Vox populi

Mostly didn't hear very good answers. I see a couple points of agreement (carbon tax is simpler and better than cap and trade, but difficult to implement, GBI was good but he seems to be talking in multiple directions on that point that don't have much to do with basic income provisions that it's not focused enough to make sense to someone what that would involve).

He worries me on two points if I'm to define these, from what came up in the interview (there's a third point that I've been hammering on that didn't even come up, which I'm not sure if that's Sanders problem or Klein's or both).

1) IR. When he says "we are all realists", this to me says he doesn't know enough or care enough about the topic to discuss it seriously or rigorously. Realism is a specific IR school of thought*.  That's why Klein asked about it. If I'm voting for Presidential candidates, my number one concern is foreign policy and what sort of crazy and potentially damaging things this person might want to do or at least what kinds of basis they might have for doing something crazy. If they have little or no grounding for their positions on this, then they're likelier to give over control of the IR state to the existing interventionist bipartisan consensus (this is sort of what happened to Obama as his IR diagnosis seemed limited to "Iraq was bad", which was true, but wasn't a total critique of our current models of interventions by military force or a plan to use diplomatic efforts to get what you want done instead, etc). His answer does not give me some idea what his basis for interventions or warfare actually is, or what sorts of diplomatic engagement he would prefer, and his lack of seriousness with the question suggests he doesn't have one. Sanders doesn't strike me as crazy as most of the GOP candidates, but the fact that he doesn't seem to care much about IR bothers me.

This is by far the most power a President possesses under our current legal frame. Most of a President's domestic agenda relies on Congress, or even state and city governments, to get something done, while Congress has effectively abdicated its war powers in most respects. Sanders will have fairly limited, if any, power to enact most of what he suggests he wants to do as an overall agenda. Except on this question. And I don't have some idea what he thinks we should do here. That's not helpful.

*The initial reason I picked Sun Tzu as a nom de plume is my affinity for that school and its decline in American IR over the last 50 years or so I saw as a substantial problem causing us considerable dismay in reckless militarism and interventions without a clear and convincing strategic goal, with predictable results in disastrous and ineffectual wars and national security policies that resemble theater rather than structured responses to real (or imagined) problems. That Sanders dismissed it so casually I see as further evidence of this trend and a knock against him. He can dismiss it in the normative terms it has come to be used in public (for people who are generally neoconservatives) but the academic tree at its roots is still around and easily accessible and someone like Klein isn't asking about it in this way for his health. Klein's a smart cookie and could have pushed back against that kind of flippant response more than "I don't think they are".

2) It seems more important to demagogue the rich in his rhetoric than to describe policies that would deal with inequality or help the poor. That he brings up the boogeyman of the Kochs rather quickly was amusing but not enlightening. He doesn't seem to have any idea what policies the Koch's even support on immigration, and would rather describe more open borders policies as though they are a Koch brothers position as if this is a bad thing in and of itself. Paying people from Sub-Saharan Africa even this meager 2-3 dollars per hour he describes would be a massive boon to their economic welfare and probably more effective than sending millions of dollars of foreign aid. I'm not sure I see the same downside he does there and there are ways around this as a policy problem if it is one, such as guaranteed basic incomes. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I've seen the Kochs endorse an open borders policy in the first place or that it is a "right wing" position even if they had. Libertarians are pretty scattered on immigration but right-wingers are not in favor of it, even legal immigration. Bernie's position of having a pretty restrictive immigration system is probably more in line with "right-wingers" than he thinks it is based on this. "Getting jobs for people" isn't really a government policy for the most part. So I'm more than a little confused by this line of rhetoric.

Sometimes the rich deserve some scorn, but I'm rather less happy about someone who doesn't seem to have another note to play than someone who points out something more difficult to describe than "rich people are evil". Describing the Nordic/Western European welfare states as an ideal is all well and good as they have some interesting policies. But it leaves out that most of those countries possess a strong market ethos (people can start businesses pretty easily for example, easier than here, and school choice has been reasonably popular in Sweden or the UK). Denmark is routinely rated as "more free" economically than the United States despite having a large welfare state even by the pro-market groups that do such ratings. Most of the others are not far behind. More to the point, most of these countries have scaled back or reformed some elements of their welfare state over the last couple of decades. Suggesting that the sustainability of these as policies is dependent on the public's willingness to pay for them in some respect. Most European states actually have less progressive systems of taxation than the US wherein the middle class actually pays quite a lot. This is tolerated because they receive quite a bit back in the form of services offered or benefits (such as generous paid family leave policies). It's possible that is a bargain Americans are willing to make, but it is not clear that anyone offers it. Few people mention that Medicare currently pays out about 3 dollars to every one it takes in so the public believes it is getting what it paid for rather than getting what someone else has paid for. In Europe, the model is probably closer to cost-benefit where many people are getting what they themselves have paid for.

There are also demographic reasons why such states have supported these policies. Other than Germany they're all pretty small. In most cases they have fewer people living there than live in the Chicago metropolitan area. Netherlands is the only country that might fall out of this category. Iceland has fewer people than the area I live in. This means that normative behavior is generally easier to enforce and scale into policy than it can be for a country of 300 million (plus). Most of the European countries have a fairly homogeneous population ethnically as well. It does not seem to be a big deal for people to give assistance and aid to other people who they assume are very much like them for physical and cultural reasons. When it comes to giving aid and assistance to other people who are, in appearance or customs, not like them, most people say "not so much", even these supposedly enlightened Europeans. This is a difficult impediment for getting Americans to go along with a more robust welfare state. Indeed, I'm fairly sure it's a basis point for the ill-fated "drug test people on welfare" idea I discussed the other day. Americans would rather make welfare harder to access based on this logic rather than increase its stability or simplify the processes of providing assistance to the poor because it is perceived, by a substantial majority of people, as giving money to undeserving "others". This is not a casual problem that can be dismissed and the policies implemented anyway over these objections. The racism implied in it is quite real.

European democratic socialists also often possess different political systems (again, Germany might be an exception), where the central governments are often not as limited by jurisprudence and Constitutional law. So ultimately what this doesn't tell me is pretty vast. It doesn't tell me how such policies would be implemented here, rather than how they are used over there, who would carry them out (at what level of governance), and which ideas are or are not good from markets. His response to this question "What is the underlying principle there? What are the situations where you look at a given area of the economy and say, "That's something we should turn over to the market," or, 'That's something we should possibly federalize'?" wasn't helpful as he didn't offer some softball things that could be turned over to markets (because the model countries he likes did so). All he did was point to things on the other end of the lever which I'm not all that fond of. This doesn't offer a model for what he thinks markets are good for, just what he thinks they are ill-disposed for. I'm not necessarily opposed to these ideas, for example I think a universal health care system would have been better than what we have or what the ACA provided. I'm not just not sure I follow why these are big deals or why they would have to be implemented in the way he seems to be describing and how they would help us fight inequality as a social ill. Health care alone as a universal system has a number of options ranging from the UK to Switzerland to Singapore. It doesn't have to be just the one way he seems to prefer.

I'm really not clear on how or why "free college" is a good and necessary reform. College educations still generally pay for themselves, and are generally pursued by people who are coming from relatively well-off socioeconomic status already. While the cost and debt load has risen (the cost in particular), the benefit in post-graduated income and access to the job market readily pays it off such that it's basically like having a really expensive car loan that you can pay off in the time it takes to pay off a house, with income that generally does so. The skill sets are pretty specific and specialised in most cases, which feeds further into a career path that benefits the person paying for it. This means that most of the benefit accrues privately, whereas a K-12 education is intended to provide both a basis for people to jump off to go to college and a set of basic skill sets that everyone benefits from by having a moderately educated population (or workforce). The debt involved is more like individual capital investment (that usually pays off). There are ways we could alleviate this debt load or provide alternative methods of paying it off well before "everyone can go for free" that would resolve this as an economic problem and free up college educated persons to make alternative career decisions to improve economic mobility further. In any case making it "free" doesn't do anything about the basic reasons American colleges have risen in the tuition costs on its own, just as Medicare did not do much about the cost of health care, meaning it potentially adds a substantial cost to the taxpayer without a clear social benefit that accrues to the taxpayers. It looks more like rent seeking behavior to pander to the recent college graduate class (younger and mostly white voters) than a sensible economic proposal as a result. I'm not seeing this as a major social reform that is needed.

Despite college being "free", Germans still graduate fewer people from college than the US does. Suggesting they're doing something else instead to provide for the economic welfare of people than sending more people to college, as "free college" should have to imply to be a good policy (otherwise it is just a handout to relatively well off and well educated people). What seems a better question of higher priority is why our K-12 education doesn't pay for itself anymore as that's where the college pay gap has emerged. "College" pay hasn't risen so much as graduating high school has collapsed as being economically viable on its own. Or perhaps look at what the Germans do that provides for people who don't get into college (eg, better use of apprenticeships, fewer occupational license laws, somewhat more unionization, etc). Another better question might be what we could do to raise the college graduation rates, or look at why or how students wash out, or what we could do to provide for people who must work while attending school to help pay for it with more generous loans or other social welfare changes that have less to do with college, or do things like expand access to accredited online resources or local community colleges that offer (only) basic courses such that students moving on to a four year program or degree can take these basic courses cheaply and then proceed on to these more rigorous demands that only a more specialized program supposedly could offer.

One of the basic questions of economics to me is "why are there people who are prosperous" as the natural state of human beings is scarcity and poverty. Sanders seems to have implicitly answered this question in a way that doesn't interest me very much. To me the answer to that question is not something like a zero sum game where the rich are taking something from everyone else. The model Sanders proposes is the system of economics for capitalist or market society, and which I admit does exist on some level in the US in the form of crony capitalism or rent seeking behavior, is not a model for sustained prosperity (the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and the ongoing struggles in Russia or Greece should demonstrate a reason why, and if you think the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were about something other than poverty and economic structures of cronyism enriching the few, I'm here to tell you are completely wrong). I think it is possible there are kernels of what Sanders says on these questions that move toward an idea that is not zero sum and is a way that the perceived imbalances of worker and corporation can be redressed in the political sphere if not the economic one, but most of the policies he seems to prefer are either not likely to be enacted or not likely to do much about it (indeed, I see the "free college" idea as suggestive of something moving away from this ideal he envisions rather than toward it). The basic problem of the "use government to solve the problem of markets behaving badly" is that it requires governments behave correctly too, and that it may be easy for governments to become co-opted by these nefarious forces they are intended to be policing. That doesn't mean it cannot be done, but it does suggest there is a rather substantial obstacle to dismantling and reforming the structures of power that Sanders believes are impediments to growth and prosperity, much less in the directions he proposes doing so. If something as a agenda is impractical and doesn't seem to be addressing the problems, I'm likely to be not interested and dismiss it as populist nonsense. As I generally have done with Sanders.

3) He barely touches on race or racism as a problem. Klein sort of asks about it, but mostly softballs it. This has been a major problem with his campaign is that the types of policies he talks the most about, for the most part, do not generally help poor minorities in the same way they might help lower middle class or working class whites. The needs of minorities in policy terms are more concrete and immediate, such as better relations with police, or because of this commonly poor relationship, access to job markets that are either which can more easily ignore (often unjust) criminal records. For instance occupational licensing often prevents people from obtaining a license and starting a business or just getting a job. This intersects poorly with the forms of unionization that Sanders tends to want to promote as it is often police unions and police union reps standing up loudly to thwart reforms in the criminal justice system or opposing and reversing penalties for bad apple cops who have done egregious things to people in the communities they work in (it is also often the largely white governing bodies of cities that oppose criminal justice reforms, but not every city or jurisdiction is controlled by majority white governments, and there are emerging trends for reform supported on certain issues regardless, like mandatory minimums or winding down portions of the drug war). Or it is unions that have helped enacted occupational licensing laws in the first place, to obstruct competition or to collude with businesses that provide themselves (but not others) employment. The idea that unions are inherently good market actors that do not rent seek at the expense of the public or even that they are good social actors is not a necessary truth and includes a rather ugly racial history that I suspect some minority voters are not all that happy about still. His positions on immigration and trade likewise have struck too often at poor people in Malaysia or Mexico in a way that is not likely to appeal to minorities either, even if his intention was to complain about rich business owners supposedly exploiting cheap labor.

I suspect he has downplayed this as a problem too much because it interferes with the economic populism message he wants to run with instead. It would have been interesting if Klein had pointed at this harder to see how he would have responded.

Academic speech blotter

I've seen versions of this argument cropping up a lot over the last several months, most notably Jon Chait's article. While I am sympathetic to the cause of academic freedom and freedom of speech involved, I'm not sure there is a case being made that this is actually being stifled or not. I see or hear a lot of anecdotes, not much data. What's actually going on? Who is being stifled? What is being shut down in debate? Where is this concentrated or occurring? Is it even new, or is it morphing to affect new disciplines from before, etc? Is this a representative sampling of students at large causing problems with academic discourse or a chosen few rebels? Not much of that is being reported in a comprehensive way. It's all haphazard stories of "this happened here, and that happened there" without someone actually looking at the dots to see if they connect in this way. So I don't know if I should take this seriously as a problem or not, whether to take the Chicken Littles as accurate that the sky has fallen or whether they have suddenly decided tin foil is a sensible fashion choice, or something in between that remains as yet undefined.

It's kind of like the rape on campus crisis. There the statistics being used are awfully suspect if not deliberately and hopelessly flawed that it is difficult to interpret what is going on. There's a lot of complex variables at work, sexual predators, issues of consent and sexual communication being vague, alcohol and drug experimentation, etc. I'm not immune to the idea there is actually a significant problem in either or both cases, and indeed am sympathetic to the idea of reducing the incidence of rape and increasing the academic liberty of students and professors, but nobody's actually proved the scope and scale of the issue yet and the proximate causes and dimensions remain unclear as a result.

It's also unclear what this means for actual behavior once students graduate. If this is a disturbing trend for feelings and identity over discourse, what does that mean when they hit "the real world"? (I'm not very concerned about the professors in the intermediate space versus the outcomes for students in the longer term, perhaps I should be more worried about their job security, but I'm not). There isn't any evidence put forward that this current generation is less comfortable or less tolerant of ideas than others before it once they complete their studies. I haven't found this talking to younger people at least. They're just as capable of being cynical and disreputable as their elders I usually find. Just in different spaces than before.

This for example: "Under such a conception, people become more concerned with signaling goodness, usually through semantics and empty gestures, than with actually working to effect change.", doesn't seem like a new problem with this generation over the previous 2-3 and there's little evidence put forward to suggest that it is so. Most of the people I talk to about politics/policy who are older also care more about signaling concern than effectiveness of policies. Indeed, one could argue that's the entire basis behind Prohibition and the Drug War, neither of which started with the current college student.

There's already been a fire burning for decades and apparently people are only now beginning to smell the smoke? What gives? What are this?

A few narrow points

The conclusions don't necessarily create the idea that conservatives have figured out how to address the concerns of women (or single mothers in particular). But there were a few morsels of ideas and concessions in here (of course, Frum isn't widely considered a conservative by other conservatives). 

"the pro-life movement really does seem to have changed American minds about the morality of abortion. Only about one-fifth of Americans wish to see abortion outlawed—a proportion that has remained steady since the mid-1970s. But the proportion that thinks abortion is wrong has edged up over the past 15 years: Only 38 percent of Americans now describe abortion as “morally acceptable.”"

- This trend explains much of the strategy behind most abortion restrictions as if most people seem to think what is being done is wrong, but aren't willing to ban it outright, the restrictions will sound like sensible methods of "getting people to think again" while ignoring the actual impact of the restrictions. It's also why I think that if Roe were ever overturned, pro-lifers are screwed as they have to defend the idea that not only is it "wrong", but it should be illegal. A prospect which is not a clear line for crafting jurisprudence, as evidenced by our fraught history waging the drug war, or Prohibition before that, among other examples. It seems even less likely to lend itself to clear jurisprudence where metaphysical assessments of the origins and meaning of human life are concerned, and these become intertwined in a variety of scientific or natural phenomenon (such as miscarriages).

The major problem with the trend is that it does two things.

1) Confuses the population's terminology and labels. "Pro-life" is more broadly interpreted than "someone who wants to ban abortion". "Pro-choice" is mostly becoming limited to people who don't want to describe themselves as "pro-life". The popularity of both labels gives the basic impression that the ardent pro-life position, or the ardent pro-choice position, are more popular than they really are. The vast majority of people are instead in a fuzzy zone and have few strong opinions other than that "it seems wrong", or something to that effect (the famous Clinton formulation of "safe and legal but rare"). Neither position should have much dominance if popular will is sufficient to argue the legal merits of abortion (I do not believe it should, and possibly even pro-life persons would agree with me on that point when they recognize that they do not stand before the majority).

2) In truth, both labels are functionally meaningless. By acknowledging that neither position does hold sway, we should be able to acknowledge properly that most other people are not in some carefully thought out and fervently advocated position on this issue and will hold neither "pro-life" or "pro-choice" politics as a result. If most people seem on simple reflection to agree that we should have fewer abortions because they are "wrong", then the actual disagreement is over what methods would best produce that outcome of fewer abortions, and not so much over the labels we use to argue to that result.

Frum's piece points out, without actually refuting, the standard pro-choice liberal narratives. Access to birth control and various restrictions on abortion account for example for why Europeans have fewer abortions than Americans (often much fewer), or for why the teen pregnancy rate has been falling as a source of decreased demand.

In addition, regardless of whether these factors decrease abortions significantly or not they may have positive effects on these concerns about the "traditional family", such as by allowing women (or potential husbands brought on by "shotgun weddings") to attend college or university and get a degree or decent job instead of attempting to raise a child on a lower-income education and salary. And increased use of birth control has beneficial effects within families, as indicated large numbers of abortions are to women who already have children, indicating unplanned or undesirable pregnancies possibly from inadequate birth control or lack of use, or by decreasing the spread of sexually transmitted disease. We might say those are positive externalities brought on by the use and accessibility of both birth control and to a lesser extent abortion.

Frum's basic argument seems to be that the problem is that in the narrow focus on abortion, social conservatives have confused away the arguments for marriage (and in a related story, also did so by trying to argue against same-sex marriage, and have mostly lost or conceded that fight). In theory such an argument does not actively offend anything. It seems unnecessary in theory to press an active social case for women to be married, whether to men or women, in order to raise children versus the legal and political arguments. In practice there may be merits to it as the "marriage" crisis, such as it is, is largely a problem of the lower socio-economic class who either do not get married or may marry younger and get divorced sooner, and is also less likely to use birth control (but not abortion), and as a result, creates a significant population of mostly poorer and poorly educated single mothers. The upper-socio-economic class gets married later, typically after educations and careers are well-in-hand, and tends to not have children prior to that point. We are also likely to see these as cyclical effects for single-parent homes to produce children who receive poorer educations and thus poorer economic opportunities (among other possible difficulties in childhood).

Having diagnosed this as a potential social ill worthy of attention however, Frum's solutions are more to fret over how we may encourage marriage or to experiment with incentive structures rather than regard the economic and educational choices of people within these single-parenting problems as problems worthy of solution in their own right prior to advancing the agenda of "get more people married" as a second order problem that may help resolve these struggles but which may be considerably more difficult without addressing these structural problems underlying the decisions not to marry for many. These problems can be innumerated thusly:

1) Social welfare safety nets often scale poorly, providing bad incentives to improve the economic state at the marginal position of poverty. Foremost among these with a poor structure is typically state subsidies for day care. Food stamps typically phase out more smoothly. Housing and childhood assistance does not. This can impact household structure by limiting the total household size. This can have the effect of preventing marriages because the marginal assistance from the state declines much more than the amount of additional income provided from a second parent, or failing that, it can have the effect of preventing one or both parents from working at various points during a year to avoid a loss of subsidies.

2) Time management in parenting is a tremendous problem with the attending demands of raising small people into adults. This was previously resolved by two-parent households where one parent (almost always the mother) stayed home to handle most of the home and parenting duties. This is neither as straightforward an option as it was in the 1950s imagination land of conservatives (because often women may have better educational or employment options than the fathers of children), nor something that is always possible even in two parent households today (requiring both incomes for sustainable lifestyles). The solutions here are fairly well known; access to day care (many ways to achieve this), access to flexible scheduling in more occupations (so that parents can take time to deal with home concerns), and some variety of parental or family leave time (whether paid for by employers or the government). With other possible assistance measures like moving back the start of the school day added in for good measure.

3) Because of poor time management flexibility, attaining an education or license for a better occupation can itself be a considerable stretch of this valuable resource (time). We have attempted to resolve this by subsidizing college education costs, but this typically has resulted in ballooning education costs and more student loans rather than more practical outcomes; like well-trained professional skills accruing to graduates. Additionally, since the focal problem is dealing with under-educated poorer people with limited time, such a focus on providing access to college educations is ridiculous as a solution. Most such people, whether from ignorance or time constraints, will not succeed in obtaining a degree no matter how much money is thrown at the problem (within reason). The fix for that requires addressing disparities in K-12 education, not in trying to repair the damage much later, after the fact.

Instead of this focus on college education, fewer jobs or professions should require occupational licenses, along with any accompanying educational requirements, from the state. If they do require licensing from an employer, or there is a potential market benefit to advertise having achieved special training in the craft or art involved, that should be a separate matter. But with the state providing a clear hurdle to entry of various professions, this prevents many people from starting competing or side businesses that they could in fact do things like time management (by largely working from home for example) or to use the profits to fund an education for themselves or their children.

How to teach to "controversy"?

"Hill found that 58 percent of respondents said this topic is only "somewhat, not very, or not at all important" to them. People who held creationist views were the most emphatic about their beliefs; 64 percent of that group said they care about being "right," presumably in the metaphysical sense of rightness. " 

I tend not to worry very much about whether generally the population accepts evolutionary theory on its own, excepting as it is a harbinger for otherwise poor quality scientific backgrounds. It does not have very much to do with almost anyone's daily lives. Antibiotic resistance and viral mutations would be the average person's limit of visible experience for which they are having adverse effects (by not getting vaccines for their children and by overusing antibiotics for viral infections for which they have no impact or farmers using them prolifically on animals we consume). These are fields for which the limited education of the average person on germ theory and the types and causes of illness, or even just the ability to critically examine ailments and their causes in others (eg, people get colds not because it is cold, but because they stay inside more often with other people when it is cold), is probably a bigger concern than evolutionary theory. Meanwhile the average person is not likely to work in a biochemistry lab or a genetic engineering research firm or as a naturalist studying animals and animal behavior or biodiversity. The specific influence upon their lives is pretty small as a result and so it is not something I worry a great deal about in particular.

What is concerning on this subject is that my "opposites", the creationists, seem to care an awful lot about it, much more than the much smaller cohort of people who are, like me, atheistic and accepting of evolutionary theory. And then this was also a concern: "An estimated 28 percent teach evolutionary biology according to the recommendations of the National Research Council; the rest don't advocate either view" Science teachers apparently don't care very much about whether the general population learns about science either. It's one thing if I don't care, because I have no children and little interest in teaching such creatures. But if the teachers at large don't care (or are afraid to, a plausible explanation in many cases), that's a deeper concern. If there's a large percentage of people who care a great deal, but who disagree with established scientific concerns, there needs to be a way to raise it for everyone else, the people who are unsure or don't care very much one way or the other or who otherwise want their children to learn the proper scientific ways of thinking and analysis as part of their upbringing and education.

Some thoughts

1) Let the most adamant creationist people go and teach what they want through home schooling (they're often already doing this).

2) Let the most adamant creationists set up their own private institutions to send their own children, with the possible result, if this is a significant problem that people do not learn adequate science in primary education, that they could risk being shut out of certain professional fields as adults (unless they address this later on by attending colleges that aren't conservative Christian in nature).

This is also already happening. I often think it may be acceptable to let them use tax credits to fund the institutions simply because #3 below looks so bad as a long-term prospect to me. We've had decades since Scopes and the needles haven't moved very much in the general population, and I think there's not very good reasons to think this will change in the near term for sure. My general thinking for #1 and #2 is that creationists aren't very easy to argue with logically, so they're better off not impacting everyone else as much or not being as concerned about everyone else because they've segregated their children off. I think it likely that if they are left alone to do their thing, there's a possible gain in them generally leaving everyone else's kids alone and we can focus on educating those children instead.

As a hopeful note, I don't know that this self-segregated education style has a lasting effect that the creationist might hope for. It's very possible that their children may not care as much about their religious identity as they do (often for other unrelated reasons) and this may allow for openings of doubt in any factual basis behind creationist mythology.

3) Continue the curriculum and courtroom fights and leaving teachers and school administrations to fight it out with parents who don't pursue those two above options out of inertia or marginal interest. I'm not very enthusiastic about this as a result because school boards are often democratically selected. As we should see from the link, not only are there a ton of creationists in America; roughly four times as many as the atheistic population which is largely on its own fighting back as the theistic evolutionist is not very concerned about the issue one way or the other, for reasons that should be obvious. They're also much more motivated about the issue. Meaning they will go vote for school boards that advance creationist views as much as they can get away with and they will win those elections in most states, with adverse effects upon the overall quality of education available to everyone. Not just what is available to creationists and not just impacting upon science curriculum and evolution in particular.

The optimistic view is that religious dogma on other issues, such as birth control or homosexuality, is driving away many young people from organised religion as young people have broken from their elders and parents on these questions, and they may also break on this question once broken away on others. This suggests that in 20-30 years time, fewer people may care a great deal about this as a question of evolutionary theory in education. I'm not sure this is a good calculated risk given what creationists or millennial revisionists can do to science and history education in the meantime. That damage is still considerable.

4) A different approach would be to let students try to bash each other's heads in by debating or bringing up these issues. I don't think this is an effective method of teaching "controversial" issues until perhaps high school and my preference would be that it be in the form of a comparative religion or philosophy course. Creationism is not science and doesn't belong in a biology class.

5) Address the question of meaning. Teleology has a long use as part of religious doctrine for providing people easy answers (if I think badly misleading ones) about the nature of the universe and one's purpose in it. As the poll should also show, there's a large cohort of people who are theistic but accept evolutionary theory or place their deity as having a specific involvement. To explain this view (or one possible interpretation of that view). Let's say god created evolution as a biological process, and upon its long and winding paths, came a result of the creation of man. This purported god was pleased by that development and endowed human beings with some special significance (often the "soul"). Or something to that effect. That's an opening for which acceptance of scientific conclusions about the nature of existence has walked through Christian theology for centuries ("god did it, and this is how", or other similar interpretations). Evolution for whatever reason is not typically pushed in the door this way and in fact is presented precisely as the vehicle for atheism that many anti-science creationists fear it to be. That may have to change tactics.

I don't think that's going to provide a very satisfying answer for meaning and purpose at all to address the question of "meaning" for which many people reject evolutionary theory to present it in the "god did it this way" variety of explanation. But apparently a lot of people do. I see this example of "meaning" frequently used in movies with an alternative to gods in the form of super-advanced aliens seeding humanity into the genetic code of the planet and sometimes teaching humans basic skills of agriculture or warfare, or in some cases various "advanced" technologies (a position which makes even less sense than the soul concept advanced by Catholics given that there's actually very strong observable evidence against it, while the soul is a metaphysical concept devoid of evidence or empirical debate). This path provides some presentation of meaning that is to me just as hollow and useless as those provided by religious scripture and organised religions. But given the popularity of the plot points, it is not surprising that the problem of meaning dominates the need to cling to creationist myths, whether science fiction-based or religious, to avoid the difficulty of addressing personal or species level meaning. I sympathize that those are difficult questions for which simple and emotionally driven responses may provide comfort and ease (but not actually answering the question). I don't think the average person wants to contemplate these issues very deeply, or at least very often, in favor of actually living their lives.

Which is probably why many people are fairly blah about whether evolution is a thing.

To put a quick flip on this science fiction-y thinking. There's also been a strain in Star Trek type shows that the future will be better tomorrow because there won't be religions because presumably the aliens we would encounter won't have them either or will find our myths absurd and have their own better ones or some such. While I find the humanist ethos running through Star Trek amusing and sometimes appealing (and sometimes not so much, since it glosses over economics on the basis of "we have matter replicators"), there doesn't seem to me to be a basis point for saying that human beings on discovering other sentient beings from other worlds would suddenly and inevitably accept that this means that there is no god and their religious beliefs are pointless. What it might (optimistically) suggest to many people is that evolutionary theory is generally correct. But that acceptance of theoretical knowledge already doesn't come into conflict with the questions of purpose and meaning that most people are using religious beliefs and practices, and the affirmation of congregations of like-minded others, to try to wrestle with. Those questions aren't going to be diminished by the discovery of and communication with other beings.

Thinking about thought

Most of my own research on subjects of interest relies heavily on the "originals", to see not only the insights we still reserve today for misquoting and attribution debates about what some particular great mind would have thought of something or other, but also what other baggage might have been wrapped up with it, what was broken about it. What often occurs from this account is whether obvious solutions to these fundamental problems are presented in the intervening years (for example, genetics and molecular biology Darwin's case for evolution, neither fields of research which even existed at the time) or whether obvious solutions from the past are now ignored, which lends me to ask why these weren't available to them, or why they're inaccessible to us now. What is it that we overlook? Was it really that hard to see? Why, what were the incentives? What changed? These seem like valuable questions for understanding the weaknesses and strengths of human beings and their institutions and communities in approaching and solving our problems.

I don't understand either why this should be considered a dismissive enterprise as a result. 

It sounds essentially like a rejection of the field of history as a viable project beyond its factual accumulations. Maybe that's the natural and inevitable result of teaching history in the manner of its factual accumulations rather than as a method of perspective taking as is its more fundamental philosophical nature, and the natural result of teaching science in a similar fashion with its fundamental basis as a method of skeptical inquiry also mostly neglected, if not rejected.

The federalism problem

In recent debates, it is clear that there is a growing concern for an object policy like national educational standards. I can sympathize with some of these concerns that underlie such a policy but I find the solution more problematic than most. These are the numerous problems
1) We have a fairly clear supposition of the following
a) that strong investment and support of education is a positive net good for a society, both for individual benefits, economic opportunity/equality, and for net economic growth as a whole.
b) that at present our educational system has infrastructural deficits in attaining this end goal.
2) We do not have a very clear idea how to attain that goal. There are numerous models around the globe of educational success and varying definitions of what defines such successes. The variations between "success" in the Shanghai or Singapore model and that of Finland or other Northern European republics is rather vast, both in results and methods.

This means that it is unclear what national standards would be best designed to accomplish, or how they should accomplish them.

3) In the absence of well-defined and independently useful metrics, it is unclear how we might measure the accomplishment of such things. We rely strongly on standardised tests, which have at best, only a marginal utility to study the impact and efficacy of our educational system and the agents we have appointed to carry it out. By contrast, the Finns do not seem to bother with standardising test results (other than for college admissions periods). And they're apparently kicking our ass on them all the same.

4) I think this argues strongly for the continued use of the "laboratory of democracy" model of decentralised federalism, as it pertains to education. With the use of federal involvement perhaps in some form like that of "race to the top", that is a reward structure to encourage states and cities to innovate and succeed in the platform of education with minimal concern as to how they do so from any top-down institutional perspective. I have my own concerns with "race to the top", namely that it still relies too heavily on testing regimes, but I admire the conceptual approach. Generally speaking in the absence of clear evidence of what works and what does not to achieve a public policy goal, even one of great importance with definite and large externality effects and free rider problems like education provision, we should not be invoking strong central responses. At best we can possibly acknowledge that some measure of taxation to provide that service publicly is appropriate, but the administration may be a more vague open ended system than, say, central and public monopolies on its provision. Other governmental involvements might be to assure that there are not discriminatory practices that conflict unnecessarily with broader educational missions, such as by excluding LGBT children or children adopted/raised by same, or practicing racial discrimination in acceptance of student and parent applications. Gender discrimination seems to have some possibly useful effects (For example, women on average behave differently in a unisex environment in what seems like a constructive way. That is, that they are more competitive than when around men in a mixed gender setting, where they can be rendered more passive by our social norms). Though I'm not sure it should be used permissively at all times (there is value in interacting in mixed sex environments for lots of other reasons) and I do not think it appropriate to systematically exclude a gender from educational opportunity entirely at all.

5) My primary concern with any nationalising standards of education is the same I have for those of state or local standards. Namely, who determines these? At present we often elect school board members to local and state offices, with the side effect of only cursory attention being paid by most voters to their actual qualifications to help determine school policies and educational curricula in any subjects. Presumably we could follow a similar model to decide federal standards, or have the tangential effect of having to lobby an appointed bureaucracy and/or influence it through the election of other public officials (Presidents for example). The existence of standards however does not presuppose what those standards will be or how they will be amended or by whom.

6) To me this seems like a model destined to repeat and inflame the smaller turf battles which occur in thousands of school districts and statehouses around the country at a national level and "we" would have to wage unceasing war with social conservatives over the content and instruction of science or history courses in order to avoid surrendering control over those standards to their perusal and objection. At present, the amount of influence formerly wielded by a dentist over not only Texas but large portions of the country concerning history or science instruction, curriculum and textbook content is a warning that forming large national controls over such things is not likely to result always in the well-meaning intention of providing a better liberal arts education base to the broader public.

7) Many of those aforementioned social conservatives already educate their children at home, or with explicitly religious instruction, and often at public expense. This suggests that their pet issues of religious indoctrination, prayer, creationism, historical revisionism, or whatever the case may be, are likely to be values they wish imposed anyway and will seek means to achieve them. Some of these are Constitutionally protected values (religion for instance), even if they are not imposable values on others by that same Constitution. (Note: this is not to say that all home school instruction is valueless, or that parents should take no effort in the education of values and subjects for their children, but that there are tacit motivations invoked and involved which are of importance to many parents and families).

8) This suggests that an alternative to stronger and tighter national and central control is to abolish or reduce local and state controls. If social conservative types are already going to flee the perceived liberal hegemony over education, then I say let them go. And perhaps they will stop bothering the rest of us if their concerns are allowed to be addressed more privately. I find that a practical objection is that there would be too many nutjobs. But in my estimation there are already too many nutjobs and that abolishing formal religiously-based instruction through schools is unlikely to rid us of them

9) I would also say that religious training is hardly the only source of moral hazard as there are various liberal credos that worry me as being explicitly anti-science too or dishonest assessments of historical fact too. Opposition to nuclear power or genetically engineered food/products is more of a gut reaction than an educated response in many cases and many anti-vaccination advocates are drawn from a liberal elite just as easily as they may be Christian science types. To me this suggests further difficulty with decisions over national standards as there are many, many possible intersections of those standards with educational subjects and the approaches taken to study them.

10) A further practical objection is that in someway the lack of (enforceable) standards would mean that in some cases educational attainment would suffer. On some of these points I am prepared to agree. Though, I'd have to argue we already have many institutions called schools which also fail to help their students attain educational successes on the one hand.

11) Secondly, I would argue that it probably matters very little what a person learns about the scientific method, evolutionary theory v creationist mythology, historical facts and figures from legitimate sources versus revisionists, and so on to their overall life satisfaction and career or job prospects. In fact it matters very little how well one studies Algebra 2 functions, for that matter. To the extent that these things matter right now, they impact political policy through the public's intervention into educational policies and how they are set, especially at a local level. Not always in a positive and healthy manner. It might matter in the abstract value of creating an educational system that fosters a love and desire for learning and study in the subjects that might occur to the person in question. But to the extent that our educational system creates more inquisitive academics and skeptics, I'm not sure this is a desirable or necessary goal in and of itself for everyone we seek to educate. We should encourage those who are able and willing of such things, and have available the methods and systems that might help foster creative and innovative thinkers to operate more freely. But that's not everyone's view of educational success. (To me this means that for most people, education is not about learning).

12) To the extent that there are or will be debates over "values" concerns like prayer in school or some such, I think these are abated if more people who care about such things are permitted to allow their own institutions and children to practice them. That's not to say that they will be silent on the issue of whether "our" institutions should likewise practice their methods, but they will have less teeth to bare and less ability to make such requirements insistently if they are allowed their own arrangements. My own preference should be that people have religious institutions for this purpose and their educational institutions are for other purposes. There are however crossover elements in terms of these vague "values" to be inculcated into the next generation between those institutions that are not easily resolved in a public policy way. Simply abolishing religion from schools and education entirely is not workable. However desirable I might find such a hypothesis valuable personally, a government powerful enough to do so would contain mechanics capable of abolishing more secular values as well or of establishing its own variety of what those values shall be.

Things, they are a happening

Various gleanings from the world about.

1) Charles Murray's thesis, as usual for Charles Murray, makes no sense.

I think it is worth noting that "elites" more broadly should be skeptical of imposing their preferences or presuming their preferences exist and should exist within non-elites (ie, those dirty commoners"). I'm not sure that it makes any sense that these elites should be at least partially acquainted with the culture of non-elites in order to do so. It would make more sense instead for elites to be less interested in fiddling with the lives of non-elites than that they could somehow magically discern preferences had they more of the common stuff going on in their lives and histories. The foremost situation where this is a concern is in dealing with the preferences of the poor and especially communities of the poor versus anywhere else in society. And in that instance, I'm skeptical not just of elites not understanding preferences but of the middle class itself not understanding such preferences.

Additionally, there are problems related to the sorts of questions that Murray picks. There are no sports questions for instance (or at least, the only sports-related question involved nascar). Following football instead of tennis or golf, or simply following UFC or boxing, etc, would strike me as relative elite/non-elite divides that could exist. Perhaps elites follow sports in sufficient numbers to make these less relevant divisions, but I doubt it. Asking questions about TV watching habits, both number of hours and types of shows, likewise would strike me as a pretty useful heuristic. Asking about politics, Murray asks if people have "a friend who disagrees with them". I'm pretty sure this is more likely among elites firstly, and in most cases, "that's because I'm the weirdo. If it weren't for me, my friends would have nobody who disagrees with them." Likewise, I'm not sure that filtering for manufacturing work is a useful idea. Most Americans don't work in factories anymore. Their grandparents might have, but even our parents' generation is less likely to have even short-term factory work in their distant past, much less their present. Physical labour is useful to note, but factories are not.

The one essential factor that could be pulled out from this is that we would probably benefit as a society if, instead race being the principle factor, things like poverty or "class" were used instead (with the caveat that naturally poverty afflicts urban areas and thus minorities more readily). Poor urban mostly black schools are roughly as bad off as some poor rural mostly white schools for instance. Home schooled kids from an evangelical background would probably benefit from being intermingled with the general population at a university just as much, and college kids themselves would be "challenged" with the viewpoints and ideas that back such upbringings and would thus become more aware of, and sometimes sympathetic to, the diverse range of intellectual views available to the general population. Even if they remain unsympathetic to some of those views specifically, the range is a difficulty for imposing policy choices through voting and elections. Maybe that's what Murray was trying to do with his work, but he was, apparently, rather sloppy about it.

(and of course, in order to make any of that possible at places like Harvard in the first place, we'd have to massively improve our primary education systems such that poorer kids would have a fighting chance of getting in and sticking around using the skills they have acquired).

2) Immigration is a moral and economic good. To say nothing of the diverse intellectual and cultural boons it can bring. Why we chose the policies we do to restrict it should be a serious question before we arrive at whether we should.

3) I look forward to being able to cloak myself invisibly. But it doesn't sound like it's going to happen very soon. Yet. Bouncing microwaves off a refractive material however is promising.

4) I care a LOT more about a building collapsing in Rio than a boat sinking. First because it sounds like more people died from the former, so on net, that's more disconcerting. Second because building codes and enforcement are likely a much more widespread problem and thus a public source of danger than some idiot captain deciding to sink his cruise ship. One need only compare the difference in catastrophic damage between earthquakes in Haiti and in Chile during the same year to see some evidence here of what this means. Presumably the one is a bigger story because cruise ship passengers are likelier richer and more media connected than are Rio slum dwellers. But losing one's luggage and vacation, while unpleasant and undesirable, is not the same as being in mortal danger and losing one's home.

Ongoing war of thought

Recent debates have shown me that many liberal/progressives are utterly hostile to the idea that their well-meaning desire for regulations is backfiring in any way. They are usually in fact hostage to the special interests that use them as anti-market competitive practices, and regulations are often not in fact used to increase public good and safety in any appreciable way, but rather to increase profits, wages, or sales for existing firms at the expense of competitive firms by establishing significant barriers to entry. Usually in the form of legal spaghetti one must cut through to attain access.

For example, while there are professions which we might think require at least modest levels of competence overseen by a state board of some kind, there is plenty of low hanging fruit that is less obvious where the public could even be harmed. On the positive side of the ledger we have doctors. The argument here is not as strong as many perceive it to be; that unlicensed by the state medical doctors are an enormous risk and menace to the public. But largely this is because modern medicine is overrated and the public has developed an abiding faith that doctors have magical healing powers that they do not in fact possess. In other words, the gain of medical training is positive. It tends to minimize people from worrying about what they've diagnosed themselves with on Web MD and allows for technical expertise at many surgical procedures that may or may not improve lives. But on many issues of medical expertise, experts are divided, evidence is slim, medications are minimally effective, if it all, and expensive, and the medical sciences become more of a medical art. Where the impact is placebo and a good rapport with one's caregivers more than anything definitive that was provided in actual care. We have minimal power over most viral infections and many forms of cancer, if any, and all we can usually offer in tangible terms is the alleviation of human suffering while the body attempts to fight off such infections and mutations. It's hard to see what advanced special training is required to offer successful palliative care at this level, much less that a license would be required to apply it (parents with some medical knowledge could do just as well at keeping a sick child armed with drinking fluids and expectorants for a common cold for example).

So. To point out some problems here, one of the most practical issues facing the country economically is rampant use of state licensing. When nearly 30% of the overall workforce requires a form of certification from the state to work, chances are that most industries are rent-seeking and jacking up profits rather than providing a decent benefit to the public by screening out unfit and under-qualified workers, or entire firms, in their fields. I haven't gone through personally every field that is so licensed by the state at some level, but doctors to me are about the only field where a plausible argument of public harm even emerges and where there might be any evidence marshaled to defend it. I'm fairly certain that 30% of our work force is not doctors, or nurses, or even just works generally in the medical field (dentists for example). So what we're left with is the state licensing for people to shampoo or cut hair, to decorate homes, to start moving companies, and so on down the line. There might be arguments for industries to accord themselves with minimal competency tests in fields like accounting, teaching, or the aforementioned cutting hair, but all of these are fields also licensed by the state in some manner. Not a mere certification of competency to advertise one's acquired skills to potential clients or firms, but a state license is required.

Are there substantial public risks involved here? The complexity and onerous nature of the individual tax code already baffles even these competent accountants all too frequently. Still, for most people, a much more simple tax form is sufficient to file an accurate tax return with the IRS. They receive wages which are reported to the government by their employer, and their deductions are plain (have mortgage, have children, have spouse, etc). Do we need licensed CPAs for that? Most people can do it themselves had they the mathematical acumen or a simple computer programme. Where someone has the money and assets to have more complex returns, they're likely to require more knowledge. But they would be free to seek it out and are already at risk even from the supposedly competent. What of teachers? There seem legions of stories of woefully poor or unconcerned teachers in public schools. How did they get there if they were licensed by a state entity? How do they stay there?

What seems clear is that the licensing requirement is tied in with higher levels of education for many of these fields. Completing and attaining such levels of education should be sufficient claim to basic certification for potential employers in these fields than is a state required exam, or should that be insufficient, an industry standard exam could substitute just as easily. The argument for requiring state licensing however requires an argument that there are substantive harms to the general public caused by non-licensed competitors having easier access to the field. In most fields, such evidence of harm is scant or non-existent. Even for fields one would expect some harm to appear such as a difference between lower certified dental assistants and dentists, the evidence does not exist. In most fields in fact, the evidence is that the higher prices charged by state license holders is a greater harm to the public than is putatively prevented through these licensing boards (decreasing access to dental or health care is a bigger public harm than the possibility of malpractice events). Whatever well-meaning intentions are involved here, if there is no evidence of a market failure, and there appears to be evidence of a market capture of the regulation, we are probably better off letting these ships sail than fighting over them.

I get why we don't do this

But I also get why it gets informally done anyway. The sad part is the amount of information dispersed through by the students themselves however. Or maybe that's the silver lining. I'm not sure yet (depends on the quality of information from faculty and schools and parents).

That is. Sex ed. Of, shall we say, a positive variety. Ie. How it works, or more often doesn't work, in a mutually beneficial pleasurable experience rather than just the bits and pieces and how they go together.

I find it sort of sad that there are men who had to have it explained to them what a clitoris was and where it was. (Or at least, sexually active teenagers/college students who had to have it explained.) Or that there are perpetually men asking where a woman's G-spot is. I'd have thought most of this was sorted out during the great feminist shift 40 years ago. I get the feeling that most people take sex ed to be largely necessary for women because of the risks of pregnancy. But I'd say, given the state of continuous running gags referring to the complete lack of pleasure provided by males from sex, that men need to pick up some slack. And they aren't learning how from other men. And they're not talking to their partner(s) to figure it out. It's just kind of assumed.

Some things I'd put on the list for inclusion if I were to teach something like this.
1) Most women don't orgasm with ordinary missionary position sex. 70% is the usual figure quoted. Religious types often expect this through their version of sex ed (this is changing, finally to a more accepting attitude toward sex within the marriage at least). I would surmise that this figure is unhelpful for a lot of otherwise acceptable human pair bonding (ie, unsatisfying sex life leads someone to stray or to be annoyed with other arenas of the relationship). Some of this is psychological. Most women can learn to orgasm this way, along with many others. But a good portion of it is biology. Ie, they could learn to do so, but it's a lot easier some other way. Hence

2) Explain where the clitoris is. And why it matters for women. Don't bother with the G-spot. If a man can't tell where and what that is, he is not bothering to do things other than sex and get blowjobs anyway. Also, because of the angles involved (curvature of penis, hip angles), women do tend to like non-missionary positions. At least once in a while. Depending on the woman.

3) Explain that porn is entertainment. This is a big one for modern teens especially because of the easier access to this sort of adult commodity. It's pervasive relative to even something like alcohol or tobacco because all it requires is a computer. Or a phone/Ipad, etc.

For comparisons to draw, in real life, people go down a lot faster after being punched. There aren't dramatic soundtracks when the two love story characters meet. The plucky sports team of loveable losers doesn't win the championship (most of the time). Pornography is a show. It's not reality. Yes there are real life women who like to do some of the things on there. Some of the time. And yes there are positions on there that are humanly possible that most of us haven't attempted. Most of them are uncomfortable however without much preparation. And discomfort isn't exactly pleasant for most people. And yes there are combinations and exhibitions of sex that most people don't do. There are reasons for that though. Having sex with multiple partners is something humans might do serially in their lives but most people aren't as comfortable with multiple casual sex partners or simultaneously having sex with said partners. And we've pretty much made having sex in public places illegal. In some states to the point of making it some sort of sex offense (although taking a piss in a public space is still treated far worse in most places. I guess there's some logic to treating it harshly but registering such people as sex offenders is pretty hardcore). So. In summary, those are professionals performing such feats. Don't try everything you see at home. At least not without discussing it with a partner (or two).

4) Explain that sex tends to be a lot better as you get older and more experienced with the same partner. That might justify waiting for someone who you might want to have sex with over that time for example. But that it also will tend to get boring, in a way. This isn't because (the) sex gets worse. Just that people don't work as hard at their general relationships (and physical health) as said relationships progress. Sexual health of the relationship deteriorates along with everything else. Experimentation (and discussion) happens in good relationships. Sometimes really freaky things happen as a result. Few can say at 14 or even 20 or 25 what they will enjoy over the course of their lives sexually.

5) Do explain condoms. Including for non-vaginal sex. Don't approach this as disaster control. Just do it. We should a) not regard pre-marital sex as a "disaster" but rather as a choice... that lots of students are already making and b) should be relatively concerned that if they are exercising this choice, that they should do so in the least harmful manner available. Telling kids that sex (outside of marriage) is so horrible and dangerous that they will die is infamous mostly for its absurdity. And its parallels to anti-drug stories spun and woven by adults as well. The risks need to be communicated accurately; not blown up into easily disproved scenarios.

6) Do teach people to talk about sex frankly with their partners, if no one else. Teach them to communicate both desires and to listen. We seem to spend a ton of time talking about sex among our peer groups (based on popular culture). Why we couldn't expend most of that talking on the actual sexual parties involved is beyond my comprehension. If we're going to have sex, you might as well make it worth the time and energy involved.

Based on what appears to be the difference in places like the Netherlands versus America, teens there have roughly the same amount of sex and by roughly the same age (by 17 is the usual age in both countries). But they report being a lot happier with their choices of sexual partners and sexual experiences. I'd wonder if they do something like this a little more formally, but it seems more broadly that they have a much more accepting culture.

Totally shocking

The White House website has up a set of user generated petitions.

Unsurprisingly, when it came time for the WH to respond to the most popular ones (among which marijuana legislation is high on the list. Pun intended?), they've pretty much offered the same useless platitudes.

Their entire anti-marijuana response for instance contained among its most significant arguments if you changed the word "marijuana" to "tobacco" or "alcohol", you would have the same argument. This is effectively among the most significant reasons people wish to reform the current laws, for the arbitrary, unscientific, "basis" for banning one and not the other (there are political philosophical reasons to oppose the accumulated power of the state to punish consensual adult behavior involving drug transactions, but this is not as powerful a message to the average voter/person as "it's not any more or less dangerous than things we allow people to buy/sell/consume").

Consequently, as soon as that silly response went up, there are half a dozen re-petitions for legalisation, legalisation debate, and also, most amusingly and most tellingly, petitions for governing tobacco and alcohol under the same logic as marijuana. I'm a little confused by the response also in an environment where over 50% are now supporting legalisation of marijuana. Not just medical research and uses, but out and out decriminalisation, regulation, and taxation. One would think that if the general public is roughly for something, the government should be a little less hostile to their position than the stance that was outlined.

As a further problem with the response, the federal government's official actions relating to both medical marijuana and reducing arrest and incarceration as appropriate responses in favor of treatment and prevention, essentially the preferred compromise position of regulating, are contradictory to its claims. The government, even under Obama, has stepped up raids on medical marijuana in states that have legalised it for this expressed purpose, and has continued to apply arrest and detention methods on end users. A position which is unsustainable (it puts too many people in jail for us to properly attend to, the vast majority of which are non-violent offenders), often baldly racist (see arrest statistics in Chicago for example), and is quite possibly the most expensive method of deterrence. The "9 billion spent on drug enforcement" is also a lie. Drug enforcement doesn't just occur in the US. The DEA has agents all around the world. Even if that amount is less than the amount dispensed on treatment/prevention (which "prevention" spending has its own problems in that the programmes, like DARE, are simply more enforcement spending rather than effectively designed prevention), and even at a 9 billion amount, that amount of spending is absurdly high relative to what, if any, benefits are accruing from it.

As a second petition they've so far responded to: Removing "under god" from the pledge. While acknowledging the place of religion in American society seems useful, the pledge hasn't always been the way to do that. Leaving in god we trust on the money is one thing. Using money doesn't require anyone to utter any oaths or declare a lack of faith in public. You really don't even have to look at it other than to make sure you are giving the cashier the proper amount. Personally, I'd much rather we take Jackson off the $20 anyway than get rid of this. Bad economic stewardship (Jackson's populist economic policies, particularly in the monetary realm, led directly to a severe Depression in the late 1830s) and being an asshole should be sensible enough reasons not to put someone on our money. I'd also back any proposal to get FDR off the money. The 1937 "Second" Depression is on him, not Hoover, and it's no picnic. Stick to people who actually had decent and effective economic policies (Washington, Lincoln, Coolidge, Eisenhower, JFK, Teddy Roosevelt...)

Not saying the pledge is a perfectly legitimate form of protest. But there are plenty of stubborn public officials in schools who won't take no for an answer and will attempt to penalise for this apparent lack of patriotic fervor. More importantly there are plenty of other students who will notice differences and distinctions and make fun of them. I even had people I considered friends in my own time point out my lack of pledge reciting with a distinct negative connotation. To say nothing of the hostility generated by less amiable fare within schools. This one to me seems a little more important to strike from the public. If students wish to pray, to organise among themselves religious demonstrations or associations, so be it, go to it says I. But compelling students, against their will, to demonstrate religious affiliations in public should not be considered appropriate. I'm not so sure why we have a pledge to recite in the first place either. But the fact that it misuses a Lincoln quote in order to explicitly define the state as religiously ordained, at least according to most pledge defenders, seems a little more insane based on our Constitution and first amendment ideals than a nation-state having its children utter nationalistic pledges and stare at a piece of fabric.

Note: I did not mind the IBR system for repaying college loans in that reply (though I didn't sign any of those petitions in the first place). Friedman for example proposed a similar system 50 years ago for paying for higher education. I suspect such a system however is not very popular with the sort of people who were petitioning relating to college loans. Also, I would disagree with the notion that more of our jobs require a college degree. Or at least the notion that more of our jobs should require a college degree. The reason they do is overextended use of state licensing requirements in several major sectors of the economy. The advantage of college degrees should be flexiblity applied toward many different sectors of potential employment, and/or training for very specific professional fields. They are not job-training however in the manner required for many forms of employment. A stronger social and public reliance on vocational training or apprenticeships would be perfectly fine for many jobs, even many advanced tech jobs. We exclude many jobs and opportunities by requiring college degrees for them.

Reprinting the silliest part of the anti-marijuana argument here:

"According to scientists at the National Institutes of Health- the world's largest source of drug abuse research - marijuana use is associated with addiction, respiratory disease, and cognitive impairment. We know from an array of treatment admission information and Federal data that marijuana use is a significant source for voluntary drug treatment admissions and visits to emergency rooms. Studies also reveal that marijuana potency has almost tripled over the past 20 years, raising serious concerns about what this means for public health – especially among young people who use the drug because research shows their brains continue to develop well into their 20's. Simply put, it is not a benign drug."

This sort of thing is more or less why I'm not voting for the guy, among many other civil liberties bugaboos. If you're supposed to be the adult in the room, you don't get to lie to the kids or use your adult status to advance arbitrary rules. Your rules still have to make more sense than "Because I said so". 

Those pesky voting machines

They're back. So with that in mind. I did my usual research on the local issues. You know, those things most people don't vote for or pay attention to.

The state of Ohio has three statewide ballot initiatives.
1) Amends state constitution to permit judges to be 75 and run for office. I don't see why there is a maximum age to begin with. If a judge is actually incompetent by age, then they would either retire, someone more competent and younger will run against them and/or they will be voted out of office. I'd prefer an amendment abolishing the maximum age requirement and not one replacing one arbitrary number with another one, slightly higher. That said, it seems better to have a higher age limit if we must have one than a lower one.

I'll probably vote yes here.

2) I think this has to do with collective bargaining restrictions. The only provision I saw that I actually liked or cared one way or the other was the provision that allowed teachers to work as teachers/public employees, without automatically having union dues deducted in order to do so. I think this is perfectly legitimate. Unions can complain about free-riders all they want, but I'd say that if their members or potential members cannot be convinced enough about the actual benefits the union is conveying upon them to continue to pay dues so as to be provided those benefits more explicitly, then the benefits provided by such union membership probably aren't as good as is commonly believed by union boosters. The results of such legal changes for dues payments in other states bear this out; lots of people stop paying when they're no longer required to do so.

Most of the rest of this bill appears to be useless on both sides. Banning and penalising strikes doesn't seem very useful. Just replace the striking teachers with new teachers and move on, or acknowledge the working conditions are terrible and make adjustments if new teachers cannot be had. Restricting negotiations doesn't seem sensible. Benefits like vacation or health care or pensions might be expensive, but arbitrarily removing them from the table isn't going to realistically control costs in a way that attaches to improving educational quality output. Performance pay needs some work before I'd say that it seems like a very good idea. I think on some level it needs to go into effect, but the methods of determining "performance" and the actual incentives offered need to be seriously looked at to see if they even have desirable results (improved academic and/or lifetime workplace performance by the student body for instance). I'm not convinced that they do. More properly, I'm not convinced that the methods we currently have to use do, but I do think there might be methods out there that will. I am convinced that there needs to be more discretion to remove incompetence. But that doesn't appear to be up for discussion with this law.

I will probably ignore this issue and not vote on it, but I'm leaning toward No (repealing the Ohio law). Mostly because I think it goes too far. I think it has some promising provisions and a bunch of ill-conceived ones surrounding them. I prefer not giving more power to governments than is necessary whenever possible.

3) Issue 3 is essentially Ohio's GOP attempt to repeal ObamaCare. I'm ambivalent on ObamaCare mostly because I don't think that it really substantively changed the status quo.  That means it's pretty dumb, but the status quo was, also, pretty dumb. And also it's basically RomneyCare (and Romney will probably be the GOP nominee). The experience in Massachusetts hasn't been very encouraging for someone like me in terms of watching health care costs become more sensible and more economical decision making occur, and the Massachusetts law is in fact more stringent about its mandates by having more severe penalties.

I will ignore this one. While I think ObamaCare or more precisely, national health care policies, do need to be seriously reformed, I don't think that states' efforts have done much to help us in doing so. All repeal at the state level will accomplish is legal confusion and will not encourage the more desirable end of attracting any more attention toward productive reforms and discussions surrounding bloated public entitlements (which account for most of our nation's health care spending, a position I would love to see decline but which the supporters of this bill do not, making them hypocrites undeserving of support).

Local stuff
The county has some minor price control issue relating to energy, but I won't get to vote on it because it relates to people who don't even live in exurbs, much less suburbanites like myself.
Hospital and school levies (including vocational school). I usually vote against these, but I'm re-thinking my opposition. I will probably vote against the local school, for the vocational one, and for the hospital. My preference would be for more of these sorts of public externalities to be funded in other ways (tax credits for instance rather than monopolising funding), but ultimately some public tax supports will be needed because of massive free rider problems. The benefit of educated, healthy citizens living around you are far more excessive and more easily shared than the purported benefits of unionisation (which essentially is privately extracted economic rent carved out of the public dollar rather than a genuine externality). So that means that I should pay for some of them too. My opposition to the local school can largely be explained by
a) that I went there and felt it wasn't much of a school, at least for educational opportunities
b) that it doesn't need more funding, what it is actually asking for, and probably could do with somewhat less. It's unclear to me what the school district wants more money for in other words.

With my endorsement

College loans, discuss

So to mollify some of those protesters, this seems like a good idea. I'm fully aware that student loans were written into the bankruptcy laws because they had high default rates, and for that matter aware that they're the exception to the bankruptcy system. It still seems nuts that we force people who have no ability to pay to pay for something that is essentially a mortgage payment.

What that should mean is that they will have high interest rates or will be given out less frequently (and for fewer types of students, in need students/students studying fields more likely to pay out). This would indeed have the consequences of a) fewer people would go to college. I, like McArdle, don't find that very troubling because of the abundance of people in colleges who clearly have no idea what they are doing there. And for that matter, neither do the colleges. and b) colleges could have to stop raising tuition at astronomical rates because the government funded spigot of free money would go down in its flow. Which would mean in about 10-20 years or so college could again start being a reasonable expense for some that could be paid off during attendance (by working) or shortly there after (by taking smaller loans/working less).

Other options: adopt a percentage of income post-graduate scheme for payment. People who earn more could be paid off sooner, so they'd have some incentive to get to it, and others would have incentive to take lower paying jobs (teaching for instance, or different medical specialties for medical students) because they could now afford it instead of a fixed payment that might represent a very large amount of their income. This would also mean that the college has some incentive for either a) training people who could potentially earn higher income or b) training people such that they will most certainly have a job post-graduation. And not for training people in useless degrees. I think this admits that our over-credentialed/over-licensing society uses college largely as a degree mill for jobs rather than as self-enlightenment and self-enrichment, but we really cannot afford to continue lying to ourselves about the utility and experience of college as some sacred rite of passage at the prices we must pay.

liberal ideas

I've noted before that there are some empirical differences between libertarians and liberals (in addition to the goals part). And that's certainly a problem when trying to get across problems with rent controls or social welfare programmes or the impact of unions.

But occasionally there's just fucking stupid.


Now. Of these ideas..
1) I agree in principle that we should be expanding visas for immigration, especially for highly educated people, and even for people who want to start companies and not just work for Microsoft or Google. I've got no problem with that. And it's even possible that this would grow the economy in raw GDP terms. But the idea that it could magically hire hundreds of thousands of people, or even millions is completely ludicrous. First, not all of those startup companies will succeed, many will probably fail, probably not for reasons like they had bad products, but more that they lacked proper marketing for the open market, or the problem that good engineers or software designers probably don't make very good businessmen. At least not all the time. But here's the real kicker: what sort of Americans who don't have jobs right now... can do the sort of jobs that would be created by this policy? Isn't your purported goal to reduce unemployment (see previous topics)? I have no doubt this would "create jobs", or at least relocate those jobs from China or India or even Canada or Europe to the US. And yay us. But the idea that there are millions of college educated people who can do coding or tech work, and that these people are just sitting around unemployed is just completely asinine. There isn't a college educated unemployment problem for the most part. There IS an unemployment problem, but almost all of those people were factory workers, administrative assistants, and construction workers. Good luck teaching them all how to design websites. Seeing as I've met some of these people (who don't have jobs and are trying to re-educate to get a new one), I'll have to tell you that you'll probably also have to teach most of them some rudimentary mathematics first before you can start in on machine code. So basically this is a programme to create a lot of upper-middle class jobs and a few janitorial or secretary slots for some small businesses that last long enough. Maybe some construction or electrical work too. Not terrible, but not exactly recognizing where the problem is.

2) Continue to give money to state and local governments. Kleiman to his credit identifies part of the problem here as "some local governments will be corrupt or inefficient". I'd be more comfortable giving money to help out some cops and teachers if state and local governments didn't have bad habits of spending their valuable tax money on extensive pensions, bad teachers and bad cops who cannot be rid of, or worst of all, boondoggle infrastructure or construction projects designed to get photo ops or names in papers. Hooray for that new stadium. Too bad we had to lay off a bunch of regular honest state workers (people) to build it on the public's dime (or raise taxes to get the bonds to do so). Things like this. If a case can be made that there are structural constraints on the money being expended in this way and that state and local budgets have to be brought into control (over long-term) by slashing useless programmes or curtailing marginal ones (prison overpopulation for instance, often caused by imprisoning non-violent vice criminals), then this isn't terrible on its own. Kleiman is also correct that with budget balancing required precisely during counter-cyclical arrangements that the lender of last resort would have to be the federal government. Which is fine to some extent. But here's part of the deal, suppose it's not a national crisis and it's just California or North Carolina or whoever going broke. Should we all act to bank them? I say no. If a state has overextended its public policies such that it is going bankrupt trying to maintain them, then one consequence should be that it should have to look hard at curtailing its public policies (or raising revenues to pay for them, and risk sending people and businesses to other states in some cases). The basic problem is that there's a liberal assumption that what people want is more government. To an extent this is true. The "People" do want the programmes that are promised them (mostly). What they don't want is to have to pay for it. They want someone else to do that, and usually convince themselves that they're not paying for it (see: keep your government hands off my medicare!). Liberals/progressives on economics have succeeded mostly by forgetting to send people the bill telling them how much glorious programme XYZ costs, and then conservatives (and liberals) have managed to convince them that programme ABC (say, foreign aid or the department of education or even defence procurement) is full of waste and abuse and fraud and costs a lot of money. When it actually costs a fraction of XYZ, the untouchable things like entitlements or defence/security/anti-crime spending. There is a lot of waste to go around, sure, but it's not enough to save us the "good stuff". And its not enough to say that oh shame, teachers and cops will lose their jobs! to convince us to keep spending money on government. Some of them should lose their jobs because some of them are costing us more in headaches and failures than is worth it to their profession and to their public function. The problem is more that it won't be just the assholes and incompetents who get kicked out the door.

3) NIH funding is fine, for what it's worth. You get from this human capital and potentially useful research in medicine and science that you can do something with later as a society funding it. So it's not a useless public works policy. But... again. What sort of employment are we getting? Ahh yes. Because that 1-2% of post graduate educated people or 4-5% of college graduates who don't have jobs will certainly help resolve the employment problems for the 15-20% of teens or 20-25% of high school dropouts and so on. Remind me again why you guys don't like trickle down economics? Maybe there's a percentage of such people who do have jobs but don't have "good jobs" and they'd trade up. But just how many science majors and math wizards and computer programmers are out of work, and how many English majors or artists or what not are?

4) Taxing corporate revenues is always a popular meme for you guys. I'd prefer eliminating the corporate income taxes personally and just going straight after dividend/bonus incomes as regular income (no capital gains either, income is income). That said, you were onto something here talking about the banks (before trying to kill job growth by increasing corporate taxation further). What they could do instead is put a negative interest rate on excess reserves, enough to offset any gain from buying government bonds. That would move the money out faster and start loaning or capital development at least. Money would again be in circulation. And the government would no longer appear to be in the banking sectors pocket. Of all the things here, this is the only one that would have any prayer of implementation even under a 60 vote Democratic Senate, mostly because it relies only on the technocratic Federal Reserve to implement and Congress has no say. This is the other problem with all of this. Good luck getting a modestly favorable immigration bill through or more NIH funding, or additional "stimulus" funding for state and local governments through Congress. Liberals had trouble enough doing anything like this with a 59-60 seat Senate and a House majority of Democrats. It's not happening at all with a GOP House majority and enough Senators to filibuster, and in a couple of these cases, Obama even isn't likely to back the idea (I haven't bought the conservative hype that he's some sort of wacko-liberal from the extreme left. Mostly because I've met people on the extreme left.)

5) The one liberal "job creation" proposal I'd take seriously is to do something like the infrastructure bank. Except only for repairs or upgrades to existing infrastructure (there's a ton of this out there to fix highways or upgrade the power grids and sewer lines or put up smart traffic lights, etc). No boondoggle HSR lines, no natural gas or ethanol subsidies, nothing fancy, flashy, and thus stupid. Just the unsexy work of filling potholes and making sure bridges don't collapse. This would have the effect of giving lots of people who are unskilled labourers something to do in the short run. And this where the bulk of the unemployment problem comes from. We can't design programmes that assume that our unskilled labour force can suddenly and magically do advanced metric statistical analysis or treat medical illnesses. Sorry, but our schools have been fucked for long enough that we don't have lots of people like that who could learn how, even after two-three years of recession already to entice them to train. Most Americans are... well they're idiots. It'll take a while to learn that "stuff", if ever in most cases. We can't go back and fix the structural problems with their education growing up now. So we're left with a bunch of half-educated dimwits who can however learn to fix cars or fill in potholes or wire a house or unclog a drain or type up reports or answer phones, etc. It's not the end of the world. But it's also not as simple as "hey I know, let's fix a non-existent problem for other smart people and then they'll hire all these other folks". Because truth be told, they may not being going back to India or China if these sorts of ideas were somehow magically available to be done, but they damn sure will be hiring some of them instead. I would anyway.

A pair of thoughts on why

Education is not about education

Sleep matters not As part of the long-running quest I've had to abolish daylight savings time changes, one possible aid is to push the start of the school back to a normal time, especially for teens (where it would also lower the crime rate, particularly in poorer urban areas). But since education isn't about encouraging learning, and is more about creating docile students who would become docile workers...

we should expect teachers to act like tyrants, behaving with the same arbitrary distinctions that employers do. And this is pretty much what they've done for decades. The same concerns about educational systems and its direction were a common thread for Russell.

"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."