Max Gulker explains that, “as regulators fight big tech mergers, startups often pay the price.”
Congratulations to the University of Florida for closing up its DEI bureaucracy. Two slices:
The University of Florida said it is dismissing all DEI staff, closing its DEI office and halting DEI contracts with outside vendors. The school also announced the laid-off staff would get 12 weeks of severance, and that the $5 million saved from the cost of DEI would go to a “faculty recruitment fund.” That’s a wrap, folks.
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The era of DEI arose rapidly in recent years, and it has burrowed itself into institutions across American life. It will take leadership to remove it. Kudos to Florida’s government and now its namesake university for ending what has become a divisive political power grab using race, gender and pronouns as cudgels. Who wants to step up next?
Speaking of the poisonous mix of ‘ideas’ and emotions that is DEI, here’s Bob Graboyes.
Arnold Kling writes intelligently about intelligence. A slice:
Human intelligence is collective. Pretty much everything I know I learned from other people, either directly or indirectly.
GMU Econ alum Caleb Fuller explains that economic incidence differs from legal incidence.
To fully appreciate this turn of events, recall that one of the sillier intellectual tics of the 2000s was the notion that China’s authoritarian regime had figured out how to Solve Big Problems and Deliver Economic Growth in a way that democracies—especially American democracy—couldn’t. The concept found its fullest expression in a New York Times columnist’s wistful imaginings in the early years of Barack Obama’s first presidential term about what might have happened if the U.S. could “be China for a day.”
The “China for a day” meme conflated two distinct concepts. The Communist Party’s capacity to mobilize vast resources in support of its political or economic goals operates independently of whether a given goal is the right one. That’s why more democratic paralysis—the proper word actually is “reflection”—would have benefited China. A more sclerotic system might have avoided the public-works overbuilding boom now in danger of bankrupting local governments. It likewise would have been able to avoid the human and demographic disaster of the one-child policy.
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal fondly remembers Brian Mulroney.
Like Reagan and Thatcher in their countries, he privatized some of Canada’s largest companies, including Air Canada and Petro-Canada. He was an ardent free trader and a leader in promoting a trade deal across the Western Hemisphere.
The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 1987 aimed to eliminate all bilateral tariffs by 1998. It was controversial in Canada, whose people are wary of being portrayed as a junior partner to the U.S. But he rode the deal to another election victory in 1988, the first re-election by a Conservative government in a century. The trade deal helped integrate the two North American economies, and it set the stage for the Nafta deal with Mexico in 1993.
Pondering America’s 2024 presidential election, George Will asks:
How did the nation saddle itself with a selection process for presidential candidates that has produced this?
