The Wall Street Journal has an article on Yang Jisheng, who experienced the tragedy of large-scale central planning:

Jisheng went on to write a book on that man-made famine, Tombstone, which came out last year to critical acclaim:

“Tombstone easily supersedes all previous chronicles of the famine, and is one of the best insider accounts of the Party’s inner workings during this period, offering an unrivalled picture of socioeconomic engineering within a rigid ideological framework . . . meticulously researched.” —Pankaj Mishra, The New Yorker

Jisheng was influenced by Hayek's Road to Serfdom. I haven't read that book. But I have read Hayek's article on the price system, The Use of Knowledge in Society, which is easily one of the most important works ever written in economics. Whenever we're in the mood for a little socioeconomic engineering, we should read and re-read that article and think hard about whether we really know enough to intervene and override the price system.

I have switched parties! A longtime reluctant Democrat, I am now an enthusiastic Centrist. I just finished Charles Wheelan's excellent book, The Centrist Manifesto, and find myself strangely optimistic about fixing politics in America. I urge you to read the book or at least the summary.

Wheelan proposes a new party, the Centrist Party, which takes the best ideas of Democrats (social progressiveness, concern for the disadvantaged) and the best ideas of Republicans (fiscal conservatism, awareness of the limits of government intervention) and combines them with a willingess to compromise on values where reasonable people can differ (abortion, guns). I think most moderate Democrats and most moderate Republicans will support most of the positions he takes.

Wheelan then goes on to outline a plan where four or five Centrist Party senators can win elections in swing states, become the swing voters in the Senate, and essentially run the country. Audacious. But it might just work. It would bring sanity and compromise back to American politics, which has become dysfunctionally partisan and unable to tackle important issues effectively these last fifteen years.

Please visit the Centrist Party's website. If you support the positions (and I'm confident most moderates will), then do something about it. Sign up for the newsletter, donate, and promote it any way you can. This is a movement that has the potential to accomplish great things. I can honestly say that this is the first political movement I have come across that I have been truly enthusiastic about.

Education in India is as bad now as when I left 19 years ago. Thane Richard, a student at Brown University, was appalled by what he saw when he was an exchange student at one of India's premier colleges, St. Stephens College in Delhi. He describes his experience in an article in the Hindu.

"In one economic history class the professor would enter the room, take attendance, open his notebook, and begin reading. He would read his notes word for word while we, his students, copied these notes word for word until the bell sounded. Next class he would find the spot where the bell had interrupted him, like a storyteller reading to children and trying to recall where he had last put down the story. He would even pause slightly at the end of a long sentence to give us enough time to finish writing before he moved on.[...] I would sit in class and think to myself “Can you just photocopy your notebook and give me the notes so I can spend my time doing something less completely useless?” I refused to participate. Instead, I sat at my desk writing letters to friends."

I remember this sort of thing from my school days in India. I couldn't wait to escape to college in the United States. I bet the situation is no different in most developing countries. What a waste of human capital. I can't wait for MOOCs to fix education in these parts of the world. It's only a matter of time.