News Snapshot:
Charles Dunst’s “aspirational” book about how democracies can do a better job of competing with autocracies is bursting with statistics and lots of common sense. The statistics are there to convince us that many autocracies spend much more sensibly than the world’s richest democracies do. A few examples: China has increased spending on education as a percentage of its gross domestic product by 75% since 1975. In 2018, 15-year-old Chinese students had the highest average scores in the world on tests for math, science and reading, followed by Singapore, Macao and Hong Kong – “none of which is a democracy”....
