Liberal Archive - Taiwan
2025.11.27

Mask Supply: Where Do Masks Come From?

This article analyzes Taiwan’s COVID-19 mask shortage from an economic perspective, arguing that the problem is fundamentally one of excess demand rather than insufficient effort or morality. The author explains how pri...
2025.11.27

Educational Quality Is a Matter of Institutions, Not Individuals

This article argues that the quality of education in Taiwan is primarily an institutional issue rather than a matter of individual teachers’ character or effort. Drawing on personal experiences as a parent, university t...
2025.11.17

Tuition and Social Mobility

Luo challenges the common fear that deregulating university tuition would harm the poor by closing off their path to upward mobility. He argues that people enroll whenever the benefits of a degree—higher wages, social n...
2025.11.17

What Does the Future Hold?

Luo cautions against confident long-range social forecasting built on vague impressions and simple linear extrapolation rather than rigorous analysis of how the past became the present. His central illustration is Taiwan...
2025.11.17

Who Pays for the Pension?

The new scheme's "employer-funded" 6% pension contribution is really part of workers' wages, recouped through slower raises; workers merely collect their own money. State-enterprise unions push for 12% because their publ...
2025.11.17

A Dollar Is Not Always a Dollar

Relabeling a cost doesn't make it disappear: excluding teachers' pensions from "education funds," or plugging the health-insurance gap with "general budget" rather than premiums, still draws on tax revenue. Governments p...
2025.11.17

To Worry Before the Rest of the World Worries

Fertility-disaster prophecies rest on misread statistics: a "total fertility rate of 1.2" merely sums one year's age-specific birth probabilities and misleads in a society where marriage and schooling patterns are in flu...
2025.11.17

Where Do "Itinerant Teachers" Come From?

Taiwan's 30,000 "itinerant teachers" are blamed on free-market competition, but the real cause is the reverse: the government sets above-market pay, drawing in too many aspirants, while also fixing demand through student...
2025.11.17

The Elite and "Populism"

When self-styled elites decry "populism"—claiming ignorant voters are easily misled while their wise counsel goes unheard—the charge masks their own failure to persuade. Voters aren't more benighted; education and info...
2025.11.17

Where Do Spoiled Ballots Come From?

Spoiled ballots surged to 337,297 (2.55%) in the presidential election. Testing three explanations against the data, spatial patterns refute both "rigging" (highest rates fell in non-DPP counties) and a "spoiled-ballot m...
2025.11.17

Youth Unemployment: Appearance and Reality

Youth unemployment of 11.9% looks alarming, but the unemployment rate alone misleads. As schooling expanded, labor-force participation among 15–19-year-olds collapsed from 44% (1978) to 13% (2002), so a 14.57% rate equa...
2025.11.17

Low Tuition and the Rationing of Educational Opportunity

Taiwan's fierce exam competition stemmed from the government rationing university places to about 10% of each cohort. "Low tuition" and this rationing were inseparable: heavy subsidies, limited by fiscal capacity, capped...