If I must address the article, it is the same kind of ham-handed shilling I have come to expect from them.
"Researchers" say this. "Researchers" say that. Then at the very bottom, regard:
"Note: Working papers have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications."
Scam the kids into college! Wait, no, scam them into trade school! Scam them into whatever lego shape industry thinks that it needs at the moment.
That, and the whole "Germany does this, Germany does that" angle is also highly disingenuous. Even skippy at CNBC knows good and well that Germany is a protected market, and that any kind of directed effort towards cranking out more tradesmen in the US of A is going to result in underemployed tradesmen and big discounts for the few places that actually employ them.
The source is the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER is not unreliable.
> "Researchers" say this. "Researchers" say that.
Scientists often disagree with each other or with previous scientists as more data and tools become available. I'm not sure why that makes you so angry?
> "Note: Working papers have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications."
This is standard boiler plate for every NBER working paper. If you don't read a lot of NBER papers it is understandable that you think it signifies more than it actually does. This was a conference paper presented at 3 different conferences.
The paper isn't just about Germany. It is uses a variety of data sources to investigate look at the cross-country evidence from 21 countries. They perform a series of regressions on the data.
Germany vs. US is presented as a case study. The research paper acknowledges all of the things that you think they are too dumb to notice.
They also present Thailand vs. Vietnam as a case study.
I generally find that it helps to actually read the underlying research before criticizing it.
Where did I criticize the paper? I was criticizing how CNBC used it to fulfill the agenda of whichever PR firm they happen to be shilling for at the moment.
I'm sure the researchers did enumerate more things than the CNBC article, since the article said very little.
I think the publisher is a very important issue for anything. If I read 'the CIA killed Kennedy', it makes a big difference if it's a random blogger or the NY Times. The same goes for reading that 'Linux is the most secure OS' - who is saying it?
