As well as in Harry Potter’s school (Hogwarts), the University of Oxford is divided into houses. Hogwarts is divided into Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Slytherin, while Oxford has about 40 colleges. All students belong to a house (i.e. college), and each college has its own common room and grounds that cannot be accessed by any other Oxford student. As well as in Harry Potter, you can "say" you want to go to a certain college during your application and the “sorting hat” will take that into consideration. I would say that the "sorting hat" had problems deciding where to put me (hahaha) but I ended up being "sorted" to go to Exeter College (photos and video below), which is one of the oldest (706 years old) and most selective colleges at Oxford. Although Exeter only has 500ish students, we have several highly influential people among our former students, including J. R. R. Tolkien (writer of the Lord of the Rings and the father of modern fantasy literature), Sydney Brenner (the 2002 Nobel Laureate in Medicine for his discoveries on the genetic code), Liaquat Ali Khan (the first prime minister of Pakistan), and John Kufuor (the former President of Ghana). As any Oxonian would say: my college is clearly the best college! Floreat exon!
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Oxford: The USA and Great Britain have some of the world's greatest centres of learning, but I propose the motion that Oxford is the world's best university.
Harvard: I oppose the motion on the grounds that Harvard is quite clearly the world's best university. You may be Britain’s best university. LSE: You are not even Britain’s greatest. Oxford:Founded in the 11th century (~1096 A.D.), Oxford was the first university in English speaking countries. Harvard:And... then they built a better one. Established in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Oxford: Oxford has 11 libraries, and over 11 million volumes housed on 120 miles of shelving, which is why our English dictionary is the dictionary the world uses, i.e. the Oxford Dictionary. Harvard: The Havard Library is the world's largest academic library system, comprising 79 individual libraries holding about 20.4 million items. Harvard's alumni include eight U.S. presidents, 369 Rhodes Scholars, 252 Marshall Scholars, and 11 Mitchell Scholars. Oxford: Oxford has educated a wide range of notable alumni, including 28 prime ministers of the United Kingdom such as Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson. Of all the post-war prime ministers, only Gordon Brown was educated at a university other than Oxford. LSE: Is that a boast or an apology? Hahah LSE Alumni and staff include 55 past or present heads of state or government and we have the world's largest social and political sciences library. As of 2017, 27% (or 13 out of 49) of all the Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economics have been awarded or jointly awarded to LSE alumni. Out of all European universities, LSE has educated the most billionaires. Oxford: As of October 2020, 72 Nobel Prize laureates, 3 Fields Medalists, and 6 Turing Award winners, have studied, worked, or held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, while our alumni have won 160 Olympic medals. Harvard: As of October 2020, 161 Nobel laureates have been affiliated as students, faculty, or researchers. Harvard students and alumni have founded many notable companies worldwide (such as Microsoft and Facebook), and have also won 10 Academy Awards, 48 Pulitzer Prizes, 108 Olympic medals, and we educated a world record 188 living billionaires. LSE: You mean the dropouts, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg? hahah You are too American focused. A disproportional amount of your students come from your country. You lack diversity. One hundred and fifty-five nationalities are represented amongst the LSE's student body as LSE has the highest percentage of international students (70%) of all world universities. LSE: We educated Juan Manuel Santos who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize "for his resolute efforts to bring […] a war that has cost the lives of at least 220,000 and displaced close to six million people" to an end, and self-made multi-billionaire George Soros who has donated billions to help minorities around the world, such as black, women, indigenous, and gypsies populations. Former US President John F. Kennedy; Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen (the current president of the European Commission); Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger; and academics such as Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, were all students or professors at LSE. Oxford: We educated Bill Clinton, Indira Gandhi, T.E Lawrence, and Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web). The philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes have spent time at Oxford, as have scientific pioneers such as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Adam Smith, and Erwin Schrödinger. Also, the writers Evelyn Waugh, Lewis Carroll, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Graham Greene all studied here. Additionally, we taught the actors Hugh Grant, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Burton, Rowan Atkinson, and Monty Python's Michael Palin and Terry Jones. Harvard:We educated several of the most influential men in history such as John Adams, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama; as well as Hollywood stars Natalie Portman, Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, and Rashida Jones. Several other notable alumni we have include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kamala Harris, Michael Bloomberg, Conan O'Brien, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ray Dalio, Steve Ballmer, among many others. Oxford: I propose... that the motion is tied. LSE: Agreed. Harvard:Agreed. As a below-average student before college, if someone had told me when I was in high school that I was going to be a student of Oxford, London School of Economics, and Harvard, I would have laughed. Some teachers thought I was stupid! The situation changed when I decided to go to university in a place where I could choose my own classes and class times. Moreover, my undergraduate classes were not mandatory and I took full advantage of it. I lost the count of how many times I skipped lectures to study the same subject at home by myself where I thought I was more productive than in the classroom. Despite all professors and many friends recommending me to go to class, I was sure classes were near useless for me. I just could not learn well from pure listening and making class notes was not useful to me. I remember many courses that I only attended the first day of class and exam days. All the other days, I did not attend. In my principle of microeconomics class, I even slept over my midterm and had a final exam worth 100% of the final grade without having attended any lecture. The strategy worked. I graduated with an extremely high-grade point average (GPA) in a 12-time Nobel Laureate winner school in economic sciences, the University of Minnesota, while doing one semester at Harvard University. I continued my studies in several of the most prestigious schools in the world following the same class strategy, i.e. never attending them unless it is mandatory. In these other top schools, which I attended for masters and then Ph.D., my best performances also happened when I did not have to mandatory attendace. Every time I had to go to class, I had below-average performance (just like in high school), and when I had the freedom to skip all classes I had a top of the class performance.
1 - My main point is not to say that classes are useless but to say that not everyone is the same. Many people may be better off with mandatory classes, but some are not like that. Just like me, there are thousands of other students who the teacher/professor may think is stupid but maybe they just do not fit their local education system rules in a variety of ways. Many times the lowest grade students are the smartest in the class, while the highest grade one may be the less intelligent ones. Exam grades, to a large extent, measure how well a person fits into the system and not how smart they are. Every person is different and therefore every student should have different requirements. Not everyone is better off attending classes, not everyone better off taking exams, not everyone must take a specific class or group of classes, etc. In my view, a major education reform is due yesterday. 2 - If I had continued studying in the place I was born, I would most likely have attended a "normal" school and received a "normal" job after. If was born in a fairly rigid educational system, like Germany, where kids are placed in certain track in a very young age, I would probably been placed in a low track, which would likely have led me to relatively low paid jobs and bad job conditions. Instead, I have being getting more money out of passive investment than I spend on a yearly basis since I was 27 (the age I like to joke I "retired"), and I have bought a vacation home in Portugal also in my 20's. All of this happened before I started to work. This capital comes mostly from investments made out of undergraduate internships, part-time research positions during my postgraduate studies, and leftovers from academic scholarships. This brings me to my second point, the goal of the educational system should be to estimulate people to study when there is no need to do so. Today, the mainstream educational system around the world estimulate people to study for a exam but most of this learned information will be forgotten within a few years after the test. This kind of learning can lead to a degree, which can help you to get a job. But education itself is often more important than a job, like my case illustrates. As Einstein was used to say, "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school." Are you well educated or do you just have a bunch of degrees? Massive protests are happening all over the world right now be it due to racism in the US, coronavirus, China's new restrictions on Hong Kong, etc. Most of these protests have extremely legit goals and reasons, e.g. fight against racism, pro-individual freedom, and pro-democracy. However, these protests also highlight a very perverse face of the globe, i.e. the fact that people care much more about their country of residence or birth than others. For example, it is definitely correct to rebels for the unjust death of a black man in the USA, but thousands of black people are killed unjustly around the world and no one says anything. If Floyd's video had happened in Uganda or Nepal there would be about no one on the streets in the USA, although almost everyone agrees that the absurdity of killing the Floyd would be the same anywhere in the world. The unjust death of black people in the US often leads to huge protests but much more black people are unjustly killed outside the country than inside the US, and those outside deaths never lead to huge protests in America. The same can be said about virtually any other protest all over the globe. This is not an American phenomenon. On average, people care much about their country of citizenship or place of residence than anywhere else. If one life in your country is worth much more than one life abroad, then several economic and political tragedies will continue to be inevitable, such as the burning of the Amazon Forest, the economic trade wars, fascist movements, anti-migratory policies, among other types of much greater absurdities. On average, politicians do their best to please the people who have the power to maintain them in office (Geddes, 1995; Bueno de Mesquita et al, 2003) and only local citizens have a vote. Therefore, if the loss of 5 Chinese jobs will lead to the creation of 1 similar job in the US, Americans are likely to approve that and so the president will pursue it. If one job for a person who was luckily born in your country is worth more than a similar job for a non-citizen, refugees and other foreigners in great need will continue to have their entry denied by border authorities. If the burning of the Amazon will make pollution a little bit worse all over the globe but will give huge economic benefits for workers in Brazil, the local government will likely pursue it. As long as people give priority to their national wealth over the worlds' and only local citizens have political power (e.g. a vote), the world as a whole is doomed. I understand that individuals are, on average, egoists in the sense that they care much more about themselves than others. This is the basis of traditional economics and much social science research. However, other factors probably come into play here to reinforce this egoist phenomenon. For example, mainstream media mostly publish local or national news as they are looking to get viewers and not make the world a better place. Therefore, average citizens have relatively little information about foreign news. Another factor that may help with this disproportional reaction to national news in relation to foreign is herd behavior (Asch, 1952; Deutsch and Gerard, 1995). Multiple research has shown that individuals benchmark other people to set their own behavior. Consequently, if no one in their social circles is concerned about something they probably will not be. If all their friends and family are worried out about an issue, they will probably do too. Sources:
As I have explained in another post, in order to make the euro work, Europe needs:
- Fiscal Union (i.e. taxation and expending must be made at the EU level, like the creation of a EU income tax). - Massive wealth redistribution within states (i.e. a huge portion of the revenue of states with greater economic problems must come from Brussels). However, this is pretty much impossible in a world divided by borders. Italians and Greek will not be willing to be taxed by Germans and Germans will not be willing to send their money to Greeks. As I have been saying for years, the idea of "country" is probably the greatest global problem. Citizens of EU citizens should give up their nationality to become Europeans first and let them be taxed and financially managed by Frankfurt and Brussels. This change would probably start from Southern Europe as they are the ones most affected by the current situation. If Southern Europeans do not accept to give up their nationalities to become European first and Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese second, more financial pain will follow. However, I think that nationalities are still too strong in Europe. When abroad and “asked where are from?” Europeans give their countries as the answer. No one says “Europe”. No one is really talking about going to the Olympic Games or Soccer World Cup under a European flag. People cheer pretty strongly for their own countries and that’s it. There is no United Nations of Europe and unfortunately, we will probably never be during our lifetime. Any change in the direction of a United Nations of Europe will likely be pushed back mainly by older generations and people with lower levels of education, possibly encouraged by populist leaders. Southern European economies will be most likely stagnate for decades (much due to brain drain and capital flight) and the euro as we know it today will eventually collapse. The trust that Europeans have on people is amazing! When I was in Europe last year, I easily rented a place based on the "promise" I would pay once I arrived. It was never a problem. Later, the guy who lived downstairs lent me his bike for free for 1 month, although he was abroad, we had never met each other, and we had no mutual friends. This week, the family of the girl who I'm renting the house picked me up at the airport in Brussels to bring me to Antwerp, just because my flight got canceled and I had a long day. I said they really didn't need to do this, but they insisted (fyi: I had already paid everything). In March, a friend of mine is asking if I want to stay in her place in Brussels for free (for the whole month!) while she is traveling! She is an incredible friend of mine, but still... none of that is normal.. none of that should be taken for granted.
In Latin America, these situations would not happen (especially in big cities) due to violence. People are always afraid of crime and to do things like that would be even unsafe. In the US, violence could play a role, but I think the bigger issue would be money. How much is this random guy paying me to rent my bike? Why should I pick up the renter of my daughter's apartment in another city for free? Congratulations to Professor Goodenough! The Swedish institution has awarded at least one Nobel prize to the University of Texas for each of the last 3 years! Not too shabby.
Alma Matter Nobel count: University of Texas at Austin (12) London School of Economics (18) University of Minnesota (25) Harvard University (49) Maybe I have studied in one or two good schools ^^ Para português clique aqui American people, in general, see a strong long-term causal relationship between money and happiness. However, the causal connection between money and happiness has been questioned for decades (e.g. Brickman et al, 1978). As pointed out by the Easterlin Paradox (1974), happiness does not always trend upward as real income continues to grow. According to Nobel Laureates Kahneman and Deaton, happiness can be divided into two parts: emotional well-being and life evaluation. For example, when your grandma who was 100-year old dies of natural causes, and you are questioned how happy you are feeling from 0 to 10, you may say 0 (i.e. emotional well-being). However, if you are asked to rate your life happiness from 0 to 10, you may say 10 (i.e. life evaluation). The fact that your grandma died at 100-year old of natural causes may not change life evaluation in terms of happiness. The best empirical evidence indicates that emotional well-being does not change after some monetary point, in the US this would be around 75 thousand dollars/year. In other words, the fact that someone makes US$ 1 billion per year and you make 75 thousand, provides no evidence that they are happier than you, in terms of well-being (Kahneman and Deaton, 2010). Additionally, even this 75 thousand/year happiness level is questionable. Studies have argued that relative wealth can be more important for happiness than absolute wealth, where absolute wealth is your nominal monetary income and relative wealth is your monetary income measured in relation to other members of society, (e.g. Veenhoven, 1991; Fliessbach et al, 2007). Some studies report that individuals living in rich countries are not happier than in poor countries (Easterlin, 1974) and happiness is uncorrelated to stable living conditions (Inglehart and Rabier, 1984). Therefore, in poorer countries (i.e. most the world), this "required" number of ~$75000 could be even lower. From another perspective, many people in the US depict life in poor countries as sad. The average person living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, for example, earns US$460/month. However, 85% of the favela residents like the place where they live, 80% are proud of where they live, and 70% would continue to live in their communities even if their income doubled (Data Popular Institute, 2013). (See our post on the Chilean 2019 Protest for another example). Money by itself cannot make most people happy. Massive surveys adding up to 1.3 million randomly sampled individuals from 51 countries all indicate the same pattern: people are happier "in their late teens and early 20s. But as the years roll by, people become more and more miserable, hitting a nadir in life satisfaction sometime around the early 50s." Thus, although individuals' income tends to increase from one's late teens until their 50s, happiness levels constantly decrease (See graphs below). Moreover, many of the highest suicide rates in the world are in rich countries: US, Japan, Finland, South Korea, etc (United Nations World Health Organization, 2016). A salary increase from $75,000 to $500,000 may make you happy but this happiness can be temporary and it is not related to an intrinsic human need. Many people get happy when they buy a Ferrari (or any material good) because they were raised with that goal or they put that as expectation at some home point in their lives. The point is, an increase in happiness from $75,000 to $500,000 can be a factor of the cultural environment you are raised in. Not an intrinsic need for the human body, like eating and sleeping. No one needs half a million to meet basic human needs, probably not even $75,000. If anything, developed countries (especially the US) need to change the culture of their citizens to make people happier. Life evaluation, on the other hand, seems to constantly increase with income growth (Kahneman and Deaton, 2010) with a diminishing return to scale. That is, a 10% salary increase for the average worker in Congo and Norway has the same positive effect on life evaluation, but the 10% wage growth of an average worker in Norway is a much greater monetary amount than the 10% wage growth of the average worker in Congo. This happens because the average salary in Norway is much higher than in Congo. In other words, if you give the median Norwegian worker a 100 dollar monthly salary raise they would not be much happier, but if you give a 100 dollar monthly salary raise to an average worker where the mean workers make less than 1 dollar a day then they would be happy. Therefore, very low amounts of money are associated with low happiness levels in both measures, well-being and life evaluations. If you have a limited amount of money that you want to donate and make the most with that money, in terms of improvement of happiness, you should donate to the very poorest countries in the world. Also according to Daniel Kahneman, happiness seems to be related to achieving expectations or goals. Many people in the US have the goal of getting rich and that hard work is a fundamental part of "success," in which “success” is defined by economic output. However, the relationship between mean child income ranks and parent income ranks is "almost perfectly linear" in the US even after controlling for race, educational level, gender, parents’ marital status, and other factors (Chetty et al., 2014: 2). The truth is that most rich people today are the ones who had investments in the 70s and 80s and not necessarily the ones who worked harder (Piketty, 2014). Therefore, Americans are creating expectations that most will not likely be able to fulfill, regardless of how hard they work, and this could potentially decrease their happiness levels. Thus, it is unclear that redistributing money from billionaires to people who already have their basic necessities covered (e.g. ~$75000) will make Americans happier. Although many people in the US (and beyond) feel happy when they have more money, such feeling could be illusory, temporary, or could be caused by the way they were raised and not by human biological necessities, i.e. hearing from everyone that “you need money to be happy;” “the more money you have the happier you are;” “you want to be like the rich people.” A possibly better policy is to try to change America's culture so that people do not feel bad for not achieving their monetary goals, people do not envy richer individuals, people do not give up on their close relationships due to money, etc. On the other hand, life evaluations do seem to increase with income, although money has a diminishing return to scale. Therefore, a monetary donation to make people happy should be directed to the poorest of the poor, which are almost always outside developed countries. Very low-income levels are associated with low happiness levels in both measures of happiness, well-being and life evaluations. Inequality, however, is clearly a major problem for freedom. Check our article "Inequality and Freedom". Sources:
People in the developed world usually portrait life in developing states very badly as if an average individual from these places were deprived from "reasonable" human conditions. The first major problem with this reasoning is that the "developing/third world" category is just too broad. It combines states with life expectancy higher than the US (e.g. Chile) with countries where more than 50% of the population live with less than US$1.25 per day (e.g. Sierra Leone). More specifically, many depict life in Rio de Janeiro's favela, for example, as poor and sad. Data from 2013 indicates that the average person living in the slums of Rio earn US$460/month but the median income of the world is US$243/month (Gallup). Therefore, in fact, the average person in a favela has almost 2x more money than the median human being. Second, a same year study from the Data Popular Institute indicates that 85% of favela residents like the place where they live, 80% are proud of where they live and 70% would continue to live in their communities, even if their income doubled. Meanwhile, many of the highest suicide rates in the world are in rich countries. Economic gains can generate short term happiness but wealth in itself has no correlation with quality of life (after a very low line). Third, humans do not necessarily need $15/hour or 1000 euro/month to live well. This argument is flawed.
The more I see and study the world, the more convinced I am that the biggest problem of our time is that the globe is divided into countries. Individuals, in general, choose to maintain or remove political leaders according to what they think is best for themselves. For example, no one votes thinking "oh, this guy/girl will be terrible for me and my country but will be amazing for the world, so I will vote for him/her." Individuals support leaders thinking primarily on their own good, not the good of others. Political leaders want to stay in power so they will do/say whatever their electorate thinks is best for them, even if it makes the rest of the world worse off: let the amazon forest burn, start trade or currency wars, close borders to foreigners fleeing wars, etc.
As long as the world is divided into countries and only the population of each country can choose their own leaders these tragedies will continue to happen. There is relatively little foreign states can do to influence governments abroad as sovereign countries are free to choose their own policies. In my view, the only way to stop these tragedies is to get to the root of the problem, i.e. removing all country borders. Otherwise, despite all the protests around the world, less than 25% of war refugees will be allowed to live in developed countries (as it continues to be the situation with the Syrian refugees), Trump will continue its economic war with China (potentially leading to the global recession in the next couple of years), the Amazon forest will continue to burn, among many others. |
AuthorPedro Moraya Barros is the Founder & Owner at Moraya Consulting and Ph.D. Researcher in Foreign Investment and International Taxation Archives
October 2020
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