What Does Education Have To Do With The Price Of Oil?

Besides growing more expensive, more rapidly, education and oil are essentially unrelated. Or, so says this post that uses data from the U.S. Department of Education and Global Financial Data to demonstrate the price of education has grown at a significantly faster rate than that of oil. Specifically, in real dollar terms, oil is shown to have increased in price by 2.4x since 1929 while education costs have increased 10x.

A commenter from the the above linked post noted the absurdity of comparing oil and education and suggested it makes about as much sense as comparing sugar prices to the per capita expense of road building noting, "the comparison wouldn't demonstrate anything at all." So, I guess that would mean comparing roads to education would be out of line too? Unless of course, the example was used to demonstrate that all public expenses have increased at a faster rate than private sector salaries, faster than the economy as a whole (here, and here), or commodity prices.

 

Comments

[Curtis Hier]

Of course, we know fuel prices are not the primary cost driver of our education spending. From 2001-2004, fuel prices actually went down, while our education spending went up 18 percent.

[George Cross]

"Lose $8 billion, pocket $160 million?

"Stan O'Neal will be remembered for the massive write-down Merrill Lynch took under his watch. He leaves the Wall Street firm with his reputation in shreds but with a rich exit package."

Yup, the private sector runs everything effectively, efficiently and productively. Whoops, what happened at Merrill Lynch? The bad news is this is not an isolated case.

[GreggB]

Centralized gov't the answer George? Stalin had a good run with that didn't he, what was the price? 100 million lives or so? Without accounting for the poverty of the masses. I'll take a bucketload of bad apple(or incompetent, I'm unaware of the details of Mr. O'neals downfall) investment bankers over central gov't anyday.

[George Cross]

My remarks have never suggested one form of enterprise was any better than the other. I am simply pointing out that the "free market" also has its problems. Sort of a counter-punch to all the anti public sector babble that emits from this blog. Hey, someone has to do it!