

Jo Kwong is the Vice President of Institute Relations at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Washington, DC.

Members and their guests may RSVP by clicking here.

Video: US Economic Freedom Index

2009-05-13T14:44:00.007-04:00

US Economic Freedom Index 2008

2009-05-06T07:54:00.004-04:00

Dr. Eric Daniels is a Research Assistant Professor at Clemson University's Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He previously served as a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor at Duke University's Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace, where he was nominated for a teaching award. In addition, Daniels has taught at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his doctorate in American history. He has lectured internationally on the history of American ethics, American business and entrepreneurship, and the American Enlightenment. He has appeared on C-SPAN's "American Writers" series and his articles have appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the San Diego Business Journal. Daniels's other publications include a chapter in The Abolition of Antitrust and five entries in the Oxford Companion to United States History. Most recently, he co-authored the U.S. Economic Freedom Index, 2008 Report.

View a pdf of the Report here.

Ebeling on the Auto Bailout

2008-11-21T15:56:00.003-05:00

Richard Ebeling, one of our speakers in November, 2008, has published a comment on the proposed bailout of the Detroit automobile industry. It appeared in the Detroit News.

An excerpt: "However the auto bailout is paid for -- through higher taxes, increased borrowing, or by cranking up the Bureau of Engraving's printing presses -- it amounts to little more than "spreading the wealth" from the rest of us to those who know how to buy political friends wisely."

Read the rest here.

Capitalism Without Guilt

2008-11-21T15:05:00.008-05:00

The second speaker in the Moore School of Business BB&T Foundations of Capitalism speaker series will be Yaron Brook, President, Ayn Rand Institute.

Mr. Brook will present "Capitalism Without Guilt"

Date: Tuesday, Dec. 2

Time: 5-6 pm

Location: 8th Floor Lumpkin Auditorium

You may view a webcast on the day of the event by going to www.moreschool.sc.edu. Look under the bottom left corner under "Moore Events." If you will be live on the webcast, just add WEBCAST into the comment section of the RSVP form.

For questions or feedback, contact:

Gabriele Koebler Clark

Director, Alumni Relations

Moore School of Business

University of South Carolina

alumni@moore.sc.edu

803-277-2910

800-277-0105 (toll free in US)

Russ Sobel on Video

2008-11-21T14:53:00.002-05:00

Russ Sobel's presentation on "Unleashing Capitalism" is now available via a video link from the Initiative for Public Choice and Market Process at the College of Charleston.

To view it, click here.

BB&T Foundations of Capitalism Series

2008-11-19T14:02:00.006-05:00

John A. Allison IV, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BB&T Corporation, will speak about 'Principled Leadership' at the BB&T "Foundations of Capitalism" Speaker Series. Moore School of Business graduate and undergraduate students are encouraged to attend.

Thursday, November 20, 2008, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Lumpkin Room, 8th Floor
Moore School of Business
University of South Carolina
1705 College Street
Columbia, SC 29208

Register here.

Russ Sobel on the West Virginia Economy

2008-11-18T20:41:00.005-05:00

Dr. Russ Sobel on the West Virginia Economy...

More of the interview here. Russ Sobel spoke to the Columbia Economics Club in November.

Ebeling to Speak Wednesday, Nov. 12

2008-11-11T12:55:00.006-05:00

Richard Ebeling, the Shelby C. Davis Visiting Professor in Economics at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and formerly the president of the Foundation for Economic Education, will be the speaker at the next meeting of the Columbia Economics Club.

His topic will be "The Bailout Boondoggle: Blaming Capitalism for Government Blunders."

Date: Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008

Time: Noon

Location: The Palmetto Club (McMeekin Room)

Member RSVP: Kathryn Robinson

Guests are $25

Dr. Russ Sobel and Unleashing Capitalism

2008-11-05T07:20:00.002-05:00

Unleashing Capitalism Presentation

Get your own at Scribd or explore others:

Email Dr. Russ Sobel here.

Order you own copy of Unleashing Capitalism here.

November 2008 Meeting

2008-10-21T13:21:00.002-04:00

COLUMBIA ECONOMICS CLUB Luncheon Invite Letter Russell Sobel _Nov 2008 - Upload a Document to Scribd

July Meeting

2008-06-30T13:03:00.006-04:00

Matt Kibbe, President of FreedomWorks will be the speaker at the next luncheon of the Columbia Economics Club. FreedomWorks is a non-profit organization designed to fight for lower taxes, less government and more economic freedom for Americans.

Topic: "The Mortgage Crisis and the Economy: Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?"
Date: Tuesday, July 1st
Time: Noon Luncheon
Location: 1201 Main Street, Capital City Club, Columbia, South Carolina
RSVP to Kathryn Robinson

About the speaker...

Matt Kibbe became President and CEO of FreedomWorks in June 2004. From 1984-2004, the FreedomWorks organization was called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and previously Matt served as its Executive Vice President from 1996-2004.

Today, as President/CEO, Matt manages FreedomWorks' overall operations and strategy, including public policy development, grassroots operations, and state and federal issue campaigns for the organization. Before joining Citizens for a Sound Economy, Matt served as Chief of Staff and House Budget Committee Associate for U.S. Representative Dan Miller(R-FL) from 1993 to 1996.

Between 1990 and 1993, Mr. Kibbe was Director of Federal Budget Policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Prior to that, he served as Senior Economist for the Republican National Committee during Lee Atwater's tenure as Chairman. Between 1988 and 1989, Mr. Kibbe was the Managing Editor of Market Process, an academic economics journal published by the Center for the Study of Market Processes at George Mason University. The journal developed Austrian and Public Choice approaches to economic theory, and a free market understanding of political economy.

Mr. Kibbe started his professional career at Citizens for a Sound Economy, serving as a policy analyst between 1986 and 1988. Matt did graduate work in the economics department at George Mason University and received his BA in Economics from Grove City College.

Mr. Kibbe has written extensively on economics, public policy and politics. His writings have appeared in outlets such as USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Reason, Market Process and The Journal of Regulation and Social Costs.

Brad Thompson's Speech to the CEC May 28th, 2008

2008-06-09T15:40:00.008-04:00

For a DVD or audio CD of this presentation, please contact Kathryn Robinson.

May 2008 Meeting

2008-05-01T16:00:00.011-04:00

"Defending Businessmen and Saving America"
by
Dr. Bradley Thompson
Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism
Wednesday, May 28th
Summit Club (Founder's Lounge)

A friendly reminder: the meeting starts promptly at noon.

C. Bradley Thompson is the BB&T Research Professor at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He has also been a visiting fellow at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the University of London.

Professor Thompson is the author of the prize-winning book John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty. He has also edited The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader and was an associate editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. His current book project is on “The Ideological Origins of American Constitutionalism."

Dr. Thompson is also an occasional writer for The Times Literary Supplement of London. He has lectured around the country on education reform and the American Revolution, and his op-ed essays have appeared in scores of newspapers around the country and abroad. Dr. Thompson's lectures on the political thought of John Adams have twice appeared on C-SPAN television.

RSVP to Kathryn Robinson

Health Care Reform on the Nation's Agenda

2008-02-22T07:34:00.003-05:00

This is a copy of the presentation by Dr. Robert Sade of MUSC to the Columbia Economics Club on February 12, 2008.

Dr. Robert Sade on Health Care

2008-02-13T10:40:00.002-05:00

Dr. Robert Sade of MUSC was our speaker at our last meeting of the 2007 - 2008 year. Here are a few of his comments.

"Under the current health care system in the United States, when people purchase $1.00 of health care, they only use 10 cents of their own money."

"The structure of society should reflect the needs of most people, not the least competent."

"In the last hundred years, sanitary engineers have saved more lives than doctors."

How to Fix Healthcare

2008-01-30T14:25:00.001-05:00

Attention Members!

Please join us for our next meeting, which will be held on Tuesday, February 12th at the Summit Club (East Room). The meeting will start promptly at noon.

Our guest speaker will be Dr. Robert M. Sade, M.D. and his topic will be:

"Health Care Reform on the Nation's Agenda: Ethical Foundations, Policy Goals, and How to Get There"

Robert Sade is a pediatric cardiac surgeon, Professor of Surgery, and Director of the Institute of Human Values in Health Care at the Medical University of South Carolina. He has written several hundred articles, book chapters, and books on cardiothoracic surgery, medical education, biomedical ethics, and health policy, currently serves as an editor of both the Annals of Thoracic Surgery and the Journal of Philosophy and Medicine, and has edited over a dozen special symposium issues in peer-review journals on bioethics topics.

Dr. Sade currently chairs the Ethics Committee of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, and chairs the Standards and Ethics Committee of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. He was a member of the American Medical Association’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs for seven years, and recently retired as chair of the Council.

Please keep in mind that only members and their guests will be invited to join us for luncheon. If you still have yet to confirm your membership or have any questions, please feel free to contact our membership chair, Matthew McFadden at 803-251-3264.

Please RSVP by Monday, February 11th to Kathryn Robinson at 803-251-3267 or via email.

October 2007 Meeting!

2007-10-05T10:02:00.001-04:00

"Economics at the Pump:
An Application of Experimental Economics to Policy"

Dr. Bart Wilson, George Mason University

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Date: Thursday, October 25
Location: Palmetto Club (Frank Smith Room)
Time: Noon Luncheon
Parking: First Citizens Parking Garage (underground) via Lady Street
RSVP: Kathryn Robinson at 803-251-3267 or Email
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Dr. Bart Wilson studies the relatively new field of experimental economics, a groundbreaking and successful effort to apply scientific standards of proof to economic questions in reproducible laboratory work.

In this fun and interactive presentation, you will actually participate in experimental economics, demonstrating how well-intentioned interventions by the government backfire because they cannot account for the complex incentives in an intricate industry.

You will enjoy a brief introduction to the background of experimental economics. Then, you will work on a portable laboratory of networked computers and gain firsthand experience with experimental economics.

Please join us on Thursday, October 25th, at the Palmetto Club (Frank Smith Room).

Remember there is free parking for the Palmetto Club in the First Citizens Parking Garage (underground) which is accessed via Lady Street behind the club.

The meeting will start promptly at noon.

Please keep in mind that only members and their guests will be invited to join us for this upcoming luncheon. If you still have yet to confirm your membership or have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly at 251-3290.

Please RSVP by Tuesday, October 23rd to Kathryn Robinson at 251-3267.

Change in Location!

2007-07-17T15:25:00.001-04:00

NOTICE TO MEMBERS

The August 2007 meeting of the Columbia Economics Club featuring Michael Santoli has been moved to the Palmetto Club.

Same time, same date.

We apologize for the change. We ran into a schedule conflict with the Summit Club for this date and this date only.

We expect to return to the Summit Club in the near future.

Barron's Editor to Speak to CEC

2007-05-31T11:55:00.003-04:00

"BOOM OR GLOOM?
Risks and Opportunities in the Economy"

Michael Santoli
Associate Editor for Barron's
Dow Jones & Co., New York

Noon at The Palmetto Club
The McMeekin Room
Wednesday, 15 August 2007
Columbia, South Carolina
RSVP to Kathryn Kennedy
803-251-3267

Michael Santoli is an Associate Editor for Barron's, The Dow Jones Business and Financial Weekly. He writes the “Streetwise” column, offering a forward-looking take on the financial markets, illuminating market trends and identifying investment opportunities. Mr. Santoli is a regular on-air contributor to the CNBC cable network, including appearances every Friday evening and Monday morning to discuss investment ideas from each week’s Barron’s.

RSVP to Kathryn Kennedy

What We Learned from Margaret Thatcher

2007-05-30T13:44:00.007-04:00

View John Blundell's presentation on "Achieving Change: What We Learned from Margaret Thatcher" from a link at the Heritage Foundation.

Click here.

John spoke to the Columbia Economics Club on Wednesday, 2 May 2007.