Low grading standards in university education departments will negatively affect the accumulation of skills for prospective teachers and contribute to a larger culture of low standards for educators.

How ethical are politicians these days? According to recent polls, it"s a mixed bag.

Are teachers paid too much? It's a question that would ignite heated debate at the most mellow of cocktail parties. But it's a question that AEI took head-on this year.

How did the financial system accumulate an unprecedented number of risky mortgages?

Efforts to blame the banks for the financial crisis are failing because they are not supported by data. The key fact is that, by 2008, before the crisis, half of the 54 million mortgages in the U.S. financial system were subprime and other low-quality mortgages.

Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

The mortgage meltdown and ensuing financial crisis were the result of an unprecedented accumulation of weak and risky Non-Traditional Mortgages (NTMs). By mid-2008 about one-half of outstanding all loans were NTMs. The early 1990s is the appropriate benchmark since shortly thereafter government policies required the broad-based introduction of “flexible underwriting standards.”

The federal government has taken over large swaths of consumer lending, most notably the $10 trillion home mortgage and $1 trillion student lending markets. The government's share of new loans for each now approaches 100%.Government monopolies in financial services pose risks to taxpayers as well as borrowers