they were learning algebra in trigonometry. eventually the stress got to eric and he dropped out. how do you compare that to the moonbound schools? definitely america is in the moonbound category in most places, so when we think kids are taking high-stakes tests, they re nothing like what asia is dealing with. a much healthier model is a place like finland where when the kids are in school, they re doing pretty high-quality, challenging work and they ve got quality-educated teachers who getting into that school is as good as getting into a quality school in the united states. and 10% of people who want to be teachers can be teachers. a very respected profession.
of the roman empire, almost never works. it s difficult to get people to have kids. paul: the roman analogy is not optimistic. if it s hard to get people to change the culture are there government solutions to this and public policies to negotiate? there are public policy solutions out there. if you look the at asia and europe, there are lots of countries in the last 40 years which have tried to boost their fertility rate through i would say crudely liberal solutions, and then crudely conservative solutions which are tax incentive based and the research shows that the efficacy of both camps is pretty low. and you get about 1/2 a percentage point increase in the fertility rate. paul: leave us with one optimistic note here. what could we do? so the one optimistic note here is that isn t that people don t want
you can go back to the falling of the roman empire, almost never works. it s difficult to get people to have kids. paul: the roman analogy is not optimistic. if it s hard to get people to change the culture are there government solutions to this and public policies to negotiate? there are public policy solutions out there. if you look the at asia and europe, there are lots of countries in the last 40 years which have tried to boost their fertility rate through i would say crudely liberal solutions, and then crudely conservative solutions which are tax incentive based and the research shows that the efficacy of both camps is pretty low. and you get about 1/2 a percentage point increase in the fertility rate. paul: leave us with one optimistic note here. what could we do? so the one optimistic note here is that isn t that people don t want
and her work on consumer protection and financial education should continue and i hope she can find a way to continue her career. but there s a political dimension to this for obama and the white house. they wanted to keep petraeus. petraeus is very important, credible. as we know from history, cia directors can cause presidents great grief. the bay of pigs, wmd not in iraq and so forth. also, they can do very important things for presidents, like the bin laden raid, which was a covert cia i know from spending time with him in his current role, how much he loved this job, engaged by this job and had tremendous bandwidth in terms of his counterterror operation. a lot of questions who replaces him. very quickly, he was transforming the agency. add rocky start but he was seeing a global vision, the economic future, looking at asia, looking at china. he was going well beyond the counterterror operations. really transform that.
house. they wanted to keep petraeus. petraeus is very important, credible. as we know from history, sue yau directors can cause presidents great grief. the bay of pigs. wmd not in iraq and so forth. also, they can do very important things for presidents like the bin laden raid, which was a covert cia and i know from spending time with him in his current role how much he loved this job, was engaged by this job, and had tremendous band width in terms of his counterterror operations. so there will be a lot of questions about who replaces him and he was transforming the agency. he had a rocky start. but he was seeing a global visi vision, the economic future, looking at asia, looking at china. he was going well beyond the counterterror operations. really transform that. he did the honorable thing. he had to resign given this. i don t think there was any question. more on this when we discuss it with our roundtable, andrea mitchell, bob woodward, thank you both very much. i wa