Skip to content

Category: Politics

Do Democrats and Republicans Grade Differently?

Apparently:

“When it comes to grading, Republican and Democratic professors at one unnamed elite university put their ideologies into practice, a new study finds: Republicans welcomed inequality, handing out more very high and very low grades, and Democrats’ grades grouped more tightly around the average.

Republicans also gave black students lower grades than their colleagues. In both cases, the researchers stressed, there was no way to know which approach better reflected students’ performance.”

Secretary Clinton on Rising Food Prices

From WRAL news:

“Speaking to a room full of ambassadors to the Rome-based United Nations food agencies, Clinton warned that some countries had adopted ‘unwise’ policies such as export bans during the 2007-2008 food crises ‘that only made matters worse’ by driving up prices, encouraging hoarding and panic buying and discouraging farmers from producing more. (…)

‘Rising food prices can have a positive effect if they send a signal to farmers to grow and sell more. But that can only happen if there is transparency in markets and stocks, so signals about prices and food supply are accurately received,’ Clinton said.

She called for countries to adopt better policies this time around and said the United States was working with developing and industrialized nations ‘to encourage everyone to respond to rising food prices not with failed policies of the past but with a sounder approach.'”

Secretary Clinton is right. Developing countries should resist the temptation to close themselves off to international trade by restricting food exports. Such measures only serve to exacerbate the problem of raising food prices. This in turn increases the number of people suffering from hunger.

What can be done to curb rising food prices? First off, investments in agricultural research and biotechnology have the potential to bring considerable productivity gains in agriculture. Second, the US government should allow developing countries to truly tap into their comparative advantage instead of undercutting them by subsidizing American farmers.

(HT: Camille Jackson.)