The growth of the Shanghai Financial district is phenomenal!  Apparently 20 years ago that bank of the river was still farm country, dark at night.  But look at the bright lights in the header picture now!  The second tallest building in the world (101 stories) is there.

Two articles I recently read I still reflect on.  The first, 17 Facts About China That Will Blow Your Mind, shows both the rapid growth and incipient problems China may face.  But the second by investor Vitaliy N. Katsenelson of ContrarianEdge is even more thought-provoking.  He argues, in slides starting here, that China’s enormous growth rates haven’t been built on anything real, but rather has been forced by a command economy that he feels is about ready to collapse, as the leaders have taken to creating cities and malls with no residents and to making bad stimulus investments based more on bribes than on sound cash-flow investments.  And now he argues that the Chinese bubble is about to burst.  If so, the consequences will not stay in China.

Normally contrarian investors do no better in the long run than regular ones (they all loose), but his arguments about China as a “mother of all grey swans” provides food for thought.  In the meantime there is lots of development and motion in the Chinese economy and daily life, as seen in the photo below of the massive traffic — and traffic jams — in Beijing.

Are charter schools really the best way to educate all children, as the recent movie Waiting for Superman would have us believe?  Or is that movie false-consciousness propaganda paid for by Wall Street to advance the belief that public schools are so bad that only private investments can save them, advancing the narrative that government cannot do anything well?  Michael T. Martin in his blog To Starve the Beast We Must Drown the Children advances the argument that Wall Street financiers willingly invest to spread the belief that public schools are failures and must be privatized. Whose job does that understanding depends on?  Making the $700 billion annual US expenditures for K-12 education available for private management and profit.

Diane Ravich, in her summary of Charter School literature in the New York Review of Books on The Myth of Charter Schools also calls the film propaganda.   The most telling statistic she cites – while a major study finds 17% of the US Charter Schools are outstanding, it also finds that 37% of the same type of schools are very poor.  Did the documentary discuss the failing charter schools?  Or would that defeat the purpose of advancing the narrative that schooling is something that must be privatized in order to be good?