Doug McNeal and Adam Corner were tweeting about a new climate communication booklet. I clicked one of the links and ended up at Andy Skuce’s blog. Andy make a number of points– but discussing those is not the point of this post. I just wanted to show you what I imagine when I encountered the sort of hypothetical conversation on climate change that is supposed to win over skeptics.
How do you react to those ‘climate communication’ inspired arguments?
“Do you have house insurance?”
“Of course – pretty much everyone does”
“Well reducing our carbon emissions is exactly the same. It’s an insurance policy against the risks that scientists tell us climate change will bring.”
“Huh? I’s not the same at all! With an insurance policy, I pay a small premium, then if something goes badly wrong, I get a big pay out in compensation. No analogy at all with reducing carbon emissions”.
“About 97% of climate scientists that climate change is happening and is caused by humans.”
“That’s a pretty meaningless statement. What matters is how fast the climate is changing and whether it’s causing any problems.”
“Scientists are as certain about climate change as they are about the link between smoking and lung cancer.”
“Bollocks. There you go with your false analogies again. There’s no comparison between the Earth’s climate, where we only have one sample, and the hundreds of thousands of smokers who’ve died of lung cancer. You really are full of it. Congratulations – you’ve turned me into a climate sceptic with your dishonesty.”
Thought bubble: “Silly girl. She missed my point about house insurance and brought up those irrelevant financial planners!”
Thought bubble: “Sexist nitwit. My financial planner has my broad interests in mind because his fee depends on it. My insurance company is narrowly focused on providing me the least coverage for the highest premium they can get.”
Thought bubble: “If I just ignore her points, I’m sure she’ll realize they are stupid and irrelevant!”
Thought bubble: “Yeah, as stupid and irrelevant at you are. Not.”
Thought bubble: “Worked like a charm. Those climate communicators are so right!”
(Missing thought bubble): “Snort! Yeah, keep up the good work.”
How do I react? With a sigh of resigned amusement.
Shouldn’t the cartoon bubbles be in Hindi and Chinese? We’ve already got the genius with the pen and the phone running regulatory mayhem; he’ll continue whether the public approves or not. And shouldn’t the arguments and studies be aimed at the psychology of the political / policy decision makers of India and China?
Why are these people targeting us? I don’t see what we have to do with anything at this point. If you want to make a difference, target your efforts where they’ll matter.
Makes me wonder if these folk are seriously worried about climate change in the first place.
[edit: Gads, will I never remember not to use rhetorical questions here.
Shouldn’t the bubbles be in Hindi and Chinese? I think so. Shouldn’t the studies be aimed at Chinese and Indian decision makers? I think so. Why are these people targeting us? Because they don’t give a darn about climate change and never did, they care about political outcomes in the west.]
Paul,
Your example parallels mine in that the “climate communicator” stops refuses to engage the point made by the target skeptic he is trying to convince. And he does this after they accepted his “insurance” frame. One of the ‘climate communicator’s” problems is he doesn’t want to stay in the frame he introduced.
There are so many places this conversation could go off the rails.
Man: “Do you have house insurance?â€
Woman: “No. I rent.â€
Where is this going to go?
Man: “If you owned a house, you’d buy insurance.”
Woman:”I like renting.”
Man: “You should consider renters insurance.”
Woman: “I don’t own a lot of jewelry or art. My financial planner showed me it’s more cost effectve to self insure the possessions that fit in my studio apartment.”
He’s not going to even reach his pre-rehearsed claim that reducing climate emissions is like buying house insurance.
His climate change-insurance metaphor as convincing reason why we need to act on climate change now is pre-rebutted before he even gets there.
I asked one of our medicine fellows about the link between smoking and disease.
Apparently the link to cancer is traditionally put at 95% because about 5% of the population appear to be immune to smoking-induced cancer, for reasons that are not at all well understood.
However the links to pulmonary diseases are much stronger: “as many nines as you like” was his informal summary.
Gary,
Since they cast the communicator as tie-wearing male and the skeptic as what looks to me like a bare-shouldered woman in with a somewhat ‘comehither’ eye-covering hairstyle, I was tempted to have her think:
“You man-splaining horse’s-patoot”. But I needed to keep the thought bubbles inside the frame.
“What’s with this guy, stopping me on the street. Is he a Jehovah’s Witness? Is he going to try and sell me something?
“He’s really all over the place. Why doesn’t he shut up for even a second when I’m trying to speak? This is boring.”
Adam Corner has written an article for the Guardian highlighting the 12 principles.
I have added a few more principles in the comments
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jul/06/12-tools-for-communicating-climate-change-more-effectively
I have home owners insurance only because my mortgage requires it. Same with car insurance. And don’t get me started on health insurance! Insurance is a big racket with only one purpose, to separate me from my money!
Now, what is it you wanted to talk about?
Barry,
The cartoon fell under “11. Have a conversation, not an argument”.
Of course a conversation is better than an argument. But it’s not a conversation if the ‘climate communicator’ doesn’t listen.
Lucia has finally communicated The Blackboard’s central point:
Who needs climate science when we’ve got vaping ?
Like all efforts to “improve communication”, this one is based on the ‘deficit-of-information’ model. That model is just WRONG. Most people are less concerned about global warming than they are about many other problems because they think the ‘science’ is very uncertain, the ‘dangers’ are wildly exaggerated, and those holding the reins of the global warming bandwagon are wild-eyed greens who do not share the values/morals/priorities of normal people. People have more than enough information to see that there is too much hype and not enough thoughtful reflection among the ‘alarmed’ about where GHG driven warming should sit on the list of serious problems humanity faces. (Hint: it should be nowhere near the top of the list.) On the other hand, I think the vast waste of resources on largely useless ‘climate science’ (like the flotilla of models which disagree with each other AND with measured reality) SHOULD be high on that list of serious problems.
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Better communication of the same message is not needed; what is needed is a better message: drop the hysteria, advocate obvious fixes like improved energy efficiency and nuclear power, stop jetting off to climate conferences all over the world, and most of all, take control of the message away from the nutcake greens!
Comparing “carbon emissions reduction” with “insurance premiums” is like comparing a can of tuna with a tuning fork.
Undertaking the tasks advocated by climate activists is not like buying insurance. It’s like enlisting in the military for an open-ended period of time.
“Scientists are as certain about climate change as they are about the link between smoking and lung cancer.â€
Personally I take this to mean that Scientists must believe that CO2 has a 1 in 5 Chance of causing Global Warming then, as that’s the chance of a significant smoker developing Lung Cancer.
Thought bubble: “Wow, is this creep related to yguy?”
oh – by the way..
Recursive Fury is back
http://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/443
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/rf2015.html
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/Recurrent-Fury-Frequently-Asked-Questions.html
(now anonymised) reads like I had a fight on the internet, with nasty conpsiracy theorising sceptics..
Stephan is quoted as saying:
“Engagement of so-called skeptics is ill-advised,” Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom told me recently. “It is a hopeless task to try to talk to them and change their minds.”
http://www.kxlh.com/story/29493096/we-cant-ignore-climate-change-skeptics-even-if-we-really-really-want-to
I think he is ‘projecting’ somewhat here, as I think the converse is the problem.
The comparison to the link between smoking and lung cancer is interesting.
I like Paul Matthews’ point: there is only one earth for a natural climate experiment. There are or were millions of smokers as compared to non-smokers. That’s intro stats or intro logic, on which so many warmists seem weak. Of course the models are supposed to yield realistic artificial earth atmospheres, but then there is actual evidence as to whether they do so or not.
Jonathan Jones: the link between smoking and pulmonary diseases is stronger than between smoking and cancer. I would say the link is clearer: sucking tar and crap into your lungs causes your entire respiratory system to fail over time.
In a way I think it is unfortunate that the link between smoking and cancer turned out to be substantial, given that the actual mechanism by which cancer comes about has still not been explained. (And an epidemic of environmental cancers, which had been predicted by some, has not come about). With climate, as with diet and nutrition claims, there is a widespread sense that no scientific evidence of interest to the public has to be any better than the co-relation between smoking and lung cancer, and in fact it is fine if there is a much weaker co-relation.
Barry,
Pretty funny based on his behavior of refusing to talk to people.
Fury isn’t so much as back, but a very different paper in parts.
Hmmm
table 3 now has anonymous ID’s… with people labelled with negative psychological traits.
but as Recursive Fury was one of psychology’s most downloaded paper (Stephan’s own words), which had table 3, with the people actually named…
It isn’t really that anonymous now even now.. (which is why I imagine Frontiers wouldn’t publish an anonomised versin)
Perhaps Lewandowsky should take down the original Recursive Fury now?
http://www.cogsciwa.com/
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/Publications/LskyetalRecursiveFury4UWA.pdf
Yeah, this thing is not Fury, it’s a … different animal. Firstly, it’s just another typical psychology paper with grad students serving as guinea pigs (paid $15 an hour). Secondly, Lewandowsky accepts some of the key points of criticism of Fury – that no institutional ethics approval was obtained, and that authors analyzing criticism of their own work as ‘data’ represents a conflict. Apparently, Lew will release raw data for this paper to ‘credentialed scholars’.
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One more jewel that will go down the drain in a week’s time and be forgotten. More like Recursive Whimper.
Lewandowsky is actually right about that, but not for the reasons he thinks. Skeptics are not going to change the way they judge factual evidence, and certainly not going to change their values, priorities, and sense of right and wrong at the suggestion of Lew, or anyone else. Same goes for CAGW advocates. They look at the same factual evidence, apply a very different set of values, and draw very different conclusions. So just talking is not going to change anyone’s mind. Limited political compromise is the extent of what is possible.
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It’s a bit sad that Lewandowsky is so non-self-aware he can’t step back enough to see the bigger picture, though it’s not surprising: it seems to be a common child-like characteristic among the loony left and the nutcake greens. They can’t imagine a rational person of good will could possibly disagree with their personal values/priorities/goals/morals, and so conclude anyone who disagrees is either irrational, evil, stupid, or all three. It is the kind of thinking that leads to skeptics being called ‘criminals’ or ‘insane’ by folks like Lew. He is both very left and a nutcake green; the combined effects appear to be ‘synergistic’, and it shows in his ‘scholarly work’.
Barry Woods,
Thanks for the link to Lew’s commentary; it is very funny.
SteveF,
The study that needs doing is an analysis of self-awareness among skeptics and warmists. There does seem to be a correlation to or gradient between the two extremes that would be informative to quantify. Lew probably would mishandle it, though, and produce more fallacious recursion.
I see Recursive Fury will not go quietly into the night. It’s a shame since I think all this will do is bring the central problem of the paper into the light. A problem I’ve never really people discuss with Recursive Fury is it only had ~180 excerpts in its data base. That’s a tiny amount.
It made some sense with the header, “Excerpt Espousing Conspiracy Theory,” but that got undermined when we all got to laugh at Richard Betts being listed in the data file. Lewandowsky et al defended Betts being listed by saying the file wasn’t for conspiracy theories, just for comments relevant to conspiracy theories. It might be true you could only find ~180 blog posts/comments espousing conspiracy theories regarding the LOG12 paper (though many of the ones they listed didn’t espouse conspiracy theories), but you could find way more than ~180 blog posts/comments relevant to conspiracy theories about the paper. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find a single blog post with more than 180 comments relevant to a conspiracy theory about the paper!
In most fields, I’d think authors labeling such massive undersampling a full collection would be grounds for retraction. I doubt it will be for this one, even though the undersampling is almost certainly a case of blatant cherry-picking.
Huh. That comment went through. I tried submitting the exact same one earlier this morning, and it got me a nasty warning. I wish I would have bothered to take note of the IP address it showed at the time. I suspect it would have been different than the one I have right now.
It’s just weird that I can type a message in the morning, fail to have it go through, leave the house for half a day, come back, then have it go through. Or the other way around. My ISP and your servers have issues lucia.
Barry Woods (Comment #137645)July 8th, 2015 at 4:11 am
“Engagement of so-called skeptics is ill-advised,†Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom told me recently. “It is a hopeless task to try to talk to them and change their minds.”
2015 at 5:50 am
SteveF (Comment #137652) It is a hopeless task to try to talk to them and change their minds.Lewandowsky is actually right about that, but not for the reasons he thinks.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #137674)July 8th, 2015 at 7:08 pm
“I see Recursive Fury will not go quietly into the night”
Needs it’s own Chapter, Lucia. Can you open a new heading up?
Is he right? Practically yes but the whole purpose of being a psychologist is to communicate with people to get them to change their minds.
Brandon
“It’s a shame since I think all this will do is bring the central problem of the paper into the light”
Not a shame at all. Great news. Lewendowsky is number one to change AGW adherents into skeptics. Well number 2 behind the Insurance agent upstairs at A. Skuse’s blog
angech:
I kind of meant it’s a shame for them 😛
But it’s also a shame in general. Practically speaking, this problem is the least interesting problem with the Recursive Fury paper. Nobody really seems to care the entire data set for the paper is cherry-picked. The cherry-picking is really quite obvious if you look at the data set. They didn’t try to hide it. They provided links so people could look at the original data sources. People just didn’t.
Put simply, Recursive Fury was little more than Lewandowsky et al quote mining their critics for things that could sound bad when taken out of context published in a “peer-reviewed” journal, dressed up in clinical terminology.
Ah, that brings back memories — of “conversations” with telephone marketers. These days I don’t even answer the phone. But if I did, the image of the guy on the other end of the line wearing a green shirt with a red and white striped tie would almost make it worthwhile.
As for real conversations with climate change fanatics, I don’t engage unless they actually know something and are open to ideas. If they want to change my mind, they have to be willing to risk changing their mind.
Why do they need a conversation? They are doing well enough without facts. Isn’t 97% enough?
“About 97% of climate scientists that climate change is happening and is caused by humans.â€
This is the theme at the University of Queensland skeptic course by and for John Cook.
Where Lewindowsky was working on the way to Bristol??
Self serving aggrandizement.
and self puffery.
Still as they say any advertising is good advertising.
The ‘conversation’ is based entirely on how alarmsits want sceptics to be, not how they really are. They assume the only ‘hold-outs’ against The Cause are either entirely ignorant (do they really think anyone who will ever give a damn about global warming has never heard of the consensus, or facile insurance metaphors?) or mendacious.
They should accept that a) most people will never care about AGW unless the shore line reaches the bottom of their street, and b) those who do care will not be convinced by more juvenile communication, but only by a determined demonstration that climatology has started to police itself by condemning idiots like Lewandowsky, and jettisoning Mann’s absurdly bad science.
It should be a lot shorter:
“Do you have asteroid strike insurance?”
“Nope.”
“Erm… crap.”
“Do you like ice cream?”
– Yes!
“Without carbon dioxide, there is no ice cream.”
A better analogy would be to consider that you have made it in life, and have a nice house with a lot of nice consumer electronics, valuable jewelry and a fine Renoir on the wall.
Now, do you think it is worth it to spend money on an alarm system?
Can we all agree that the smoking/lung cancer connection is the epitome of the correlation is not causation argument?
I thought we were already spending big bucks on an alarm system. How else would you explain the Climate Science Enterprise?
That’s the police department spending money to track the number of burglaries in your neighborhood, they are not in the business of preventing said burglaries.
Never heard of the Climate Science Enterprise, is that a division of the Climate-Industrial complex?
If the police noted an increase in residential burglaries and predicted a 500% increase in the future, would you review your insurance?
“Is it possible that fishies like hot water, highly acidic oceans?”
– No, that’s impossible!
“Check it out.“
First I’d ask how they could possibly know that residential burglaries will increase in the future. If the answer were credible, which I seriously doubt, I’d fire the current police chief, who is clearly incompetent, and give the new one a bigger budget. Police are in the business of preventing crime. See for example the liberal bete noir stop and frisk.
Rather than buying more insurance, I’d put better doors and locks on the house, install a good alarm system and a 12 gauge shotgun or maybe a Rotweiler or Doberman.
“[Police] are not in the business of preventing said burglaries”
If I were you, I’d run back to the insurance analogy as fast as possible.
And regarding the CSE, it’s proudly advocated by all the “smart” people.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Climate+science+enterprise%22&rls=com.microsoft:en-US:IE-Address&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7MXGB_enUS592&gws_rd=ssl
Where are the Psychologist police or the AHPRA [- Regulating Australia’s health practitioners in partnership with the National Boards ] when you need them?
Where are the concerned Psychologists of the world?
When a practitioner of the light arts can make such a muck up of his articles and worse get them published where is the regulation?
A person showing such traits of paranoia, and writing dictated by such paranoia should surely have attracted the attention and concern of all well meaning practitioners.
They should be bringing him in for suppor,t reevaluating, counseling and debriefing.
Or at the very least pointing out the concerns about such articles getting air in their journals.
It speaks out loudly on how much fear deviation from the Climate Change herd inspires that none of them are even giving a whimper.
Blank check syndrome. Convince someone climate change exists and has risks will magically make them write out a check of any size to solve the problem.
In a world of unlimited resources, I advocate we spend unlimited resources on protecting ourselves from possible bad climate change outcomes.
We live in a world of limited resources. Let’s try another engaging communication strategy.
Q: Are you for preventing innocent children from dying brutal deaths from cancer? Are you for spending MORE money on preventing this tragedy?
A: Of course I am! What do you think I am? Heartless?
Q: How much money are we spending on cancer research now?
A: I have no idea (but it must not be ENOUGH!).
Anyone see a flaw in this argument?
One of government’s tasks is the efficient allocation of limited resources, such as taxpayer income. It is irrelevant whether people support a particular cause that has merit. What matters is where it falls on society’s priority list, the cost of action, and the chances of success.
Would you rather spend $100M on cancer research or clean energy research? This is what government decides, not whether climate change or cancer research is a “worthy” cause in the abstract.
Advocates fool themselves that an admission of risk automatically results in their preferred action. The correct answer to the questions is I buy house insurance if it is reasonably priced for the quantifiable risk. If we can solve climate change for $1, I’m all for it.
Priorities. Risk. Cost. My guess is the unlucky citizens of Greece who line up at ATM’s daily are spending very little time hand wringing about climate change lately, nor should they be.
“One of government’s tasks is the efficient allocation of limited resources, such as taxpayer income.”
Wherever one stands on global warming, if one accepts the above premise then the most important debate is lost. Government’s role should be quite limited (per the Constitution), and taxpayer income belongs to the earner.
HaroldW,
So you’re for eliminating the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA and all those other Federal agencies that sponsor research? I’m libertarian, but I’m not that libertarian. There is a role for the Federal Government to support higher education through research grants. Private enterprise simply won’t take that sort of risk.
DeWitt –
Yes, insofar as they exceed a minimal government function. I’m happy to have CDC for the purpose of epidemic control, for example.
1. Do you agree with Tom’s formulation that it is the federal government’s proper role to “allocate taxpayer income”?
2. What criteria would you suggest to define the scope of Federal agencies?
HaroldW,
I suggest that you do some homework then. We might not even have this forum for discussion without DARPA. I’m not complaining that the NSF paid my daughter’s way through graduate school and also provided support for the University she attended either.
I would restate that the proper role is to most efficiently accomplish the tasks that are best suited to the federal level. I would also say that the NIH, for example, is essential to the functioning of the CDC.
This being a republic, the scope of federal agencies is defined by our representatives in Congress, the President and the Federal courts. If you don’t like what’s happening, elect someone who more closely represents your views. Otherwise, you’re pi$$ing into the wind.
Hmmm…. the predecessors to the CDC and NIH go back a long way in our history.
” A Short History of the National Institutes of Health
The NIH traces its roots to 1887, when a one-room laboratory was created within the Marine Hospital Service (MHS), predecessor agency to the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS). The MHS had been established in 1798 to provide for the medical care of merchant seamen. One clerk in the Treasury Department collected twenty cents per month from the wages of each seaman to cover costs at a series of contract hospitals. In the 1880s, the MHS had been charged by Congress with examining passengers on arriving ships for clinical signs of infectious diseases, especially for the dreaded diseases cholera and yellow fever, in order to prevent epidemics.”
http://history.nih.gov/exhibits/history/
A lot of our victory over large scale public disease has been due to NIH and CDC.
Tom Scharf (Comment #137775)
Good point, except that that money is ‘other people’s money’
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“One of government’s tasks is the efficient allocation of limited resources”
How is that working out? See the pretty graph here:
https://ricochet.com/athens-on-the-potomac/
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“Priorities. Risk. Cost.”
It’s well known that the general public has a very poor sense of statistical risk and that politicians have a distorted sense of priorities. Bjørn Lomborg said some things along the cost/benefit lines that made him infamous.
Interesting that the freedoms that we might assume are protected by constitutional safe guards are not in reality. Income taxes can be applied at any level. A well read author, Piketty, advocates for a wealth tax that many see could be applied without constitutional amendments.
Sometimes we forget that governments interest in carrying out laws can require restricting individual rights and that “compelling” interest passes constitutional muster. The Obama Care legislation from SCOTUS review, in effect, says if you can tax it you can regulate/impose it and at any level of individual activity.
Like DeWitt implies, looking for constitutional individual rights for a minority voting group is akin to pi–ing into a strong wind – even though many might have assumed that it is the individual and minority that the constitution is supposed to protect.
The exception to getting constitutional relief from the voting populace in some states is to get SCOTUS to find a right that is politically popular at the national level.
In my above post I have assumed that without the right to an individuals own income and wealth others rights are diminished or effectively eliminated.
HaroldW,
A bit of a misunderstanding, I meant “income taxes”, not “income”. I certainly do not believe income belongs to the government. There will always be taxes and one of government’s roles is to allocate them efficiently and reasonably according to the priorities of the electorate. I’m all for small government, but am all for government doing the things that makes sense (defense, regulating a “fair” market, education, common infrastructure, etc.). I also support some frivolities such as space exploration and core research.
Ledite,
I never said our government was doing their job well, ha ha. Borrowing other people’s money at low interest rates can make sense sometimes, getting a college education for example. Whether the US is using its loans wisely allowing it to reap larger rewards later is a bit doubtful.
Deviating from the electorate’s priorities is a path to authoritarianism. The public may not always be wise, but I’d trade that for the inevitable corruption that occurs when those in power no longer have to answer to the public. I’m not a big believer in benevolent dictators of any kind, even if they go by the names “scientists” and “EPA”.
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Friends of mine have difficulty drawing the line between socialism and fascism. It appears there are two paths.
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1. An totalitarian authority takes power and control of everything, and that includes all people’s well being: fascism->socialism
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2. A populace seeks more and more of their well being through ‘guaranteed’ benefits from the government and in the process cedes more and more power to that government:
socialism->fascism
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The constitution did a good job of stemming path 1 by separation and balance of powers. However, there’s not much in democracy that can be done about path 2 and the founders warned us of what we may become.
Turbulent,
Well, yes, there is the tyranny of a tyrant, and then there is the tyranny of the majority. That 50%+1 can impose its will, no matter how harmful, on everyone else was a clear worry of the folks who wrote the constitution, and the Constitution was crafted to try to make sure a simple majority was restricted in the harm it could do. .
Unfortunately, progressive presidents, starting with Woodrow Wilson, and a parade of foolish Supreme Court justices, up to and including John Roberts, have done their best to bring both kinds of tyranny upon the public. The Court acts as if the Constitution does not say what it plainly does say…. many of the protections envisioned by the writers of the Constitution have simply been taken away by the Supreme Court. IMO, it is high time for a constitutional convention of the States.
In times past, people were allowed to:
… call “bullsh.t” when they saw clear bullsh.t.
Not today, you are then called a “denier” or a “conspiracy ideator”.
Bill,
When was that ever true?
SteveF,
I’m pretty sure that we wouldn’t like the result of a new Constitutional Convention. The liberal mentality is too deeply rooted.
DeWitt,
Maybe. Each state would have one vote…. it wouldn’t be a plebiscite. Of course, the requirement of 3/4 of states approving changes might make any formal constitutional change impossible, by any means. Which is, I suppose, why ‘progressive’ SC justices have consistently ignored the actual Constitution and substituted whatever Orwellian ‘interpretation’ they want. Since they can’t formally change what they don’t like in the Constitution via amendment, they instead subvert it.
DeWitt:
As taxes and regulations go up returns diminish and enterprise is curtailed proportionally. Many valuable product and service inventions were never realized that we will never measure.
.
Eddie: “…difficulty drawing the line between socialism and fascism…”
Ronald Reagan: “There is no right or left, only up or down.”
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Tom Scharf:
Thomas Jefferson: “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”
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Reagan is the last President to have repeated the above Jefferson quote. If a candidate utters it today they will be branded “tea bag scum.”
Ron Graf (Comment #137793)
Perhaps, if you take a very myopic view of what has historically benefited enterprise.
And many valuable product and service inventions have been funded by tax dollars and protected by regulations.
As far as I can tell government is still far from being big enough to give me everything I want.
My version:
“Shouldn’t we listen to the NAS and the Royal Society on climate change? This is a scientific question, so it seem reasonable to listen to the world’s most esteemed scientific bodies.”
“Scientists are stupid liberals who are trying to force socialism down our throats.”
“I’m going to walk away now.”
And…scene.
Boris,
Not all scientists, for sure, but it is clear that a majority of scientists, especially academic scientists, are politically well left of the voting public. And this is just about everywhere: voters on average place “action on climate change” near dead last in a prioritized list of policy issues.
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Scientists are no different from other people: they want to advance policies consistent with their political views. In the case of global warming, their evaluation of the relative costs and benefits of fossil fuel use, and the policies they support with respect to fossil fuel use, are a clear reflection of their political views. For climate scientists, a tiny fraction of all scientists, there seems to me a clear “green” political bias as well, which exaggerates the claimed urgency to “do something”. The thumb of climate science on the scale used to weigh the science is so obvious that it would be humorous, save for its potential to promote unwise and wasteful public policies.
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The many “defer to the authority of scientists” arguments you and others make are, not surprisingly, made by people who mostly share the politics and policy goals of those scientists. Many voters will (quite sensibly!) not be convinced by appeals to authority. It is at bottom mainly a disagreement about goals, priorities, morality and world view, and the voting booth is where such disagreements are
decided.
Oliver,
Government is at best a zero sum economic game. Free enterprise is usually a positive sum economic game. I think it helpful to keep those two things in mind.
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BTW, there are no records of Jefferson writing or saying “a government big enough…..”, that appears to date from the 1950’s in response to a rapidly growing government. What Jefferson did say was:
Jefferson was obviously concerned about an ever growing scope of government.
Jefferson was obviously concerned about an ever growing scope of government.
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I am pretty sure that Jefferson’s realization has slipped out of the common grade school (and college) curriculum. I remember when my 9th grade social studies teacher drew the political spectrum on the chalk board with communism on the left, fascism on the right and socialism left of center and capitalism right of center. I scratched my head. I argued later in college that fascism was central control (dictatorship) where private wealth could be accumulated as long as it supported the regime. Where in communism private wealth accumulation was forbidden unless one was within the regime (or its bureaucracy). This hardly seems opposites of a spectrum. Socialists appear to have had a long hold on academics. Some would say they tend to be religiously academic. It’s certainly how their religion is spread.
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Oliver: “And many valuable product and service inventions have been funded by tax dollars and protected by regulations.”
Barack Obama: “You didn’t build that.”
I would think from the discussion here that it is clear that a constitution, at least as was originally constructed in the US, is no protection against a growing government and its invasion of individual rights – given the poloitical leanings of the current crop of intellectuals.
The only way to a limited government is through a change in thinking of the dominant intellectual community.
By the way I do not judge the success of a government enterprises on a stand alone basis. We do not know what enterprises would have evolved without the government enterprise. The internet came into existence from an initial government operation but reached its current massive utility and application through private enterprise. We do not know whether it would have been developed without the initial government involvement but if other technologies developed in the private sector are any clue one might conclude it would have even if the timing were not the same.
Kenneth,
“The only way to a limited government is through a change in thinking of the dominant intellectual community.”
This seems to me a very difficult or even impossible task in the current circumstances. The culture of academia, especially at well known schools, is overwhelmingly leftist. Being given a position in this environment is essentially conditional on agreeing with the consensus view of the faculty; not allowing certain points of view to even be uttered on campus is but one of the consequences. Unless a professor has tenure before saying the “wrong things” (like Richard Lindzen does) they will simply not be allowed to stay at the school. It is a self-perpetuating process of keeping education “politically pure” and uncontaminated with opposing views, and seems to me a result of the same mentality as the UEA emails showed how well known climate scientists thought about enforcing the consensus view of looming climate catastrophe.
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Like all political problems, I think the leftward tilt of politics on campuses can only be reduced by political means: A very large fraction of research funding (especially in the sciences, but also in other fields) is public money, and decisions about how much and what kinds of research to support are made ultimately by elected officials and their appointees. Public money should come with strings attached.. or even withheld completely.. when elected officials see a university enforcing a political environment that is contrary to the public interest. A lack of access to money has a wonderful way of focusing peoples’ minds.
We need Apocalypse Insurance, All Perils. Future global warming is the least of our worries, just another Hollywood disaster movie. And now we have to worry about earthquakes and tsunamis bigger than The Big One. With Cascadia, everything west of the I-5 is toast. I read it in the NYT.
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PS. When you buy the Brooklyn Bridge, be sure to get the extended warranty.
I first heard an analog made between climate change mitigation and home insurance made by Steve Schneider more than a decade ago. I found the analogy enlightening.
1) Most people are required to buy home insurance by the bank that loaned the money to buy the house. Car insurance is also involuntary in developed countries. Mortgage companies escrow funds from monthly payments, so that home insurance payment are made. Citizens who owns their homes outright are usually fairly affluent and usually do volunteer to continue insuring.
2) Many affluent people voluntarily purchase some life insurance, but almost no one insures against the full risk. Fewer affluent people purchase disability insurance even though the risk of disability is far higher than the risk of death. Although fully aware of the risks they are running, even affluent people are plan to ADAPT to death or disability rather than pay the full cost of MITIGATION. The less-affluent usually do without such insurance.
3) In the case of home, life and disability insurance, we have good information about the risk being run, how much insurance will cost, and reasonable confidence that our insurance company will pay in the event of disaster. In contrast, we don’t know how much future climate change might cost, or how much mitigation will cost. Until technology provides a cheaper source of power, the past quarter century shows that emissions cuts by developed countries likely will be swamped by emission growth by developing countries. If so, mitigation won’t ensure against disaster. Would you buy insurance from fly-by-night or even government-owned companies in based in the third world? Based on past performance, would you voluntarily buy climate mitigation insurance from any of the signatories of the Kyoto Protocol?
4) In general, only the affluent volunteer to buy insurance; the less-affluent adapt to disaster. Developing countries, undeveloped countries, and the poor in developed countries can’t afford to purchase insurance against the possibility that future climate change will be catastrophic.
5) I suspect that many readers of this blog would consider paying to ensure against “climate change catastrophe” IF such insurance really were analogous to other forms of insurance. Unfortunately, they are very different. Suppose the price of climate change insurance were as cheap as doubling the cost of the energy you consume. Would that cut your relatively inelastic demand for CO2 emissions by 50% (enough to stabilize at today at 400 ppm)? What you would you hope to be able to purchase with such insurance? The IPCC’s RCP 6.0 or 4.5 scenarios? What are the chances that the insurance you purchase would payoff? How many others would purchase such insurance?
Re: SteveF (Comment #137798)
We seem to be running up against axiomatic “knowledge” here.
Oliver,
Do you doubt that a large portion of what government does is re-distribution of income? (It is a greater portion in some countries, like France, than in others, like Japan, of course.) Do you believe the administration of that re-distribution is without cost? These are not intended to be rhetorical questions.
SteveF, I have no doubt that a huge part of what the U.S. government does is re-distribution of income, and that administration of said re-distribution has costs.
How does connects to your adage, “Government is at best a zero sum economic game.”
Are you taking an extremely narrow view of what is to be included in that sum?
SteveF, I will respectfully disagree with you on who controls whom in the influence of intellectuals versus the voting public. The voting public follows the majority intellectual community thinking even if not on all current issues then by a lag of a decade or so. The New York Times and the Washington Post are sounding boards for the intelligentsia that is taken as the gospel by the MSM and for the reading public to mostly take as the final words on these matters. The reversing of any of this process will take changes starting in present time and extending into the future decades.
As an example, Keynesian economics is well accepted by both political parties, if not in theory, then in practice. Keynes set up a system that allows a for the appearance of theoretical grounds for the irresponsibility we now see in our politicians with regards to spending and printing money. A recently publicly recognized counter to Keynesian thought has come from the libertarian oriented Austrian school of economics. Keynesians at least feel compelled to attempt to answer the Austrians criticisms.
Using climate change mitigation as means of gaining a better foothold of the government on the economy and resources is an interesting example of the interplay of the intellectuals and the voting public. Social Security and Medicare are accepted as successful government programs by a large majority of the public and especially the part that votes. It is difficult for the intellectuals and the voting public to admit to the failures of these programs and thus if the days of reckoning can be put off to future generations (as our huge government debts at all levels of government are also handled) it fits on one hand a general weakness of the masses and admits to intellectual dishonesty on the other. Intellectuals are only human I would guess in that they call for immediate action on climate change to save future generations while seemingly forgetting the problems that Social Security, Medicare and government debt pose for future generations. Has anyone seen a dissertation in the MSM on this contradiction?
The unsustainability of government spending revolves one thing: the cost of healthcare in the US. The difference between the US and the next most expensive country is about 5% of GDP. That’s about $850 billion, or the entire cost of the “TARP” bank bailout or the stimulus bill each and every year. Government spending is about half of that figure because, although it doesn’t insure more people, it insures the most expensive people (the elderly and the poor). If healthcare spending is brought under control, the problem largely goes away.
The other problem area, Social Security, can be fixed with a few minor changes. Everyone makes it out to be such an insurmountable problem, but there are any number of solutions that can be combined to solve the problem.
The remainder of government spending is shrinking as a share of GDP, and thus is not a threat to the solvency of the country.
Interesting that those easy fixes for Social Security are not implemented and particularly by the left leaning politicians who would appear to have a special interest in saving their beloved government program. Fixes or even talk about fixes are called the third rail of politics.
A clue in this matter is the almost uniform irresponsibilities of state and local governments in under funding their pension programs. All these unfunded liabilities have to be considered in toto and when that
is done the problem becomes huge and without any easy fixes.
Modern day governments are inherently oriented in the Greek mode – it just a matter of how far they are from where Greece is now. Or perhaps someone here can tell me how these irresponsibilities will change in the future.
Obama offered Chained CPI and raising the retirement age during various budget and debt showdowns but there were no takers. If the Republican leadership was serious about such things, both Obama and a handful of Democrats would have put those proposals over the top, but those offers have long since expired.
Of course, concessions like that would directly hurt social security recipients. The truth about “beloved government programs” like Social Security and Medicare is that they disproportionately benefit the right’s key demographic, which is considerably older than the left’s, and who believe that this is “their money” that they “earned” and not tax revenue that funds a government safety net. Much more likely to happen, at least when Democrats return to power, is raising the cap on the payroll tax so that it applies to, say, 90% of income (which is not unprecedented). The vast majority of the Republican electorate would not bat an eye.
Of course, all of this is a function of demographics and is easy to solve if any one had the courage to do it. Reducing the cost of healthcare, is much more difficult.
Of course we know that Obama in his first campaign was against reducing SS benefits and that his budget proposal for reduction in SS benefits was soundly rejected by the leftward interest groups. Those reductions would not have fixed the unfunded liability problem.
The unfunded fixes in total would require action at the federal, state and local levels. If those fixes required tax increases one could visualize those increases slowing the economy which would require even higher tax rates which in turn would further slow the economy.
I have not even mentioned the potential taxpayer liability for 2 trillion dollars in student loans.
My reference above to the feedback effects of increasing tax rates and negative influences on economic activity has a real life example in Greece. The Greek government was required to raise funds to pay loans which in turn decreased economic activity which in turn made raising revenue for further loan payments even more onerous. Future examples might lead to the term Greece trap.
cce wrote: “Much more likely to happen, at least when Democrats return to power, is raising the cap on the payroll tax so that it applies to, say, 90% of income”
For those making over the max, that amounts to a massive 5.6% (90% of 6.2%) increase in the marginal tax rate on income over about $110,000 – 11.2% increase counting the “employers contribution” and the self-employed. That would be equivalent to raising the top tax rate on income nearly 10% – with no increase in benefits for what might be double, triple, or more withholding of SS taxes from every paycheck. Since the system is already so “progressive”, those making above 50% of the max already get relatively little back in terms of future benefits per dollar of tax paid. (Not to mention the lousy deal our descendants must receive.) Now the system will be “infinitely progressive” in terms of benefits gained per additional dollar withheld. A great solution to the problem of income inequality.
If Social Security were required by law to break even (over a five- or ten-year period), then maybe a reasonable compromise between taxation, eligibility for benefits, and benefit levels might be struck and Social Security would be solvent forever without burdening our children. (Only benefits tied to the productivity of our economy and the tax revenue that generates – not defined benefits (entitlements) – can be guaranteed forever.) That huge un-payable debt the Treasury owes the SS Trust Fund could be used to provide a safety net for seniors whose benefits fall below the poverty level.
cce,
There are lots of options for funding Social Security: increasing retirement age, substantially increased taxes, and means testing for benefits (AKA welfare for elderly people), among many others. None are politically easy. A one-time modest increase in retirement age, followed by linking the retirement age to changes in average lifetime seems to me the most politically plausible way to ‘solve’ the problem permanently. WRT to Mr Obama’s previous ‘offers’ to raise the retirement age, I’m pretty sure his proposals contained a lot more than just raising the retirement age, like… oh, say… much higher taxes of all kinds.
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WRT people thinking SS benefits represent ‘their money’, I suspect that was more common in the past than at present, and was the result of disingenuous politicians who sold the program as “insurance” rather than an inter-generational wealth transfer plan. Certainly I (close to official retirement age) and my children all understand that lifetime benefits for most past and current SS recipients was/is much larger than the inflation adjusted value of lifetime contributions. This was made possible by rapid growth in income, in real terms, and a bulge in the population (baby boomers); the demographics say the current system is unsustainable. Lots of people understand that many, if not most, people who retire in the future will not receive lifetime benefits equal to contributions, and nothing like the benefits/contribution ratio received in the past (inflation adjusted).
WRT Medicare, the program is far less sustainable than social security due mainly to continuing large cost increases. The potential solutions are far more politically contentious, because they represent very different views of the proper role and scope of government. There are some, and I suspect you are one of them, who view access to the very best available health care as a ‘right’ which can only be protected by government. There are others who very sincerely don’t think that access to the best available health care is a ‘right’. It is a very difficult political issue, as the history of Mr. Obama’s health care plan shows. I do not see any obvious compromises.
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My view is that health care costs are out of control because the Federal government creates effectively unlimited demand via direct payment for services (Medicare, Medicaid) and via subsidies for health insurance… by not considering insurance payments as taxable income…… and now via Obamacare. The options are: nationalization of health care and rationing of services, as in the UK, or for government to stop disconnecting costs from benefits. People need to have some economic ‘skin in the game’ if private health care costs are ever going to be controlled. A new cancer treatment to extend life a year or two, but which is offered at $250,000 per year, is going to be very popular…. so long as someone else is paying for it. If the drug company knows very few will pay $250,000 for an extra year on Earth, then there will be downward pressure on the price. But if Medicare pays… no price is too high.
Frank,
“That would be equivalent to raising the top tax rate on income nearly 10% ”
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Of course, and that is the point. ‘Progressives’ want to tax higher incomes at much higher rates…. with no upper limit. Some even speak wistfully of instituting a “wealth tax” of several percent per year on net assets over a maximum allowed wealth. So it has always been, so it will always be. It is, IMO, nothing more than a Robbin hood view of the world. And just remember: “You didn’t build that!”
Bigger problems with these promised benefits and the unfunded liabilities for all government pension and medical programs are the feedback effect mentioned above (of which most modern day liberals have little understanding) and the fact that the voting populace will not forego these promised benefits to any great extent as demonstrated by attempts in Europe to reduce benefits and the fact that we in the US have a third rail on the topic. It is not something that merely needs tweaking.
There is also the problem of more people depending on SS and doing less saving outside SS for retirement.
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Well, that was the FDR’s intent – individual investment, not a welfare program. But that’s at the heart of the corruption of all government allocation. Governments are not as productive with capital as individuals ( that’s why we have to tax individuals because the government doesn’t do as well ). But that means reduced efficiency of capital when we take more and more of it from individuals, regardless of the good intentions.
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Here’s the thing with SS. Longevity continues to increase, making the total cost of human labour more expensive ( through other things as well, but certainly including old age benefits ).
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At the same time, machines are rapidly proceeding on their trajectory to match and continue to further exceed human capabilities.
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Cost of human labour increasing, relative value of human labour decreasing. Not a good trend.
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Politics is, of course, amongst the most irrational pursuits we have, and we humans, in such a state, will use whatever available evidence we have to justify our feelings.
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But…
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People tend to think in the simplest terms about taxation
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Revenue = f( tax rate )
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Usually they consider the function to be linear:
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$ = tr * I
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where $=revenue, tr=tax rate, and I=income
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But of course it’s much more complicated than that.
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Maybe:
$ = C(tr) – A(tr)
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Where C is compliance and A is avoidance.
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There are many other factors, of course, but as tax rates go up, compliance goes down and avoidance goes up.
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This is nothing new. The Muslim scholar Ibn Kalduhn observed this in the eleventh century ( when FDR’s ancestors were still barbarians in mediaeval Europe ).
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It’s why when the top marginal rate was 95%, there were still deficits, even though on paper we were gonna skim all that revenue.
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It’s why we have a relatively small amount of corporate tax revenue, even though we have the highest corporate tax rates among nations:
http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/559ab55aecad04850b4b5c43-1056-1214/fiscal-chart.png
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It’s why Hauser’s Law applies:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703514904575602943209741952
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There are many reasons for this.
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People avoid higher taxation legally.
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They may avoid taxation by simply ceasing the activity that is being taxed ( we believe this is true because we try ‘behavioral’ taxes, like tobacco taxes ). But discouraging investment imposes government inefficiency on the economy.
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They may avoid taxation illegally.
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They may engage in activities which are not taxed, but also not recorded and so, the data we have regarding taxation and revenue may be misleading because of observation bias.
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One huge related factor, the higher tax rates go, the more valuable tax loopholes from power mongerring congress critters ( and presidents ) become, so the higher the rates, the more corrupt the government ( and consequently the lower the revenue )
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In a sense, all of the above behaviours are negative responses because they make the allocation of capital less efficient.
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But the historical evidence is clear that higher rates mean lower compliance.
How about this:
A conversation about increasing the defense budget.
Advocate You have home owner’s insurance don’t you?
A. Well, yes, of course.
Advocate: Well, increasing the defense budget is exactly like purchasing home owner’s insurance. It protects our country against the risks of foreign aggression. That risk has been clearly identified by political scientists.
— So how certain are these political scientists that U.S. interests will be damaged in the future by foreign aggression?
Advocate: Well, if one looks at history it is clear that major wars of foreign aggression have occurred frequently in the past. There is no reason to believe that our foreign enemies will cease to be a threat in the future.
–Don’t we need to be 100 % certain of the risks of foreign aggression before we spend any more money on the defense budget?
–Actually, political scientists are quite certain that our enemies will continue to pose a threat to our economic and political interests. It is just a matter of time unless we immediately increase our defense budget.
–Wow, you have convinced me that increasing the defense budget is just like purchasing home owner’s insurance. So how much money do you need?
–Well, I haven’t completely figured that out yet.
–No problem at all. When you figure out the costs, just let me know. No cost would be too high to eliminate the risk of foreign aggression against U.S. interests.
–Hold, on I didn’t say that I could eliminate the risks of foreign aggression. We can only reduce the risk.
–Well, by how much can you reduce the risk?
–I am not exactly sure how to put a number on that.
–Wait, I am confused. Could you explain again how increasing the defense budget is just like purchasing home owners insurance?
cce,
That is an apples and oranges comparison. We include things in the cost of health care that aren’t included in other countries. But they still spend the money. I should look up the reference, but I have other things to do right now. IIRC, it involves social services of some sort.
It’s like infant mortality used to be (I think they’ve at least fixed it somewhat now). If you don’t include the deaths of preemies and, in some cases, infants up to one year old, your infant mortality rate looks a lot better.
Eddie and Steve: I don’t claim to have any special insight concerning the relationship between high marginal tax rates and suppression of economic output. The Kennedy tax cuts (90% to 70%) supposedly increased government revenue. All I want to do is make it clear that removing the limit on SS taxation of income is equivalent to a massive increase (about 10%) in the top marginal tax rate on income. The combined state and federal top marginal rate on income will be well over 50% and well into dangerous territory (IMO). Congress needs to make tough choices, and dissembling about the true nature of those choices won’t help.
Health costs due to Obama Care in Australia [called Medicare, present 35 years] has not killed or crippled Australia yet [We do have a different economy, income and priorities] but a new Disability Insurance Scheme may be the straw to break the camel’s back.
All politicians are now talking about putting up taxes without much dissent.
Guess it is easy for them to install a crisis and then ask for more to pay for it.
The other option is to reduce services.Not popular.
A third option, not mentioned ever, is to do it smarter and cheaper.
A fourth is to not want it at all [mindfulness].
There is a lot of waste and repetition in the medical field and services could be directed more shortly , sharply and effectively.
Every time the cap on income for Social Security tax purposes was raised, the maximum benefit was raised too. This is equivalent to kicking the can down the road. Revenues will increase in the short term, but it won’t help the long term unfunded liability much, if at all. Raising the income cap without increasing maximum benefits eliminates the last fig leaf on SS being like a pension rather than welfare.
I suggest you get a quote on an inflation protected annuity before you say that SS is a bad deal for those retiring now.
Interesting that many liberals are against means testing
SS while conservatives tend to favor it. I think it has to do with the original image of SS being a savings program and means testing implies welfare and admitting that SS as originally sold to the voting public has failed.
It seems that the cynicism depends on one’s biases .
Thanks for the link RB. It pretty much supports what I surmised in my link. Liberals see mean testing as admitting failure to the original intentions of large government programs. Plus from the link we get 6 liberal shibboleths as a bonus.
I have sometimes thought that as a practical political matter means testing of these programs would be a way to eventually eliminate them – and before they fail catastrophically. But since the big government boys are onto this ploy I guess the programs are doomed to fail not unlike in the manner of Greece or worse.
From that link
This is very likely true. There just won’t be enough SS savings to be had by means-testing the top 1 or 2%.
The payroll tax has, in the past, applied to 90% of income, and by “income” I mean income in the aggregate. That is to say, if you added up all of the wage income in the US, the payroll tax would apply to 90% of it. Last I saw (and it may have changed after the recession), it was somewhere around 80%.
Obama’s offer to increase the elligibility age (during the 2011 debt limit standoff) and the proposal to move to chained CPI (2013 budget), were, of course, rejected by “leftward interest groups.” But they were also rejected by “conservatives” who believe that the debt is the most important issue facing the country. If conservatives were interested in such things, a coalition of Republicans and a few Democrats could have passed a compromise.
Compromise means “taxes.” Call it “increased revenue” or whatever you want, but regardless of various ways to trim costs, it remains a social and mathematical certainty that taxes are going to go up, and the longer this action is put off, the more abrupt the tax increases are going to be. If you ask people (it doesn’t matter what political party) what they want cut, the last thing they list is Social Security and Medicare. They represent something like 90% of the population. If a conservative sees a liberal offering to cut (i.e. “slow the rate of growth”) either of these services, they need to sieze that offer, because they are going to get very little political cover to cut benefits. Every other dollar to shore up those services will come in the form of higher taxes. When push comes to shove, everyone, including the Republican base, is going to demand taxes be increased on the rich before they face a significant reduction in benefits. Political capital would be better spent building the case for the most economically efficient way to raise revenue (e.g. X-Tax, VAT, pollution taxes, etc) rather to insist that these problems can be fixed with cuts and/or private accounts.
And yes, the reason why liberals don’t want to means test Social Security is because it will become easier for conservatives to brand it “welfare.” Given the number of people who benefit from it, even if it was trimmed on the top, I doubt this claim would get much traction, which is why means testing is probably going to be part of some kind of eventual compromise.
In case you are not familar, cce, with how these matters are handled: the first instinct of politicians is to put off the day of reckoning beyond their term in office. Raising the eligibility age is one way, but even better is denying that a problem exists or that minor tweaking down the road will fix everything. They are in turn supported, as you point out, by a voting public that is in denial about the future of these programs. The MSM will seldom or ever mention these problems except perhaps to quote a liberal expert saying ” not to worry” so much of the voting public is left clueless.
cce,
You could eliminate the cap on income entirely, not change the benefit structure and there still wouldn’t be enough money. Raising taxes alone will not solve the unfunded liability problem. The problem is demographic. Every year the ratio of workers to retirees drops because the population is both aging and living longer. The median age of the US population was 30 in 1980. It was 37.7 in 2014. The life expectancy at age 65 for both sexes was 13.9 years in 1950 and 19.1 years in 2010.
The solution to this problem is to raise the retirement age for full benefits, a lot. You could still start collecting at age 62, but the amount would be significantly lower. Effectively, benefits would be cut.
Well, there’s another solution but it’s equally unpalatable: open the borders. The influx of young immigrants could significantly alter the demographic problem.
I’m not holding my breath.
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I would probably agree, but not in the way you’re thinking.
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Tax revenue as a percent of GDP has been relatively constant:
http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/inline/images/large/tax_rates_graph_ranson.jpg
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http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Chart%20image_0.png
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Raising rates won’t raise revenue.
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However, there is a tax that governments routinely use to cover obligations. That is devaluation.
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Outstanding obligations can be viewed as a debt.
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And the truism is: Nations that can devalue their debts devalue. Those that cannot devalue their debts default on their debts.
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Devaluation is a backdoor tax on everyone, but it tends ( like everything else ) to hurt the poor the most. But if history is a guide, devaluation is the most likely government response.
TE,
The problem with Social Security is that Congress in its infinite lack of wisdom passed automatic cost of living adjustment for benefits. They used to take great pride in voting for increases in benefits, i.e. mailed notices to all their constituents, so I’m not at all sure why they did it. Devaluing doesn’t help with that. Not to mention that inflation isn’t currently cooperating.
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Good point ( one I’ve considered in the past but seem to have repressed – now I’m depressed ). Medicare would seem similarly inescapable. The same demographics that make old age benefits problematic also work against inflation. Still, real interest rates are negative, but the dollar has appreciated against the Yen and the Euro beating us to the bottom.
Retirees increasingly depend on Social Security in retirement and with the consumerist Keynesian economic model being dominant even people making good incomes and living currently with apparently high standards of living are not saving sufficiently for retirement to allow them to retire with the same living style. I believe there have already been calls from the left to increase Social Security benefits. When we talk about fixing Social Security there is that other problem – surviving on its benefits after government has encouraged its dependence.
http://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/articles/2011/08/30/retirees-increasingly-depending-on-social-security
That people making good incomes will spend because of Keynesian indoctrination seems… well, strange. What is evident though is the tremendous growth of the financial sector as a percentage of GDP since the deregulation of the 1980s coinciding with the growth of the credit card industry and easier access to debt via securitization.
Kenneth,
If you save a substantial part of your income while working, it’s a lot easier to maintain your standard of living after retirement. The problem I see is that those of us that did save are going to be punished for it to support those who didn’t as well as those who made bad investment decisions on what they did save. See, for example, means testing, wealth taxes and already paying taxes on up to 85% of Social Security benefits if your income, RMD from your tax exempt savings accounts e.g., is too high.
I don’t think Keynes has anything to do with people who live beyond their means.
DeWitt, Kenneth,
Devaluation is indeed the simplest way to reduce public debt. The relative increase in value of the dollar versus the Euro and the Yen just speaks to how much less sustainable the economic paths of those economies are compared to the US economy. If you look at the value of a dollar over the past 40 years of so, it is clear that holding government debt was a horrible investment… and it remains so today. Even the CPI does not properly show the extent of cumulative inflation, since technology consistently drives down the true cost of production, and the CPI does not capture this.
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It is true that some government expenditures are indexed to inflation (like SS), so inflation/devaluation doesn’t reduce those expenditures, but inflation/devaluation does dramatically reduce net public debt in real terms. In today’s environment, with money chasing safe haven investments like treasuries, and comically low interest rates, inflation/devaluation is a seductively easy way to take investor’s money without compensation. So long as you are willing to accept the long term economic damage (see Greece), debt financing, followed by inflation/devaluation is the preferred path forward. When government refuses to be financially responsible, being a net saver is being a sucker, as many Greeks are now aware.
it is clear that holding government debt was a horrible investment .
Depends on what you mean by horrible.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-10-31/bonds-beating-u-s-stocks-over-30-years-for-first-time-since-19th-century
Keynesians and Keynes always talk about stimulating the economy through consumer spending and that (too much) savings has a negative effect on the economy. This is opposed to the Austrians who take a nearly opposite view. Certainly if under savers are told by politicians and economists that we can spend our way out economic downturns and worry about our debt later, why would they not think that magic will work for them?
It was Keynes who answered the question about his concerns for debt
in the long run with: We are all dead in the long run.
First, we get a warm up:
The first entitlement crisis is only a year away
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The 5 year treasury is yielding 1.67% which is about what inflation was for 2014. Buy and hold a 5year and you are treading water. Longer term and you gain a little, shorter term and you’re losing.
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Since the majority of US debt is 5 year or shorter, there is devaluation going on.
RB, that return was not realized from the interest rates but because falling interest rates increased the value of the bond. I thank the Federal Reserve for allowing me to turn a tidy profit on bonds that I cashed in a while back (with some luck) near the peak.
RB,
If interest rates ever do go up again, holding bonds would be a very poor choice. As Kenneth pointed out, those profits were a result of bond trading, not buying and holding to maturity.
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #137840)
None of those high-earners is thinking about Keynes while spending.
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #137843)
The question is still one of investment returns. It goes to show that there are many moving parts to government bond returns, inflation and/or whether dollar devaluation should directly translate into inflation.
DeWitt,
The 30-year bond yielded 12-14% in 1981-1982. Buffett’s comment about investing in zero coupon bonds under certain circumstances here . BTW, the point was that investing in govt bonds over the last 30 years was not a ‘horrible investment’ not whether this should be an investment strategy.
On the other hand, I hadn’t been paying attention to the deflation in the first half of 2015!
.
Fed forestalls tightening yet again?
RB, not thinking about Keynes but rather thinking about the thought processes spawned by Keynesian economics. Heck spending versus saving might even be considered a patriotic duty.
Kenneth,
As I suggested earlier, the simpler reason is perhaps easy access to credit spawned by the best and brightest being drawn to financial engineering, starting with the 80’s deregulation.
RB, I think you mean trading in government bonds and certainly not buying and holding to maturity. I think you know the difference.
The Federal Reserve holding interest rates at artificially low rates has been a big problem for those living on a fixed income and their only answer is: Hang in there better days are just around the corner.
I have been playing both stocks and bonds based on the Fed telegraphing their intentions, but most of us do not do this and thus the rich get richer and the poor get low interest rates – all thanks to the Feds.
RB, I think you mean trading in government bonds and certainly not buying and holding to maturity. I think you know the difference.
As I indicated, no.
Check out 30 year s&p 500 returns here:
http://dqydj.net/sp-500-return-calculator/
I got 10.95% (dividends reinvested) from June 1981-May 2011
RB,
And for how many years could you buy 30 year bonds at that rate? I read the chart that yields were above 10% for about five years, from 1980-85. Talk about cherry picking. If I pick 1970-2000, the yield on the S&P500 is 14.307%. OTOH, for 1970-2000, the return on SP500 reinvested was 14.307% and from 1985-2015 was 10.856%.
But even that isn’t really relevant for an individual investor saving for retirement. You need the return on an investment stream starting from zero that increases over time as wages increase with experience and inflation rather than an initial lump sum. Given the history of bond interest rates, it’s unlikely that you would outdo stocks with bonds over the last thirty years.
Sure .. who said that it’s an investment strategy? After all, there is a well-known equity risk premium.
RB,
I wrote, “it is clear that holding government debt was a horrible investment… “, I made no comment on bond trading strategies, which is what you are talking about. Buying (and holding) treasuries at this moment looks particularly unwise, since rising interest rates seem inevitable at some time in the next few years. As Herbert Stein noted: what can’t go on for ever, won’t.
SteveF,
As I said earlier, I’m talking about holding to maturity over a variety of 30-year periods sometime in the last 35 years (which means it was probably not a horrible investment either in the last 40 years), not bond trading strategies. In general though, I agree that government risk is a risk for long-term bonds (government or non-government) compared to holding productive assets. But the risk is in the form of inflation, not dollar devaluation since imports are ~15% of gdp and a big part of the economy is service sector related.
RB,
A lot of the very high yield bonds were called long before maturity. Holding government bonds has been a historically poor investment; Sure, Warren Buffet took a gamble on zeros in the late 1990’s, but he recognized it was a gamble, and one that depended on a combination of relatively high discount rates on the zeros and his evaluation of the (low) relative attractiveness of equities at the time. Sure, you can pick a specific period where the return was not bad. You can also plan trading based on expected interest rate changes, which is a very different strategy. That doesn’t make buying and holding a prudent choice, and especially not today.
SteveF,
From what I can find, treasuries issued in the early 1980s were callable after 25 years.
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2003-08-31/some-baffling-calls-on-treasury-bonds
This is also borne out here:
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/history/histtime/histtime_bonds.htm
RB, what you are saying is that bonds were a great investment if you purchased the 1980s 30 year issues when interest rates were are at historically high levels and have never reaced those levels since. That is cherry picking at its best.
I got lucky with some purchases of that high interest debt including some for my mother in law. I have not done the calculations but I wonder what the inflation adjusted returns were as inflation rates were high in that period even after Volcker.
Well, it goes back to Comment #137839 addressing SteveF’s comment about the last 40 years.
“As I suggested earlier, the simpler reason is perhaps easy access to credit spawned by the best and brightest being drawn to financial engineering, starting with the 80’s deregulation.”
Access to credit is a good thing that can obviously be overdone, although I am not sure what the connection of credit would have to do with the mindset of saving versus spending. I would suppose that individuals could have credit card or mortgage debt and still have savings for retirement while some individuals could have little or no current debt and still not be saving for retirement.
Not saving for retirement might be also motivated by some individuals who would think that worse comes to worse the government will be there to bail them out – not unlike the moral hazards for corporations created a few years back.
Ya. Payments would appear not to be devaluable, but we’re financing a growing portion of those payments with debt which is devaluable.
That works – until belief in repayment flips, and then it doesn’t. Medicare ( and Medicaid, VA, other ) would also seem problematic. I hadn’t kept up, but it appears that health care inflation continues to outpace broader inflation. Japan would appear to be an example. They continue to support existing programs even though their situation appears less and less sustainable. I’m guessing the US will follow suit though our demographics are not nearly as dire.
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #137861)
You’d have to wonder why then that consumers suddenly woke up in the 1980s more than 40 years after the fact realizing that Keynes had their rear covered and that there was something called Social Security, so they could now pile on debt freely.
And the fees associated with credit and securitized debt became a major source of bank profits .
RB, you nor your links show a connection between accessible credit and saving, or the lack thereof, for retirement.
Keynesians are mostly obsessed with consumer spending and I would suppose that would be in line with easy credit for the consumer.
I hate them Keynesian liberal progressive big government welfare redistributionist types too.
Should remember that Keynes wanted balanced budgets except during recessions, so we’re not exactly being Keynesian – we run big deficits during normal times and huge deficits during recessions.
Time to reopen the Lewindowsky’s conspiracy blog, Lucia.
Over at WUWT Lubos revealed that his identity was stolen by John Cook to use to puff the number of hits on sites he needed, a lead in to the conspiracy theory paper.
What if it turns out that the only conspiracy theorists were warmists in disguise.
Well worth a read.
Brandon?
I am not at all certain that Keynes thought that once giving a supposed theoretical rationale for deficits to politicians that a long term budget balance was going to happen. Certainly Keynesians like Paul Krugman see no problem with large government debt.
angech, I agree. What the heck! John Cook needs to be called out on his BS, especially because he was receiving funding during that time frame.
https://twitter.com/intrepidwanders/status/624284320031731712
This could be so big, the convenor of the 97% meme asking for fraudulent support under his own post and linking to his own apparent fraudulent behaviour.
This should be big enough to wreck the 97% meme, Lew and the UWAu Queensland.
But it won’t.
Anyone else care enough to give it a push or a few comments?
Thanks Sue +++
For more info http://motls.blogspot.com/2015/07/identity-theft-thief-of-lubosmotl-turns.html#more
Science communication about climate? Okay, let’s try this.
If I tried to tell you all that there is no Pause in Warming, because I’ve only just noticed that the most reliable global data set we have (UAH) shows warming continued over the last 12 years, will I be shouted down or ignored?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/mean:6/plot/uah/from:1997/mean:6/plot/rss/from:1997/trend/plot/uah/from:1997/trend
Remember, RSS uses climate models to adjust the raw data, whereas UAH refuse to use climate models to make their adjustments. UAH is more empirically pure.
I am making this comment on the Blackboard because on my usual haunt I would very likely be shouted down or ignored.
Apparently Cook thinks he has “proven” that skeptics are dumber than climate fanatics.
His clever proof involves faking the ID of skeptics and posting inane comments in their names.
So if John_Cook were to post something like,
” A shooting star went over my cow pasture last night. My cow was dead this morning. The shooting star was impacted by climate change. This means the Koch brothers killed my cow.”
We would see just how sublime the reasoning abilities of the climate concerned really are.
Nah, Lumo has overreacted.
This quote tells you it was all internal test data:
Could be test data for a natural language parser used in automatically finding comments that support/decline a statement.
Not actually used in “the experiment”.
AndrewM,
If you want to show trends over the past 12 years, why link a graph that starts in 1997?
Andrew M,
The WFT data for UAH may not be the most recent release; IIRC, RSS and UAH are now pretty close in trend. In any case the ENSO driven variation in the lower troposphere is larger than ENSO driven variation at the surface, so there is somewhat greater uncertainty in the satellite trends.
lucia, Because I…. pasted the wrong link. Sorry.
I was making that chart for a comment on a different web site but it seems I pasted the wrong one.
So, some assembly required. Change 1997 to 2002 and you still get the upward sloping trend on UAH.
Andrew. M ” If I tried to tell you there was no pause”
Go for it.
You will not find a pause in global warming for the last 12 years in UAH data and
“You have only just noticed it”
Brilliant!
Or were you were asleep?
Did it take you 12 years to realise just now that the graph shows some warming?
What happened during the other 11 or so years.
Or are you pointing out that there was a pause and it has only now, after 12 years, stopped being one on the data set and time you wish to comment on?
I would suggest you would be better sticking to GISS or some other data set that proves your point rather than one that disproves it in your sudden finding of no pause after years of a well documented pause.
No matter which way the record goes from here there will always be a pause in that data for over a decade from most dates in the last 2 years.
Brilliant is best comment.
“the most reliable global data set we have”
I believe you wrote this but I do not believe that as a John Cook apologist you actually believe it.
His web site refuses to use UAH data showing a pause
He does point out that you must take every action not to engage with denialists in case you increase their denial by sloppily framed arguments.
He has also put up a set of 4 blogs warmist and skeptic to test on students at UWA. His greatest fear was when the students read the Skeptic blogs they could become Skeptics and that they would need to be debriefed afterwards.
I would strongly advise you never to read the skeptic blog of the four as he obviously put up some pretty compelling arguments for skepticism.
Andrew M
“If I tried to tell you all that there is no Pause in Warming, because I’ve only just noticed that the most reliable global data set we have (UAH) shows warming continued over the last 12 years, will I be shouted down or ignored?”
Brilliant but praised is also an option.
You are to be commended on only just noticing, “now” that this particular data set may show some warming over the last 12 years.
I could say I do not know why it took you so long?
You should have informed us sooner like last month or last year.
What wait so long?
Or are you pulling my leg and really saying hey there was a pause for 12 years last month and last year but the lates data input has changed this?
Because a current pause cannot be cherry picked, right.
You take the data from now and work backwards.
So you would be correct to say there was no pause in the last month, for instance. Or in the last 20 years.
You may be right to say in the last 12 years but depending on where you take your ending there would also be instances in the last 2 or 3 years.
The problem is you are choosing that period of precisely 12 years which has only just occurred this month as your definition of proof of no pause.
The fact is that you can show a pause for much longer than 12 years, ie 18 years if you go back to 1998 on UAH
You can show that a pause existed for 12 years or longer from last month or the month before.
But you have brilliantly chosen one of those shorter time periods in the longer pause by picking a high ending time and going back a limited way.
On a different note as a John Cook apologist I note that he used his fake alias to comment in the sets of test papers for his students at UWA.
There were two Skeptic and two warmist papers with fake comments.
He said that he was very concerned that the Skeptic arguments (that he and others made up) were so strong that the students who had to read that paper would need to be debriefed to prevent them from becoming long term skeptics.
I am afraid that I must firmly insist that you never read those arguments in the fourth (Skeptic) paper as John was right on the effects on gullible minds.
I am sorry I ever mentioned them to you.
Andrew M:
The nom de guerre of most climate warriors here is Lukewarmers, so most expect that GHGs do most likely impose increased thermal energy on the earth-atmosphere system. Therefore, the presence or absence of a pause is not as important as what the longer term rates of warming are and the significance ( if any ) of any indirect effects and impacts.
.
Here is a good chart to consider global temperature trends with. The chart represents the linear trend of temperature from the year marked through 2014 ( so the trends since the given year ). This is using the mean of three land/ocean temperature indices, but it is consistent with what you observed at WFT – there is warming through the present even since the minimum rate year of 2002.
.
However, the context of the rates indicates that warming did decelerate, if not pause, from its peak. And the range of trends is from 0.2C per century to 1.7C per century. These rates are in terms of centuries not TCR or ECR that are more en vogue but they represent the low end of climate model projections. And even the highest trend is at a rate less than what the IPCC AR4 predicted ( 2.0C per century for all scenarios ).
AndrewM,
Sure. Not news.
It seems Turbulent Eddie has proven my point much better than I did.
Andrew M.
If Turbulent Eddies post proved your point, I assume your point was that no one would attack you? Or that you happen to agree with what most of us have been saying all along? If it’s not one of these two, I’m rather mystified what point you think you were trying to make.
Comment by Jim Hunt — 19 Jul 2015 @ 4:12 PM at real Climate
I’ve arrived here somewhat late in the day via a link from the Arctic Sea Ice Forum. In all the circumstances perhaps I might repeat here what I recently said over there.
In a personal communication Prof. Wadhams informs me that:
“My SIPN prediction is an outlier but it is in fact what is predicted by the 5-year trend in ice volume in September. In 2013 and 2014 the volume in summer came in above this trend, but since then we have started a new El Nino which tends to increase air temperatures more. I am just staking this area out as a marker, and expect to be shot down in flamesâ€.
[Response: Of course he will be. This is posturing, not science. – gavin].
Is this an example of responsible science?
Wadhams is predicting minimum Arctic sea ice extent of 0.98 Mm². The June SIPN predictions look like this: http://www.arcus.org/files/sio/23168/sio_bargraph_final.png To say that 2013 and 2014 came in above the five year trend, assuming that’s 2008-2012, is a colossal understatement. What’s missing in all this is that Arctic ice volume has also increased quite a bit the last two years. I agree with Gavin, it’s posturing to get media attention. Right now I’m looking at about 4.5Mm² from JAXA, which seems to be running below NOAA near real time and MASIE at the moment.
angech,
Certainly Gavin’s comment reflects more responsible science. Anybody who predicts near zero ice extent is plainly nuts…. or as Gavin notes, is posturing for PR purposes. The weird thing about bizarro claims by activist climate scientists is that it seems they can’t (or won’t!) stop following the late Stephen Schneider’s ‘scary story’ playbook. It just makes them look ridiculous…. or in this case, maybe batsh!t crazy. Like the man said, if you are an arctic climate scientist, you may be targeted for murder by ‘big energy’ interests.
I cannot understand the Arctic at the moment, volume has been increasing until recently according to piomas yet the sea ice extent 15% decreases in leaps and bounds, and DMI stays in the middle of it all. The huge decreases off Russia seem to be a thing of the past so hopefully there will be a slowdown in loss and not another 2012.
I hope Al leaves Australia and heads back north to refreeze the area.
angech,
The volume anomaly was increasing. The actual volume starts decreasing when the ice starts melting when the sun come up in the Spring. Plus, PIOMAS is a lagging statistic. We won’t know what happened in July until mid-August. A repeat of 2012 seems unlikely as extent and area are still way above 2012 levels at this time.
I follow the US Navy ( they have a vested interest ) short term model of the Arctic.
.
It is a bit odd, the most recent thickness for 2015 does appear much less than the corresponding thickness for 2014.
.
Is this accurate? or does change in snow cover or change in melt ponding provide noise to measurement and model?
.
Or is the ENSO event actually taking its toll on Arctic sea ice this summer?
.
Interesting next 6 weeks.
If you look at the July 27 data for 2014 and 2015 from Cryosphere Today, it doesn’t look quite like your images. Although Hudson Bay does seem to be melting a little more slowly this year. What I see is a lot of ice being flushed through the Fram Strait this year compared to last year. I don’t think all that ice off the East coast of Greenland is because it’s colder this year.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a big jump in the AMO index in July.
Lucia –
==> ” the sort of hypothetical conversation on climate change that is supposed to win over skeptics. ”
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m afraid that you’re going to have to re-do your post and ask all the commenters to comment on a corrected post.
As I understand it, the goal isn’t to “win over skeptics.” From what I’ve seen, for the most part they consider that to be a lost cause. Their interest is in convincing the un-convinced.
Joshua,
I hate to break it to you, but the term skeptic is used rather broadly and includes “the unconvinced”.
lucia,
I think by unconvinced Joshua means naïve.
DeWitt,
It’s difficult to believe that anyone is naive enough to find the insurance analogy convincing.
Good thing I wasn’t drinking anything when I read that. I would have lost a keyboard. Good point.
Lucia –
==> “Joshua,
I hate to break it to you, but the term skeptic is used rather broadly and includes “the unconvincedâ€.”
Not that I want you to get upset, but how you use the term isn’t relevant. You’re characterizing their intent. And not that I want to repeat myself, but your response was non-response. From what I’ve seen, for the most part, **they** consider “skeptics” to be a lost cause. Their focus is the “un-convinced.”
They aren’t trying to “win over “skeptics.””
Try again.
Joshua,
Don’t concern yourself. :> Your dispute isn’t going to upset Lucia.
[edit: It’s not going to impress her either, unless I’m badly mistaken. Is there something deeper here than a semantic quibble?]
Joshua’s argument is almost exactly the same as the one UFO believers use to distinguish between those they hope to convince and the “debunkers” that UFO believers seek to silence.
Ironic doesn’t begin to describe Joshua’s efforts.
Lucia,
The insurance analogy is so bad as to raise questions about anyone who would choose to use it.
Joshua
Not to get you upset, but I’m not at all upset.
That said, when you quote and interpret what I wrote, I should think how the word I used is used both myself, and those who you seem to later refer to as “they” is relevant.
As far as I can determine “they” use the skeptic to include the “unconvinced’. “They” do so rather frequently.
Although, perhaps you you point to who “they” are we can find some “them” who uses it more narrowly that typically done at alarmist blogs.
Who do you referr to with the word “they”? The page from which one can download the manual mentions skeptics. So I have no idea why you would think the authors of the book think it’s contents are not relevant to discussions with skeptics. Or failing that: irrelevant in discussions involving skeptics, which all of these do.
Keep telling yourself that.
Lucia –
I’m going based on my observations of what folks like Andy usually say about their intent. They generally consider “skeptics” to be a lost cause…and well they should, IMO…as indeed, “skeptics” would certainly not be convinced by the strategies you’re criticizing…
You and the folks here seem to be under some illusion that they think that the “insurance” argument is intended to convince people like you and the folks here. It isn’t.
Your characterization of their intent it just flat out wrong, IMO. But obviously, you can hang on to it if you wish. Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better in some way.
Joshua,
Not really Joshua. I don’t much care about the distinction you are making, don’t see what difference it makes. It’s not like I’d be any more impressed with the ‘insurance’ argument even if I thought you were absolutely correct and it was 100% directed at the ‘unconvinced’ rather than ‘skeptics’.
It doesn’t matter. It’s still a lame argument.
Hey Mark –
==> ” I don’t much care about the distinction you are making,…”
Thus far, I haven’t been referencing my opinions of the argument, in the sense of it’s validity or its likely effectiveness with the “un-convinced.”
As for my opinion of it’s validity… I think it is a somewhat useful analogy. But IMO, analogies are useful for explaining concepts. As rhetorical devices, I think that they are weak. I think that the “insurance argument” can be useful for explaining a perspective, a concept that is relevant to the application of risk analysis to the issue of ACO2 emissions. As a rhetorical device, it is obviously open to a lot of criticisms with respect to how analogous it is in a number of respects.
As for whether the argument might be effective with the ‘un-convinced”… I really don’t know. I think it could be somewhat effective for conceptualizing the application of risk analysis w/r/t climate change for those who haven’t really given it much thought. It’s obviously very hard to evaluate the effectiveness or lack thereof, of different communication strategies in the climate wars because even though we can look at fairly stable opinion polling over long periods of time to conclude that any particular communication strategy hasn’t moved the needle particularly one way or the other – we have no way of controlling for potentially confounding variables (e.g., the effects of other strategies on the other side like the “hoax” strategy, or the effects of short-term weather patterns or the economy) on public opinion.
But as to whether you think it’s lame or not, IMO, doesn’t speak to whether the strategy might be effective with the intended target – so all this wondering here about why anyone would think it’s effective because no on here is convinced by it is all rather just more rather unskeptical group identity reinforcement on the part of “skeptics,” IMO>
And Mark –
==> “Don’t concern yourself. :> Your dispute isn’t going to upset Lucia.”
Well, that’s good. What you just heard was a big sigh of relief.
What’s up with not being able to get (empty) line breaks in comments?
Joshua,
We disagree. I think the lameness of the argument absolutely is pertinent to any question of who will be convinced by it. I think the lameness of the argument is sufficiently large that it’s not going to be effective with anybody except the already convinced.
But, not to put too fine a point on it, it might be of interest to you who will be convinced by it; skeptics, unconvinced, or whatever. I didn’t understand this to be the central point of Lucia’s post. Might be I missed the point, might be you did. It’s all good.
Joshua
And I’m going to base my observation of how folks like Andy use the word “skeptic”. “The”y use it to include the unconvinced with great regularity. The use it to include people who believe AGW is man made. “They” us it to include people who think we should respond– just not in the precise ways folks like Andy want them to.
Why do you think I’m under that impression? Because I used the word “skeptic”, and for some reason you seem to object to my using it with the breadth “they” assign to it?
I think “they” intend to use the insurance argument with people who they have not yet won over. And “they” include the unconvinced in that group. I find that notion they will win over the unconvinced with that argument laughable.
I also think they intend to use that argument to try to win counter positions they disagree with. And I think they intend to use it that way– among other things— because they refer to countering skeptic arguments on the page where the download for the book is available.
It could help conceptualize. I would think the results of that is they would realize they don’t insure for lots of things. There are often very strong arguments not to insure (unless you sell insurance.)
People have been pushing the “insurance” one for a long, long, long time. That it doesn’t work would seem to be pretty good evidence it’s not a very convincing strategy. It’s a bit difficult to think it’s going to start working now.
Who said that’s the “because”?
How about these for the “because”:
1) It’s a poor argument.
2) It’s an argument that has been advocated and tried for..oh… decades and it hasn’t worked.
With respect to (1), the argument isn’t “it’s poor because it doesn’t convince us”. The argument is it’s just flat out poor. Unless you can explain why you think the insurance argument is actually convincing to anyone somewhere, suggesting that we can just ignore the fact that people here don’t find it convincing is rather… well… lame.
With respect to (2) you can complain about ‘confounding variable’. But those “confounding variables” are what communicators will be encountering when communicating. So it’s rather ridiculous to speculate what whether that communication strategy would exist is some magical universe in which those so called “confounding variables” exist. They do exist.
Joshua,
Don’t know. I don’t do CSS. You could put ‘.’ or an html break between your lines.
Mark –
I’m a bit confused here. I say that whether *you* think the argument is lame isn’t particularly relevant to whether it might be an effective argument with the intended target.
You’re an outlier w/r/t views about climate change.
I would guess that there are many, many arguments that are effective with the general public that you think are lame arguments. I certainly know that’s the case for me. For example, to pick a timely example, the whole Obama is the World’s biggest sponsor of radical Islamic terrorism is, IMO, a lame argument. Even Mitt Romney thinks it’s a lame argument. However, I have little doubt that it is an effective argument for many voters, and that’ why someone like Cruz is doubling down on making that argument.
So if we move past the confusion in this thread among the commenters about the intended target, let me ask you
==> “…it’s not going to be effective with anybody except the already convinced.”
what evidence you have to judge the effectiveness of the “insurance” argument for the “un-convinced.”
I tend to agree that a commonly found manifestation of confirmation bias on both sides in the climate wars is where people try to generalize from outliers (such as the views of the folks in this thread about the insurance argument)… Most of the discussions I see in the climate-o-sphere threads amount to people thinking that the only arguments being made that are effective are the ones that support their own views. I see hardly anyone in these threads changing their views on anything.
But the sample there is an unrepresentative sample. Trying to generalize from that sample seems to me to be extremely unskeptical.
Joshua,
We could talk about this. But I’ll let you concentrate on Lucia for now, since she’s actually addressing your points and I’m still stuck at the ‘so what?’ stage of the discussion. 🙂 Let’s get back to it later, I’ll hush for now.
Not sure what else to say, Lucia.
(a) From what I’ve seen, your view on their intent/target is different from the positions that I’ve seen them take in discussions about what is/isn’t/might be/might not be effective and with whom. They consider “skeptics” a lost cause – unconvincable, by evidence or by rhetorical devices.
(b) I haven’t seen evidence to support your certainty about the effectiveness with the “un-convinced” of the “insurance” argument among various arguments. For example, unless you have evidence to quantify the impact of confounding influences, such as the “hoax” strategy that is so pervasive in the main stream media, I don’t know how you could so confidently evaluate the differential impact of the “insurance” argument. It’s all speculative. And I find it amusing how often I see people who are very talented in scientifically examining for cause-and-effect relationships so certain about speculation, without validated evidence, that just so happens to confirm their biases.
Joshua
Huh? We’ve both agreed they want to convert the unconvinced. So how do you conclude my view point is different from the position you say they take?
You merely keep redefining the word “skeptic” using it differently from how “they” use it. Perhaps you haven’t gotten out there much to see who they label “skeptic” and for what reasons.
Perhaps this is because you haven’t been out there much.
First what “hoax” strategy? In which main stream media?
Second: How would “the environment that exists” be a “confounding variable”? Communication is done in an environment that exists. You can’t just define all it’s features as “confounding” as if there exist some idea environment without any “confounding” variables.
I would suggest that your notion that one should measure the efficacy of publick communication strategy in an environment that does not exist which will never exist and can never exist is the speculative one.
I don’t know if you are talented scientifically. But I imagine when you look in the mirror you see someone who likes to discount actual in-vivo evidence of effectiveness of communication strategies by speculating about their efficacy in hypothetical in-vitro environments that don’t exist.
I find that amusing. But perhaps you don’t even notice this in yourself and so aren’t laughing at yourself.
Joshua is the best at getting people to pick nits out of scabs. I saw it on the SkS top secret blog that they send out these type of disruption bloggers to lukewarmist blogs to tie up the time and effort of skeptics thereby preventing real investigation of the commie plot to tax carbon in ice cream… childrens ice cream.
Oh no!
Joshua of the ‘incontinent keyboard’ has arrived, and the endless, mindless arguments over tiny issues and semantics have started. Let’s hope Lucia becomes as tired of his drivel as Judith did…. and so puts him in moderation forthwith. Joshua has zero to contribute technically, and has admitted as much. At a technically oriented blog, that is not a good thing. He is more than a bit like Doug Cotton, but without the wacko theories of radiative transfer.
Aww. Please be nice Steve. I boasted to Joshua over at Judith’s that folk are more civil over here. I think ‘civilized conversation can be had’ was what I said. I hate being wrong.
besides, people put up with me, I don’t add to the technical discussions much.
Posting on my cell… always a mistake.
Lucia,
IMO, Joshua is not technically capable of understanding that insurance is normally justified on the basis of a real, accurately quantifiable risk. It is only when the downside risk (and its consequences and costs) are defined that the cost for insuring against that risk can be rationally evaluated. The failure of the ‘climate insurance’ argument is mostly due to climate ‘risk’ being so poorly quantified that the ‘risk’ may be actually be beneficial, at least in the near term. When the science is better, people can make a reasoned judgement about how much to spend on “climate insurance”. As of now, the risks are too poorly defined to convince most people of the need to pay for this very expensive ‘insurance’.
Markbofill,
People here generally are more civil than at Judith’s. But Joshua is still…. well… Joshua-of-the-incontinent-keyboard. If Joshua is interested in civil conversation, he could begin by stopping the endless nit-picks, endless quibbles over semantics, and endless ‘same-ol-same-ol’ comments. Don’t worry, Mark, he isn’t interested in civil conversation. Seems more like he is interested in wasting peoples’ time… along with his own. By the way, I think the quality of the threads at Judith’s was clearly improved when Joshua was put on moderation. I think she should do the same for several other “excessive commenters” who in fact have nothing much to say.
The main link between the climate obsession and insurance is that the cliamte obsession has allowed the insurance industry to justify rates much higher than actual risks.
The money being demanded by the climate community is not doing anything to reduce “climate risk”.
In fact, I would like to invite to write a non-circular definition of “climate risk”…. heck, even “climate” in terms that can be objectively quantified.
Ignoring Joshua (always the best strategy) for a moment, Lucia is quite correct in labeling the ‘insurance’ comparison both old and inadequate. There are blog posts with titles comparing climate risk with insurance prospects going back a decade. And yet the arguments continue. yy
It isn’t appropriate mainly because the costs associated with the ‘insurance’ (that percentage of global GDP needed to mitigate climate change) are far higher as a percentage of the value at risk than is the case with normal insurance policies.
If we decide to pay $100 billion a year to developing countries as part of a mitigation strategy that also includes $8.5 trillion in revamping the world’s grid infrastructure, wholesale adoption of less dense fuels to replace more dense fuels, we have come close to equaling the lower estimates of the costs of climate change before doing anything real to mitigate it. And that will cost money too.
Renter’s insurance policies that cost more than the stereo that might get burglarized do not succeed in the marketplace–unless the student’s mommy buys it on behalf of the student.
Thomas
Exactly. That’s why we didn’t have renters insurance when we were graduate students. Nor did I have “dorm” insurance when I lived in the dorms.
Consumers are presented all sorts of articles containing good advice about how to avoid buying unnecessary insurance. This often includes stuff like getting special insurance for vacation travel, special insurance for rental cars (when your own policy likely already covers that) and so on. Other items on the border of insurance: extended warranty policies on electronics and appliances and so on. Of course some of these things are sometimes worth getting, but on average, they make money for insurers and do little for anyone else.
….so in a sense the taxes, grants, subsidies, fees, etc . that the climate community demands we pay *are* like certain low-end types of insurance: high premium for no actual benefit to the insured.
For the record, these days most renters policies covering $15,000 in contents, providing $100k in liability and with a $500 deductible actually cost between $150 and $300 per year in most college towns.
Now a days, students do own more electronics than formerly. But back when I was a student…. well… many of us owned some old hand-me-down tv, a futon and so on. So $15,000 for contents wasn’t worth it. Few students had $15K worth of stuff in their apartments. With a $500 deductible, even less worth it.
Liabibility might have been worth while especially if you threw wild parties. But most students would chose to self insure.
Joshua,
Right. Well, to briefly address this:
I don’t. It’s just my off the cuff opinion. I think your observation that people are indeed sometimes swayed by what might be considered poor or faulty arguments is interesting. I think that could be so. Depends on exactly what we’re talking about.
I’m not up for a replay of my experience on Climate Etc. though, where I irritated the bejezus out of the regulars by discussing stuff like this with you. It’d strike me as rude for me to repeat that here, and for what? I read and comment for entertainment, essentially. I guess we could talk about it over at Anders place, where it wouldn’t matter to me who was bothered by it, but I’ve got an aversion to having my comments snipped. Not to mention subjecting myself to the abuse. 🙂 It’s a dilemma.
Oh well. Hope life is treating you well Joshua.
“un-convinced”
Just ask Joshua what evidence he was convinced by.
It’s a cornucopia of delights.
Andrew
Mark Bofill,
It seems clear that Joshua is a great example of someone swayed by faulty arguments.
Hey Mark –
Yeah. Having the discussion with me here would obviously annoy some of the regulars here.
Have you had comments snipped at ATTP? If you have, that would be interesting to me, as while I don’t agree with Anders’ moderation policy, I do think that generally comments made in the spirit of good-faith discussion don’t get snipped over there and so far all of the exchanges I’ve had with you have all seemed to me to be in entirely good faith.
Lucia –
==> “You merely keep redefining the word “skeptic†using it differently from how “they†use it. Perhaps you haven’t gotten out there much to see who they label “skeptic†and for what reasons.”
I’m pretty familiar with how they use the term “skeptic.” Of course, everyone basically defines the term in ways to substantiate their arguments, and there are no agreed upon definitions, and the determination of who is or isn’t a “skeptic” is more Rorschach test than anything else, (e.g., the silly arguments about whether Muller is or isn’t a “skeptic”). But for the most part, once again, they consider “skeptics” to be a lost cause – their argument is that the “un-convinced” might be swayed with more information/better crafted arguments. I happen to mostly disagree with them, but in the discussions I’ve had with them, that’s the argument they’ve presented.
==> “Perhaps this is because you haven’t been out there much.”
OK. Keep telling yourself that.
==> “First what “hoax†strategy? In which main stream media?”
Really? If you’re asking that question, it seems to me that you just aren’t trying very hard to engage in good faith. “Hoax” arguments w/r/t climate are all over mainstream media – Fox News, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Ingraham, Beck, the WSJ, etc.
==> “I would suggest that your notion that one should measure the efficacy of publick communication strategy in an environment that does not exist which will never exist and can never exist is the speculative one.”
Well, your suggestion would be wrong. My “notion” is that you can’t tease out the effectiveness of any one particular argument in convincing people one way or the other in the real world context – where different arguments have different influence. Again, there is no way to single out the effectiveness/impact of any one particular argument. You can speculate all you want (in ways that just by coincidence line up with your ideological stance)…but I don’t think you have the evidence to support your confident conclusions. In an absolute sense, we can get a general sense of public opinion polling and see that not much change has manifest. IMO, there is solid evidence that strongest influences or short-time horizon influences that impact people in their day-to-day – such as short term weather patterns and relatively short-term economic conditions. There are also more general known influences in how people approach low probability high impact risk over long time horizons. Again, we can evaluate public opinion in an absolute sense – but teasing out the effectiveness or lack thereof of a particular argument isn’t possible with the evidence we have, AFAIC. Would public opinion be different if it we were to eliminate any one of the “97% consensus” argument or the “insurance” argument, or the “would you go to a dentist to get advice about treatments for heart disease” argument or the “Lysenko!!!!!” argument or the “It’s a hoax by anti-capitalist eco-Nazi” argument? I don’t know. I doubt it. But I find it amusing when people claim that they do know because I think there isn’t sufficient evidence.
I say the same to “realists” when they claim that their arguments are effective, I say the same to Kahan when he claims that the “97% consensus” argument is counterproductive (by pointing to the overall lack of change, in an absolute sense, in public opinion polling and then arguing that is proof that the “97% argument” doesn’t work)…
==> “But I imagine when you look in the mirror you see someone who likes to discount actual in-vivo evidence of effectiveness of communication strategies ”
Not what I”m doing…but keep telling yourself that if it works for ya’.
==> “Just ask Joshua what evidence he was convinced by.”
Why are you suggesting that someone else ask me? If you’re interested, then why don’t you ask me?
I’ll tell you this: I have run into a whole bag o’ “skeptics” who think that they know what evidence I’m convinced by even though, rather unskeptically, they have no information to support their assumptions.
Is that the case with you? It seems that you think that you know what evidence I’m convinced by, and what I’m convinced of.
Go for it. Spell it out. Put your cards on the table.
What evidence convinces me? What am I convinced of?
Joshua,
Repeating yourself and not engaging what other people actually say makes you very boring. Have fun conversing with Andrew_KY.
Joshua,
“Why are you suggesting that someone else ask me?”
So they can personally experience your deft interweb skillz when you respond and draw their own conclusions.
As for what evidence (for AGW) convinced you, you are free to put it in your next comment, or not. I’ve never seen you list what it is, if there is any.
Andrew
Sorry. Outside trying to melt aluminum in a slow bake home concocted electric furnace. What could possibly go wrong? 🙂
I hate commenting on my phone but I’m addicted to the blackboard. Joshua no I’ve never commented at ATTP. Been snipped in similar forums. Appreciate your remark about my good faith, likewise.
==> ” What could possibly go wrong?. ”
I don’t know. All I can say is that I’ve never had any problems the thousands of times I’ve done it.
the list isn’t long, but it’s terrifying. 🙂
Happily the experiment ended with a nichrome wire failure. No aluminum melted, but nothing esploded esther. I can live with that. Maybe it’s time to switch to charcoal and forced air.
@ mark
Propane with oxygen is fairly accessible and burns at a max temp of 2820 C. Just how bad do you want to poor-boy this project?
Earle,
It’s a good suggestion. I shied away from it at design time because Ima fraidy of propane. It seems like the sort of thing that’s more likely to make my furnace explode. The death. The maiming. The property devastation. The fury of my wife when I explain why the shed is no longer standing in the yard. That sort of thing.
Is there something I could use that’s easy to control and not too expensive?
[edit: maybe a propane torch… I’ll look at it.]
Say. Maybe it wasn’t a total failure. I’d chopped up a bunch of aluminum angle into 5 inch strips and put it in the crucible at startup. Now that everything’s cooled and I’ve been able to closely inspect, the aluminum angle definitely warped and bubbled, some of it substantially.
Does this mean:
1) The furnace got to the temperature I needed but didn’t stay there long enough to meet the latent heat of fusion needed to melt the metal.
2) That (#1) above at least happened in localized spots.
3) None of the above.
4) Something entirely different.
5) No conclusion can be drawn from some warped and bubbled aluminum angle.
?
What do you peoples think?
Here’s a link to an image of them:
http://i59.tinypic.com/2qbr53p.jpg
The jagged edge on the rightmost piece I think is aluminum foil that welded to the angle.
Mark B,
I don’t think you’re going to do it with nichrome. You might want to try Kanthal wire instead. It seems to be readily available.
DeWitt,
Yeah. I think it’s time to reconsider my approach.
I wish the physical world was as easy to work with as software. I can get code wrong a dozen times and still arrive at the solution in a matter of hours. Doing stuff in reality takes forever and ever…
Mark Bofill,
Why are you trying to melt aluminum?
WRT your questions:
1) some parts of it may have, but probably not all.
2) yes
3) no
4) ?
5) The temperature was close, but to hot enough to melt everything.
Most aluminum alloys melt near 1250 F or a bit higher. There are other much lower temperature alloys (eg tin based) with melt below 300C. These might be better for you, depending on what you want to do.
You should keep in mind that the physical properties of melted and then cooled aluminum (in some kind of casting?) will depend on the type of alloy you are using (there are lots of them) and how quickly (and from what temperature) the metal cools. The metallurgy is complicated. You might enjoy: http://www.slideshare.net/FoundryJoe/aluminum-alloys-for-hobby-foundry
Many “stiff” aluminums, often used for structural members, turn relatively soft (they feel “gummy” when you cut or drill them) once heated beyond a certain temperature and cooled. Depending on what you are trying to do with the melted aluminum, this could be important. Completely melting a significant quantity of aluminum will probably require that you have a well insulated crucible.
SteveF,
Wow, thank you for the link! I had no idea. I wonder what in the heck sort of aluminum that channel stock was. Lots of other interesting stuff in those slides.
The ultimate goal is to cast something. But for starters I was just hoping to melt a bit o’ aluminum. Sort of to get my feet wet. uhm but not wet with molten aluminum. You know what I’m saying. 🙂
I’m pretty sure energy poured out of my furnace like blood from a stuck pig. I used a plaster of paris sand refractory mixture, then cut slots with a dremel/drill into it to hold the coiled nichrome. Cast a lid out of the same mix. Coils were about 24 feet of nichrome 19, ran off household line voltage. I imagine this was about 10 amps at about 120 volts? (didn’t take actual measurements). 1 hour and 43 minutes to the point of failure, which was the contact between the power cord, connecting washer, and the nichrome.
Long story short, a proper refractory mix would likely help a lot too. 🙂
Mark,
The aluminum channel stock was most likely 6061, which a very common inexpensive structural aluminum.
Thanks Steve.
Mark,
You check this guy out yet?
http://www.backyardmetalcasting.com/
Thanks Earle. I’ve looked through but haven’t studied that site. Looks like a good resource. 🙂
After consideration (and pending further information) my tentative plan is to try out propane. I seem to be reading that people who start with charcoal and forced air eventually try propane and wonder why they ever fooled with charcoal and forced air in the first place. It doesn’t appear to be cost prohibitive, and my fears of explosions don’t seem to have much of a valid basis; it’s not like I’m constructing the propane container, valves, or burning mechanisms. With reasonable caution it doesn’t seem any more dangerous than using a torch to melt something inherently has to be.
Thanks for the input all! :>
Insurance is buying a windmill in Minnesota to help with New York City ocean storm surges. Self insurance is not locating in elevation challenged locations of New York City. Key West has the option of building windmills and solar which actually could have value after a hurricane if not damaged or putting houses on stilts. Self insurance is orders of magnitude more focused. Self insurance can make sense. High deductible medical insurance along with an HSA account. 401(k)s and IRAs. I can lobby someone to raise financial aid for my college son or open a 529 plan years ago. I think people should self insure more. Another option is raising everyone’s taxes so they don’t need the things I suggested. Government would just cover it all. Maybe that’s a tiny bit of why the U.S. seems to be a laggard on the issue of global warming. And while I appreciate all the ocean transportation ports, as for the rest of East coast dwellers, it would nice if they would self insure for hurricanes and sea level rise.
Ragnar, Your example of insurance that uses buying windmills in Minnesota makes no sense.
Your New York example is dubious as well.
As far as “laggard on the issue of global warming”, who is not “lagging”?
Your last comment makes little sense as well.
Can you try to clarify a bit.
hunter:
Green energy is insurance against sea level rise just about everywhere. It’s a pooling approach rather than a self insurance approach of steps New York City could take to reduce flooding during heavy storms. It’s my opinion the windmills in Minnesota answer is not cost effective nor is it likely a New Yorker could see a tangible benefit with their situation.
The East coast has areas not much above average sea level. We could say we need to insure against those being flooded through CO2 mitigation and/or general Federal, State or local spending on things such as sea walls and natural infrastructure such as marshes, reefs, and beaches. The idea is to use localized answers rather than the big, uniform approach of CO2 mitigation. I am saying the more localized the answer, the closer it is to self insurance. My bias is towards self insurance, and it occurred to me that CO2 mitigation seems like a Big Insurance approach and local climate change answers match up with self insurance. And self insurance reduces one’s dependence on Big Insurance.
Ragnaar,
There is no correlation between “green energy” and sea level rise.
There is no evidence, in the real world of data based measurements, that shows slr to be something that requires insurance or even much worry by rational people.
All coasts, by definition, have areas not much above sea level.
Well managed coastal areas balance protection (sea walls, bulkheads, building codes, and environmental preservation. The Dutch, for instance have hundreds of years of experience with this.
Well informed people who live in areas subject to flooding also typically know that many things- erosion, subsidence, land use, building codes, impact flood risk and flood damage levels.
None of this needs a big unworkable insurance metaphor. Insurance is for well defined perils and the insurer commits to indemnify the insured from damages due to the covered peril.
Your metaphor does not fit the definition of well defined peril, nor does your “insurance” develop reserves or claims paying ability in the case of a loss.
WRT to climate insurance, I think the confusion stems from the common use of this analogy by warmists. But curtailing economic activity to avoid risks is not the same as insurance. It’s simply what most of the less economically active nations have been practicing for centuries: subsistence.
Ron,
But the climate obsessed have redefined more and more of the language to fit the needs of their obsession.
That the policy ideas they push, like Ragnaar’s idea about windmills, are literally nonsense is not important to the obsessed.
Try googling for definitions of “climate” and “climate change”. Circular, political, vague.
After the many tens of billions we have spent on the topic, there are no easily accessible objective definitions of what we are to “buy insurance” to protect against.
Insurance in its original definition involves insuring against occurences where over a large population the risk can be reasonably estimated. Insurance has a logical and ultilitarian basis which makes the term susceptible for misuse when attempting to sell other processes that are not insurance – like government programs.
Kenneth,
In the insurance industry (the real world) that is still what insurance is.
Speaking of insurance, have you noticed the ads for insurance on insurance lately? That’s not what they say, but that’s what they mean when they talk about policies that won’t increase rates for your first accident or 100% replacement of a totalled a new car. Note that they don’t mention that these are extra cost options.
DeWitt,
That is an interesting observation.
Each company is handling those two features differently.
I know that for one of the companies the new car replacement is *not* an add-on under the conditions in which it is applicable: New car, not previously titled, and less than 15,000 miles. It is OK.
Same with so-called accident forgiveness: Some companies charge extra per renewal period for that endorsement (feature), others allow an “earn in” over a pre-set number of years, typically five years of claims free history.
The most popular new innovative features I am aware of on personal auto policies are the devices that track driving metrics for a period of time (90 days to several months) and allow a driving quality discount to be added to the existing policy. The other is to buy down the deductible to zero over a period of renewal terms. The auto insurance market is very competitive and dynamic, and a lot of innovation is taking place. Insurers think they have auto risks fairly well understood and so are competing like crazy for the consumer’s attention. This is a good time for auto insurance consumers.
Here is a view on wind power from Down Under:
http://stopthesethings.com/2015/08/02/the-wind-industry-always-and-everywhere-the-result-of-massive-endless-subsidies-part-1/comment-page-1/#comment-389359
(h/t Tallbloke)
When buying insurance and comparing rates you better know you are comparing apples to apples. Some ads are less than clear on this issue. Better still have your current agent go through all the terms of your policy with you so you know exactly for what you are paying. You may well be able to reduce your rates substantially.
As an aside Obama Care is not insurance by the original definition for many reasons. Recall also that the government I.e. the taxpayer subsidizes insurance company loses for Obama Care. That assurance kept the insurance industry at bay during the legislative debates. Liberals are very much into playing crony capitalism when it is required to expand government.
“Ron,
But the climate obsessed have redefined more and more of the language to fit the needs of their obsession.”
Good point. I should have said the insurance analogy is par for the unclear thinking typically used in the debate. It has been said all analogies fail in climate science.
.
In the case of whether the wise path is to forgo prosperity now in exchange for risk avoidance one must properly weigh the effect of less economic development. Would we have the same technological development either way? What are the risks of other problems like financial collapse or world collapse into communist-like (bad) government? The climate obsessed assume we can restrain the use of fossil fuel in some way without detrimental effects and that these restraints will be meaningful to the solution of an otherwise overwhelming possible future problem. They also assume they know exactly the correct balance through central planning and that their planning is not affected by ideological considerations.
I would hope that at least a good number of participants here do not think the attempt to expand government through illogical arguements and sparse evidence on AGW is at all unique in the annals of US big government proponents.
Kenneth,
That’s SOP. Declare a crisis and insist that only governmental action can solve it. Ignore or demean any criticism of the plan. When it is less than successful, insist we throw more money at it and continue to demean critics. Thomas Sowell wrote a book about it.
DeWitt,
*Shrug* Just as silly is the opposite tactic — declare a crisis and insist that only the near-abolishment of government can solve it. Ignore or demean any criticism of the plan. When it is less than successful, insist we leave more money in the private sector and continue to demean critics. Books are being written all the time about this as well. It’s all posturing.
Oliver wrote:
.
“Just as silly is the opposite tactic.”
.
Never been tried. So to call it silly is just a attempt to sound clever.
.
DeWitt’s statement has been proven.
Kan,
It’s been tried and continues to be tried. Pretending otherwise just sounds like, well, pretending.
Oliver,
If that policy had been implemented (rather than merely being talked about) then you would be able to point to periods where government spending as a percentage of GDP fell significantly. Such effects are not terribly obvious with the exception of the ends of World Wars.
Oliver,
Jonathan is correct. We’ve never implemented any plan that is remotely close to “near-abolishment of government”. So we have no empirical data to test any theory about what would happen if we did so. We certainly don’t have any data about what people did after that plan failed, because it’s never been implemented.
I also have to say that demeaning critics is something that happens on all sides. Not everyone does it, but it’s hardly more characteristics of those who prefer limited government than those who want larger more socialist systems.
Johnathan Jones,
Thanks for the link to that graph; there is never a significant reduction in spending as a percentage of GDP except WW I and II. The remaining fluctuation is driven by economic expansion and contraction… the spending never goes down, it only rises more slowly that the rate of expansion during a boom, and more quickly than the economy during a bust.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind in that graphic. Spending at all levels is dominated by direct and indirect wealth transfer from higher earners to lower, infrastructure support, and military costs. Take those away, and the fraction spent on ‘solving problems’ (like GHG driven warming) is a relatively small portion of spending, and includes boondoggles like corn-ethanol in gasoline and Solyndra, rather than serious efforts to actually solve a problem.
The other thing to keep in mind is that folks on the left try when possible to force individuals and industries to spend their money to do the governments bidding, with Obama’s forced purchase of unneeded health insurance being the most obvious example; it is a huge off-the-books wealth transfer plan. The more income that is spent on “required” purchases, the higher the true net government take as a fraction of GDP. Fully accounted for, the true total is considerably higher than that graph shows.
It all comes down to a political disagreement about the proper role and scope of government. I suspect any agreement with Oliver, even about factual things like keeping track of government expenditures, is going to be impossible.
Since we’ve wandered onto the topic, there’s an experiment in limited government I’ve wondered about that I’d like to get people’s thoughts on.
Would a transition away from a government run public school system to a system where elementary, middle, and high school were largely private help or hurt us as a country overall? Improve quality of education, teachers pay? Or would we end up with massive numbers of illiterates who couldn’t do basic arithmetic?
To me, it’s impressive that expensive private schools exist at all, given that they have to compete with a government run alternative that provides a ‘free’ service (While public school is not precisely free, people can’t opt out of paying for it). Anecdotally speaking, private schools seem to have a reputation for providing a better education than public schools.
I could see it going either way.
What strange universe are you from? Not this one. The teachers unions have largely eliminated any differential between teachers pay and the pay for jobs in the private sector. Teachers unions are also the single biggest obstacle to K-12 education reform. Charter schools and home schooling are the public response to this mess. Needless to say, charter schools are anathema to the teachers unions.
Actually, infrastructure support is not where the growth has been. Until 1969, military expenses dominated while the most recent 40 year period has been dominated particularly by healthcare expenses (in both the government and private sector).
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/?_r=0
I don’t know DeWitt. As an engineer for example a person can make an average of about 100K. As a grade school teacher a person can make an average of about 50K. 50K is more along the lines of entry level for engineering. That’s got to affect where the talent goes.
I grant you, the benefits, pensions, and retirements may be more impressive. I’m not so sure about the pay.
[Edit: different sources give me different numbers, but generally speaking it seems to hold that engineers make more than elementary school teachers]
Meh I think I overstated the difference. Depends on what sort of engineer. Maybe something more like 80K per year on average.
Government spending, however ratioed, gives only a partial picture of government expansion. Cost of regulation gets to 13 digits per year and that is not counted against government spending. Payments to SS and Medicare can take 14 percent of many people’s income (counting the employer share) and that is not counted against government spending. Recall also that private transactions are voluntary while government’s are by force.
Attempts at AGW mitigation by government would no doubt expand government power through regulation and not so much in spending. Government would pick winners and losers in the private sector through crony capitalism.
Anything goes around here in the name of libertarianism.
Mark,
Are you correcting for the fact that K-12 salary is for 9 months, not 12? That 50k would then be 67k on an annual basis. Once past the probation period, a teacher has a job for life because the unions demanded they have tenure. That’s worth something too. Have you ever looked at the curriculum for a teaching degree? It would bore you to tears. There’s no comparison to an engineering degree. That’s another barrier to entry that was engineered by the teachers unions.
It isn’t all about pay either. There isn’t a salary high enough that would have tempted me to be a K-12 teacher.
Pot. Kettle. Black. Or, glass houses and stones.
I was incorrect in not countng SS and Medicare payments as part of most sources definition of government spending.
That does not detract from the huge cost (and expansion) of government regulation. Even tax fiing given the complicated code is a large government expense not counted as a government expense.
If interest rates are allowed to rise then debt becomes a much bigger government expenditure.
DeWitt,
Good point. I wasn’t correcting for that.
If that’s so, I doubt that helps with the quality of education.
Maybe this is part of the problem. No, I’ve never looked at it. Whatever it is teachers study though, and whatever it is they teach, it seems largely ineffective. Maybe this is a false impression? Granted, it was long long ago, but it seems to me that I learned arithmetic in elementary school, improved on my reading, and practiced writing. I think that was basically it, I don’t think I got anything else out of it as a kid.
I agree with you; I wouldn’t take a job teaching in a public school. I could however conceive the possibility that it might be an interested and exciting job in a private school that had control over its own curriculum.
DeWitt, national average public school teachers salary is about $56K. Engineers do earn more; chemical engineers average about $91K. Of course there are some compensating factors: public school teachers generally have much better benefits and retirement packages, and have more days of vacation.
Mark Bofill, non-religious-affiliated private schools exist mainly to ensure the offspring of the wealthy have the best possible chance of gaining entry into a “desirable” college or university. Another factor is avoiding contact with a host of ‘undesirables’ in the public schools, and avoiding all the disruption of learning those undesirables cause. While I am no expert, my observation is that private schools hire people who are more knowledgeable in their subject areas (the chemistry teacher is a chemist, not a education major). This is something private schools share with top flight universities: none of my college professors had studied education… only physics, chemistry, math, literature, etc. Those professors, shockingly, succeeded in teaching, despite not having been formally trained in education.
.
When I was 15, one of my high school science teachers told the class that the disappearance of brake pads over time is a good example Einstein’s equivalency of matter and energy: the matter in the brake pads was being converted into ‘negative energy’ to balance the kinetic energy of the car’s motion. After I got my jaw off the floor, I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain that abrasion of brake pads has noting to do with E= MC^2. He knew nothing about science… an education major…. so my effort was hopeless. I’m pretty sure such people do not teach science at private schools.
SteveF,
Priceless. 🙂
But I agree with you, a price tag is often useful to people who want to exclude ‘undesirables’. I guess ‘undesirables’ being approximated by poorer people. For those who care strongly about equality and homogenous classrooms and so on, the free market would possibly be detrimental to this.
Specialization in the actual field, I agree with this. I can parrot information from a book on most any subject. I can teach stuff I actually understand. Maybe demonstration of true mastery occurs when one can make an esoteric and difficult subject clear and accessible to others who lack expertise.
I just keep thinking, why doesn’t my kid’s science teacher show them how to build a quad copter? Or a sugar fuel rocket? (rhetorical, I think they should, I’m not sure why they don’t) Just a couple of examples in just one subject that I think would command incredible interest, enthusiasm, and possibly even concentration, work, and learning from young kids. Oh. No. We couldn’t do that, some of the children might actually come out of their comas and actively pursue education!
[Edit: forgot to add, I’d like to believe there are equivalent examples in other areas. I have a hard time coming up with those, because I’m not good at those things. I’d make a lousy (oh wait, standard is what I meant to say) teacher of those subjects.]
SteveF,
There is a supply and demand issue here. Not everybody passes undergraduate P-chem.
I went to a private high school. It wasn’t the football coach teaching the science courses there. Teaching is apparently like management, you don’t actually have to know the subject to do it, or at least that’s what the teachers unions and managers insist.
Government mandates such as Obama Care increase goverment power significantly without a compensatory increase in acknwledged government expenses.
RB,
From your link:
I am puzzled that anyone who had paid attention (even a little) over the last 40 years could not be well aware of that, and even more puzzled that the folks at 538 blog figured there was any need to explain the obvious. Spending on things like social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, unemployment benefits, etc has taken away from all other government expenditures as a fraction of GDP. We probably will disagree on how desirable this is.
Mark Bofill,
“I guess ‘undesirables’ being approximated by poorer people.”
Maybe, but I think it is more a desire to avoid badly behaved kids who create a terrible learning environment.
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“I just keep thinking, why doesn’t my kid’s science teacher show them how to build a quad copter?”
I think a few enthusiastic teachers do try; I had a great high school chemistry teacher (who knew a lot of chemistry). He used to take his best students, in his car, on his own time, to ‘chemistry competitions’. That would never be allowed in most school systems today. My wife (PhD in chemistry) taught high school after she ‘retired’ from biotechnology research, although she had to jump through a thousand hoops and take a multitude of teaching courses on her own time…. because she “wasn’t really qualified to teach chemistry”. She did all kinds of interesting things for her students; we once built a “stuffed animal” cannon from a 6″ diam piece of PVC pipe, which fired by igniting a mixture of ethanol vapor and air with a spark. It would shoot a stuffed animal 30 yards… and generated a 4 foot jet of flame out the muzzle behind the stuffed animal. That lasted only until an administrator saw the cannon fire. WRT a quad copter: can you imagine a school administrator allowing something so dangerous? I can’t. Maybe at a private school.
Mark
Comparison is always contentious, but you should try to do like-to-like.
Google says average pay for gradeschool teachers is 56K, not 50K. https://www.google.com/search?q=teachers+pay+average&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Also, when comparing, you should bear in mind teachers don’t typically work 12 months a year. School is in session for 9-9/1/2 months not 12 months. That means you should compare their pay to 9 or 9/1/2 months worth of pay for a full year job.
Teachers can and do find summer work. My mother was a chemistry teacher– she did. So, that does add to their earnings. Some teachers take the summer off. But that’s no reason for them to be paid for time.
So, merely accounting for the difference in typical number of word days knock your 100K engineering estimate down to 79K that one would earn for a 9.5 month job. Of course, if you use more reasonable estimates of the average earnings for an engineer— say 80K/12 mo job would be 63K for a 9.5 mo job. 91K /12 months is equivalent to 72K/ 9.5 months. The 80K/12 month job which would be $63K for 9.5 months work is already not that far off from the teacher average of
Beyond that, if you compare 12 month jobs to 12 month jobs using the pay in the Chicago School system, you’ll find some teachers can and do make the $100K you think typical of engineers. Here’s CPS salary schedules:
http://www.ctunet.com/for-members/text/2012-tentative-agreement/52-week-positions-Final-Showing-Pension-Pick-up-092412.pdf
In case you are wondering what the “pension pickup” is, it’s the portion of the pension contribution that teachers would ordinary pay themselves which the employer pays. So, in the CPS system, teachers pay 0% of the contribution toward their own pension. CPS pays both the “employer” contribution and the “employee” contribution. That factor — often omitted when people discuss teacher salaries– needs to be accounted for when comparing salaries on an equal basis with people in other fields. It alone can account for the difference between the $63K for the engineer who works 9.5 months year and the ‘typical’ teacher who makes $56K for $9 months alone. The teacher may “think” they are underpaid– but really, they are earning at the same rate as that $80k a year engineer.
Unionized teachers tend to get good medical dental and other benefits too. I would even suggest that for PR reasons, the teachers union likes benefits relative to ‘salary’ because they can then represent teachers pay using the salary only number and neglect to mention the benefits which tend to be very good.
Now consider other factors:
Around here, high school is typically in session 8-3 pm including lunch. So that’s 7 hour — including lunch. Teachers may be required to have a before or after school hour, but the day is pretty much never longer than 8 hours. I don’t know about other teachers, but my mother had time set aside for grading, so that task could be done during the work day. (Some teachers may do some grading outside school, but hours are scheduled for that.)
Of course I’m sure teachers in rural areas are paid less than in major cities, suburbs or industrial areas. But then, workers in rural areas are paid less, and the cost of living is lower. I suspect the fraction of engineers living in rural areas tends to be smallish– after all, engineers to tend to be tied to the existence of industry of some sort. So comparing average salaries has a bit of an apples/oranges aspect there too.
Generally it seems to me that teachers pay is fair to generous given the job they do.
Certainly once one is an established teacher, it’s impossible to advance dramatically and pump up your salary beyond $100K + $7K a year. No amount of hard work or extra education will get you there. This may affect whether the most talented hard working people are attracted to teaching as they can’t achieve CEO level salaries.
But most engineers don’t become CEO anyway. So the fact that the upper bound of teaching is rather limited doesn’t necessarily justify paying people who work 9ish months a year salaries that others work 12 months a year to earn.
Now the question is: Would we attract the evidently more hard working more creative people to teaching by paying more? I’m not sure we weould.
Like it or not, the job, while less repetitive than some jobs, is repetitive relative to engineering. High school teachers teach the same subject multiple times a day, and over multiple years. Chemistry, math, physic, history etc. simply do not advance over the teachers lifetime to change all that. Certainly, the topics required in grade school and high school don’t evolve at that rate.
Many engineers like engineering precisely because they apply their skills to novel applications relatively frequently and technology evolves. (This is true of creating new processes, installign new systems and so on.) They find they do quite different things over the course of 5 years, with their job entailing very different applications every 10 years or so.
Also, some people simply do not want to deal with teens or young children all day. Many don’t want to deal with the level of bureaucracy involved in teaching- and many don’t want to deal with students’ parents.
Teaching would need to pay exorbitant amounts to attract those who hate these features of teaching– and I would suggest teaching would get worse if we did attract them into teaching. You really don’t want teachers who hate teens teaching high school. Even if you think of these people as hard working, bright, creative splendid peak of the whatever you want to think it is, actually attracting these people to teaching in would harm teaching. Some might be tempted into teaching by more money. But raising salaries to bring them into teaching? I suspect that’s unwise.
Given salaries, vacation, benefits and so on, I suspect we could attract some more teachers if people were properly informed about how relatively well teachers are paid given the hours. Teachers unions would rather spend time trying to paint a picture that teachers are underpaid– and many people including students who might otherwise be attracted to teaching actually believe that story. This false story probably does more harm for our ability to attract teachers than any increase in pay could achieve– especially if the real salary levels and benefits aren’t publicized.
Lucia,
Regarding the money and the time off, yes. My estimate of engineering salaries was high, teachers get 3 months off, etc. Points taken regarding benefits and differences in rural vrs urban or suburban locations.
Doing new things. Is it an essential characteristic of education that teachers teach the same ol same ol year in year out? Or does it happen to be the way it’s done? My uninformed opinion is that schools do a ‘breadth-first’ approach rather than ‘depth-first’. What do I mean by that. Well, a kid can’t build a quadcopter because he hasn’t had all the math and physics yet to fully understand what he’s doing. We seem to want to cover everything across a spectrum superficially at first, and year after year go into more depth. Great, but boring for the student. It takes years and years before you know enough to do anything interesting that way.
Maybe variety could be found in trying different approaches over time.
Doubtless studies have been done validating the current approach, but I still wonder about it.
Regarding the money, hating kids, and hating bureaucracy, that’s scrambling a lot of stuff together that needn’t go hand in hand. I think I’ve read that intelligence correlates with financial success (God I hope I’m not making that up or remembering a piece of fiction. 🙂 ). I’ve never seen anything that ties intelligence to disliking dealing with children. Regarding the bureaucracy, again. Is that an unavoidable feature of education? I think as it stands in the U.S. today, sure, but need it be that way?
Maybe.
Thanks Lucia.
[edit: you didn’t scramble all of those things together. I phrased that poorly. My response was a little hurried because (ironically?) I’ve got to go pick my kids up from public school in a few minutes.] 🙂
Lucia,
“You really don’t want teachers who hate teens teaching high school.”
Reminds me of an uncle of mine (a father of four) who said in his later years “I never met a teenager I really liked.” And he had known ME as a teenager!
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Yes lots of people would hate having to deal with teens all the time. Heck, based on what I have seen, some high school teachers clearly fall in this same class! But I think that education would be improved by freeing school systems to hire subject qualified people who don’t have formal “education training”. Knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject matter are probably worth a lot more than some courses in the theory of education, especially for people with a relatively high ‘teen tolerance’ level. (For sure, that’s not me…. teens remind me too much of social liberals. 😉 )
Mark Bofill
I don’t know if it’s “essential”. It is what is done. High school assignments might vary to the extent that someone might teach the AP, vs ‘honors’ vs ‘regular’ track of a class, but you really don’t have Physics teachers switch to Chemistry, math and certainly not history.
Maybe. But did I mention “bureaucracy”? I could also mention “common core” or “no child left behind”. The mere fact of any sort testing standard means schools sort of must cover the topics that will be tested. If they skip “proving pythagorean theorem using squares and triangles”, their students will most likely be unable to do those problems which will result in low scores for the schools even if that batch of students happened to be especially good at “doing superbly complicated word problems involving algebra” and so on.
(FWIW: I actually have no objection to breadth first. I don’t think it makes things any more boring for students than depth first. Also, I think some things proposed as “interesting” or “sexy” sometimes make stuff too confusing and distracting.)
My knowledge of studies of educational methods is scant. The few I’ve read seem to be too small sample sizes, lack of true randomization and also involved methods being tested by precisely those people who were advocating those methods. This is not a recipe for good studies. But the difficulty could just be my hap-hazard reading in the area. (No, I don’t remember which studies. And… the number of studies I’ve read is something like,say 3. I just read a few googling and thought: Huh? The selection process… what’s with that? And the actual measurement…. uhmmm would have been better if the test tool for testing the students after the study had been selected by someone other than the person who proposed the teaching method, implemented it, picked the test tool, analyzed the result and published the paper. )
I didn’t say it was. What I meant was that some (possibly many) intelligent people do dislike dealing with kid. (Some stupid people dislike kids too.) Trying to lure a larger fraction of people by elevating salaries to very generous levels could result in some of those who didn’t like kids deciding to teach because the salary is so generous. These people would displace those smart people who happen to like kids and who are like teaching at the current salary levels (which are generally fair levels.)
It might be different if teacher salaries actually were low. But they aren’t really low by any objective measure. Some teachers might like to be paid more. But doesn’t everyone? 🙂 (Yes. That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is mostly yes.)
I’m not saying it’s unavoidable. Just that it exists and has since at least the 70s. We were discussing what we might achieve by paying teachers more. I’m observing paying them would not reduce bureaucracy. It might not increase it, but it’s just not a cure to anything. As long as it exists, many people will tend to avoid teaching in order to avoid the bureaucracy.
A quick google scan appears to indicate that I either made up or accepted a piece of fiction as fact that IQ correlates with financial success.
Sigh.
Lucia,
Thanks. We were indeed discussing paying teachers more. Although it was not exactly my original focus, it was an early and significant detour. Points taken.
That could be exactly right. Motivating kids to learn and teaching them might not be the same thing.
SteveF,
I like teens.
Actually, one of the advantages of private schools when I was in high school was they were allowed to hire people who did not have teaching certificates.
I went to a private high school that I generally hated (for reasons having little to do with the teaching.) Many of the best teachers did NOT have teaching certificates.
My high school English teacher was an Oxford grad who’d married a Fullbright scholar, moved here, hated our public school system, and became a teacher at a private girls school. Every girl in the AP English class got a 4-5– with most getting 5s. And about half of us took that class. She was great in many, may ways.
My sophomore science teacher was a novice (in a nunnery, not teaching) who I recall as ok. She didn’t take her final vows and left. Her replacement was a real honest to goodness chemist– no teaching degree. He was great too.
There were other teachers who were excellent teachers too. My freshman English teacher I recall as very bad. I think she taught at the school one year and was gone. (I know she was gone my sophomore year.)
Public schools are very committed to formal credentials. “Tracks” and salary grades tend to follow formulas based on degree, extra credits, number of years and so on. I have no comment on how that works, but none of these great teachers would have been able to work in a public school without first getting a teachers certificate. I have no idea whether that certificate would have improved their teaching– I doubt it.
I suspect– though don’t know– that the ability to let go bad teachers does more to improve the average quality of teaching and being willing to do so than any other factor at private schools. Certainly our teachers were not paid more than teachers in nearby public school.
I would add that my impression is the teachers who were let go often were let go after much discussion both within the school and with interested parents. The parental involvement might seem unfair– but let me tell you, if lots of kids are clamoring, it’s often not because the teacher is ‘too hard’ but because the teacher is objectively bad.
Mark
I think often motivation can be achieved by explaining what fields or sort of problems one might do with this learning. But the actual applications for students need to be worded clearly, and adding in too much of the supposedly “motivating” details (or doing them too early) sometimes gets confusing.
Students don’t have any problem accepting an explanation like “Doing this is the first step in understanding X, but you won’t be able to do ‘X’ completely until you’ve also learned ‘Y’.” Then do applications.
In fact, practitioners actually do spend quite a bit of time looking at applications and identifying which details they need to omit first to get a handle on solving the problem. (‘First step: Treat the cow as a sphere’ is sort of a joke. But it’s … well… sort of not a joke.) People really do solve those problems, then add the extra bits and make sure their new solution give the correct result in a limiting case and so on.
Re: lucia (Comment #137969)
Leaders of certain political subgroups trot out the tactic (and its opposite) often enough. Unless I’m getting the wrong impression from their public statements (and arguments on the floor of the Senate).
No, such a plan has never been implemented in any way remotely close to near-abolishment of government. But have we really ever implemented “Unlimited government spending until the problem is fixed,” except for the possible exception of a few major wars?
Extremes like that don’t tend to happen the way our system runs. That’s why I say it’s all posturing.
So, it’s not the money. Is it the bureaucracy that’s screwing up our educational system? Policies like ‘No Child Left Behind’?
IS our education system in fact screwed up?
I’m going to go re-examine my premises.
Lucia, Mark,
I think it could be quite reasonably argued, based on the skills required and work they do, that both teachers and engineers are underpaid relative to professionals in a few, very lucrative (e.g., financial) industries.
Good point about the dangers of making teaching too lucrative based on pure $$$.
Re: Mark Bofill (Comment #137997)
Well, I don’t think there are simple answers. Bureaucracy and standardization clearly do a lot of damage to actual, good teaching (and to creative and innovative work in general). On the other hand, if there are no standards at all then how will accountability work?
Oliver,
Not ignoring your query, just don’t have a good answer. 🙂
Oliver,
I never said spending was unlimited. I said that when a solution failed to achieve its goals, often for exactly the reasons the critics had outlined originally, the answer was always more money and effort, not ending the program and trying something else. Or in the words I actually used: throw more money at it.
False dichotomy is often used in the process. See for example the Iran deal. The choice is posed as this deal or a nuclear armed Iran. But, in fact, the deal guarantees a nuclear armed Iran and the rest of the Middle East as well. And like Claude Rains as Captain Renault in Casablanca, the diplomats will state that they are shocked, shocked when it happens.
Mark Bofill,
I don’t know what you were reading, but there is an obvious correlation between intelligence and income, see for example: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/04/iq-income-and-wealth.html
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Sure, there are other factors… choosing extremely wealthy parents is advantageous, especially if that means you inherit a fortune, no matter how dumb you are. OTOH, a smart drunk is likely to have low income, in spite of being smart.
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But anybody who thinks smart people are not more likely to have higher income than dumb ones is delusional…. and ignoring a wealth of data that shows exactly the opposite, not to mention simple logic: who is more likely to start a company like, say, Microsoft? Clearly a smart person like Bill Gates. Is a smart person or a dumb person more likely get into medical school and have average lifetime earnings of $4+ million (~3.5 times the average college graduate https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byur99cIMAAStxq.png)? I think the answer is obvious: a smart person.
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Liberals desire life to be ‘fair’, with ‘fair’ being defined as “more equal outcomes”, because they say differences are only due to a person’s background… and some lucky choices. Mr Obama’s outrageous “You didn’t build that!” comment sums up the liberal POV succinctly. But reality does not cooperate with this desire for “fairness” in outcomes. Some people are able to accomplish much more than others, in large part because they are smarter, and they are usually compensated for it, whether that is “fair” or not.
DeWitt Payne,
Seems to me Mr Obama is betting Iran will become better behaved by the time it is in a position to “dash” for a nuclear weapon. I think he is sadly mistaken…. Iran’s behavior has only worsened over the decades; I think history is unlikely to treat Mr Obama well for making this bet.
SteveF,
Why does North Korea come to mind when I hear about the Iran nuclear deal? I think the answer is obvious. Iran is no more likely to keep their end of the bargain than North Korea.
SteveF,
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish at a google glance the difference between propaganda and fact. 🙂 I didn’t take much time to dig.
Here is a decent link explaining the recent years increases in regulatory costs.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/red-tape-rising-a-2011-mid-year-report
I have talked to teachers who think that teacher’s certificates are pretty much worthless pieces of paper. That paper says nothing about how well the teacher is versed in a particular subject – other than perhaps getting a teacher’s certificate. It is doubtless an effort to emulate what doctors and lawyers do with certification in order to eliminate some job competition.
On the matter of the Iran nuclear deal a writer for the Chicago Tribune who claims to be a libertarian (to whom I explained on many occasion that he really was not until he broke off communications) with the name Steve Chapman in a recent article was praising the Obama administration for making the deal while at the same down claiming that sanctions were not working and never do. In a letter to the editor (unfortunately Chapman is an editor) I pointed to the fact that if sanctions do not work then why would the administration use re-imposition of sanctions as a means to enforce their Iran deal. If I used Chapman’s reasoning about sanctions then the whole Iran deal is simply a charade by the administration for a short term political gain that will eventually fail. Of course the letter was not published.
I think once again that Chapman failed to see the weaknesses of government actions where politicians have a finite life and thus tend to push for short term gains at the expense of long term ones.
Kenneth,
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the libertarian position on Iran that it’s none of our business whether Iran has nuclear weapons?
Kenneth Fritsch: I didn’t see anything on the costs of not regulating. Are they farcically presuming that no regulations would come at no cost?
Upstream, in Comment #137864, Kenneth Fritsch demonstrates that he will refuse to consider any evidence of the costs of no regulations since, I guess, it is anti-libertarian.
Mark
I don’t know if the policies are on the balance negative or positive. I’m just pointing out that to some extent, teachers and systems do need to organize curricula to match what is tested or lose money.
There are some advantages to the testing. Suppose a child moves from district to district. Everyone covering roughly the same material at roughly the same time means they are less likely to re-cover things they had and miss stuff they didn’t. Testing by an external body is likely the only way to learn if students in some schools learn nothing. So it’s not all bad.
And as I said: I have no objection to quite a bit of breadth before depth. Provided the ‘breadth” doesn’t end up including ridiculously unnecessary stuff, I don’t see much of a problem.
But the testing does take away some flexibility and that might on the balance be detrimental. I don’t actually know.
Iran’s ruling theocrats have been waging war on civilization since the they took over. Mr. Obama and the West have enabled that theocracy to stay in power and increase its power in this dangerous agreement.
His arguments defending the agreement are childish and naive, like most of his foreign policy and energy policy positions.
My wife spent 23 years as a public school teacher. Listening to her experiences and watching how she and her teacher friends deal with the large institutions running schools behave leads me to believe that there have been poor assumptions made by basically all constituencies involved in public education.
SteveF,
If one of my kids had told me about a teacher using that brake pad example for Einstein’s equation, I would have been in the principal’s office raising heck. But it is one of the more hilarious bits of irony I have heard in awhile.
hunter.
“If one of my kids had told me about a teacher using that brake pad example for Einstein’s equation, I would have been in the principal’s office raising heck.”
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My parents most certainly did not understand Einstein’s famous equation, and I doubt I could have explained it to them in those days; I had an only vague understanding, but knew it had nothing to do with brake pads. Besides, raising five kids on a meager income gave them a host of more pressing issues to deal with. The good thing about that episode was that I became convinced learning basic science was something I would have to do on my own through reading (in the 1960’s, that meant spending time at the library to find suitable books), and setting up a “laboratory” in my parent’s basement where I investigated all kind sorts of interesting things: home made Van De Graff generators with motors salvaged from the local dump, radio receivers, vacuum systems based on old refrigerator compressors, glass blowing equipment, model rockets, giant tethered polyethylene balloons filled with natural gas (a little over half the density of air, but really dangerous!), and more…
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I did later have the good fortune to have a very competent chemistry teacher, but that was not until my junior and senior years.
DeWitt, your take on the libertarian position on Iran is essentially correct. My point is that Obama is playing the political gambit of short term gain at the expense of long term consquences in order to attempt to solidify a legacy.
I suspect over time Iran will have nuclear capabilities. Certainly China, Russia and our European allies are not going prevent this occurrence.
The best scenario would be a change in the government in Iran towards a more secular and free enterprise one that recogonizes individual rights. Dealing with the current regime and ignoring its threats to destroy Israel as just talk will not get that job done. We need to relate to the Iranians and not the government.
RB, the point I was making was that the increase in power and cost of government requires looking beyond the coventional government expense to GDP ratio. We can discuss the effectiveness of regulations and alternatives, but the fact remains that the costs of regulations are huge.
Regulations also favor bigger and more established enterprises over smaller businesses and that is not good for growing the economy.
If you have followed closely a public school student with special needs at either end of the spectrum you soon realize that the system is aimed rather inflexibly at the average student. That should not be a surprising result for a public institution.
Kenneth,
“The best scenario would be a change in the government in Iran towards a more secular and free enterprise one that recogonizes individual rights. ”
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I believe this is wishful thinking. Based on my conversations with Muslims in the Middle East, it seems clear to me that “destruction of Israel” is not just the raging of wackos in the Iranian government, it is a commonly and firmly held belief by a huge number of private citizens in the region. They honestly believe that the country of Israel is a moral abomination and that it should be completely eliminated; the sooner the better. You could change the regime in Iran, but that won’t change what Muslims think about Israel (or about infidels in general, for that matter). An elected government will hear what those people think…. look who won the free elections in Egypt.
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Peace in the Middle East is currently unattainable for reasons that are independent of a specific regime in Iran or anywhere else; the current administration in Washington DC is as blind to that reality as all their predecessors were. The agreement with Iran is a symptom of that blindness, just as the Nobel Peace Prize winning “Camp David Accords” were. There is no progress toward peace because one side does not want peace.
I had the wrong false dichotomy. The current statement from Fearless Leader is that it’s a choice between peace now or war now. But, in fact, accepting the current deal actually means war later with a stronger and probably nuclear armed Iran rather than war now.
Oh, but wait. It’s none of our business whether Iran has nuclear weapons or uses them on Israel. Or, more likely, Israel launches a preemptive strike on Iran. We don’t need to do anything.
Kenneth Fritsch:
The absence of regulations similarly favors large, more established businesses. For example: “market manipulation.”
Not regulating toxic emissions from plants negatively impacts the health of the surrounding communities.
I don’t see that factored into Heritage’s analysis either.
Carrick as I pointed to in a previous post I was discussing costs not effectiveness. I would use Rothbard’s manifesto as a guide to protecting individual property rights which includes the individual’s well-being against polluters.
https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollution
One size fits all used in most regulations is not effective.
SteveF, the multiple and severe conflicts between various Muslim groups and sects does not fit into the picture you paint.
SteveF,
Clearly you did very well and over came the poor abilities of that over employed teacher. It is interesting to consider how resilient kids can be.
I was blessed with great biology and chemistry teachers.
The chemistry teacher was busted in the late 1970’s under what we call today “breaking bad”… he was applying too much chemistry on the side with too little respect for the law…
The biology teacher taught long enough that he actually taught grandchildren of his original students from 1962. He had a choreographed lecture on the honeybee dance that was locally famous. And a great break from his by-memory lectures on the Krebs cycle and such.
Kenneth,
Just because there are violent schisms within Islam doesn’t mean that they don’t all agree that Israel is an abomination, should be wiped from the face of the earth and would cooperate temporarily to achieve that goal. Once that happened, they’d go back to killing each other instead.
I had a Latin teacher in high school that would don his Roman Centurion garb every Ides of March. Omnes Gallia in partes tres divisa est.
Kenneth Fritsch:
Causally linked health costs due to air pollution are actual costs, not just a measure of “effectiveness”.
Muslim political leaders like their non Muslim counter parts tend to find enemies in order to retain powrer and that tendency is stronger the more pervasive the government is domestically. It takes the populace some time to figure this out as not in their interest -sometimes a very long time.
Carrick, effectiveness would be a measure of, for example, if one had alternate means of protecting indivdual property rights with regards to a proven polluting source and one cost twice the amount of the other while both had the same end result.
Perhaps we can all agree that a measure of government control should include the cost of regulation and that the effectiveness of any particular regulation can be questioned and critically judged. Even a big government proponent like Obama has requested regulation review even if we might question is seriousness.
Kenneth,
As DeWitt correctly points out, whatever their religious differences, many Muslims in the middle east do seem to agree that Israel must disappear. My personal experience in discussions with a couple dozen Muslims in the Middle East may not be representative, of course, but the history of the Middle East since 1950 shows repeated refusal of most surrounding nations to explicitly accept the existence of Israel as a matter of moral and religious principle. Those who imagine acceptance of Israel is a simple matter of effective diplomacy or freely elected governments in Muslim countries have not been paying attention. As far as I can tell, the current situation is not materially different than it was 40 years ago…. and that is not for lack of diplomatic effort….. nor do I expect it to materially change in the next 40 years, unless some truly wacko leaders in Iran decide to attack Israel with nuclear weapons. The animus toward Israel is strong and unyielding. I find Mr Obama’s stupidity to be quite comparable.
Kenneth:
But if one cost twice as much as the other, the cost would still be twice as much. Regardless of the language, policy based on libertarian ideals, like any other, comes with a cost associated with it.
I like to keep things in purely economic terms “cost” vs “benefit”.
I think any policy, including the recent EPA policy that got sent back for revision, needs to have a serious review of cost + benefits.
Carrick,
“I think any policy, including the recent EPA policy that got sent back for revision, needs to have a serious review of cost + benefits.”
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Sure, but that is not what EPA employees appear to think. Sometimes a regulatory agency becomes the “captive” of the industry it regulates (eg. banking before the 2008 crash). In the case of the EPA, it is more like capture of the regulatory system by the Sierra Club and similar organizations. My personal experience is that EPA folks are the most extreme green of greens, and this results in regulations and prosecutions consistent with a capture by by environmental organizations. I do not suggest that those EPA employees are acting in bad faith. I do suggest they consistently act contrary to the public’s economic interests.
Re: SteveF (Comment #138051)
Can you provide any specific evidence for this, even if anecdotal?
SteveF,
When (if) we finally get back to real journalism, the investigations into the cozy deals between EPA and the enviro NGOs will be eye opening.
Oliver,
Sure.
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Many years ago, I worked at a large chemical plant which was regulated under the EPA NESHAP’s standards. There was an instance where the plant’s head electrical engineer tested the high voltage underground (>4 KV) backup supply feeder lines between the plant and a 2 megawatt generator. There were two sets of these lines (three phase each), and one line on one set was found to have “leakage” to ground, indicating that line, and the two others of the same vintage, should be replaced, so as to ensure the generator would always be available in case of a power outage. Essentially, the point of two feeder sets was to never have a circumstance where failure of a set of the underground feeder lines from the backup generator would keep the plant from having emergency backup power, since a complete power outage could lead to dangerous conditions in the plant, and possibly uncontrolled emission of a ‘hazardous air pollutant’.
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On the day the faulty lines were being replaced, there was a local grid power outage due to a thunder storm. The second set of feeder lines, which had tested OK, failed shortly after power was sent from the backup generator to the plant. Since the new lines for the other cable set had not yet been completely installed, this meant that the plant had no emergency power for about 30 minutes. During that 30 minutes two polymerization reactors overheated, and approximately 3,000-4,000 pounds of ‘hazardous air pollutant’ was released to the atmosphere (this release took place to keep the reactors from rupturing due to overpressure… and killing people).
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The EPA came in a couple of days later to investigate the circumstances leading to the emergency release. The head electrical engineer explained exactly what had happened, and laid out a new preventative maintenance plan to ensure that the same thing could never happen again. Under his plan, the feeder lines would only be replaced during a plant stoppage, and would be replaced based on their time in service, rather than on measured leakage. The EPA staffers became furious, stopped the meeting, and said they needed to call in the criminal prosecution lawyers at EPA to pursue the head electrical engineer for criminal negligence.
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Now I can tell you this guy was the salt of the Earth, as conscientious and thoughtful an engineer as you will ever find… and he was trying to ‘do the right thing’ by replacing the faulty set of feeder cables. And more to the point, under existing EPA regulations, the plant was legally allowed to emit up to 2 tons per day of the hazardous pollutant, each and every day of the year, but internal controls had already reduced those emissions to well under 1 ton per day…. hundreds of tons per year less than was legally allowed. Still, a bizarre set of circumstances, leading to a single emergency release of 3 tons, was enough to threaten criminal action against an individual who was doing his best to make sure emergency releases would not happen. There was no willful negligence. There was honest effort to avoid emergency releases.
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None of it mattered to the scoundrels at the EPA. They were arrogant. They were angry. They were self righteous. They were miserable SOB’s, for whom all that mattered was the opportunity to torment people working in industry for minimal ‘violations’ of EPA regulations.
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Fortunately for the head electrical engineer, EPA higher-ups agreed to not pursue criminal charges in exchange for the company agreeing to a host of additional “measures”, none required by the actual NESHAP regulations, to reduce total emissions from the plant even further below what the regulations allowed. It was all a ploy to force the plant to not just comply with the actual regulations, but to comply with much more stringent emissions requirements, outside of the regulations… regardless of cost.
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This and several other encounters with the EPA convinced me that they give not a hoot about cost, they want only ever less “environmental damage”. IMO, they are a bunch of dishonest crazy greens.
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Have you any reason to believe otherwise?
SteveF and DeWitt, I will respectively disagree with your premise on peoples enemies and how it evolves. Historically it has been politicians motivated to stay in power or increase their power who have instigated the populace against their invented enemies. Religion is a handy tool in doing that and Muslims are not historically an exception. For many reasons it has been used more readily by Muslim politicians in current times.
You see the same process domestically where politicians use the wealthy, the unconventional and “extremists” as convenient “enemies”.
People may dislike another group, but it takes a political instigator to lead people to kill one another on a large scale.
Lucia,
I find this hard to argue against. Maybe I’m reaching for straws in trying to form an argument that a bureaucracy isn’t the only way or best way to accomplish this.
Standardization is good for the reasons you mention, just as it is in many different applications. If something is standardized it’s more ‘transferable’, sure. Also it gives a basis for comparison.
Thinking out loud (~groan~ I know, means I’m about to speak nonsense) it doesn’t seem to me that it’s always necessary to enforce standards. Sometimes, in some areas, definitely standards are needed. But dreaming of a more free market style education system, maybe we can dream that some schools will voluntarily adopt standards, propose standards, etc. The best schools might find that advantageous, other schools might want to strive to meet those standards or rank themselves on those standards at least; it might be a selling point. Other schools that disagree with the … hmm … value of the standard might not, that might also appeal to some segment of people looking for schools for their kids.
Yeah. The more I think about this, the more I doubt my argument here. I was abstracting from personal experience, but then again I’m an oddball who learned things all out of order (in some areas) on my own. From personal experience, I liked the idea because ‘depth first’ motivated me. As a kid with a TRS-80, I learned BASIC quickly. I wanted desperately to write better video games, so I learned Z-80 assembly and machine language. Was I really prepared to understand it? Not really, but it caused me to learn an awful lot early on about microprocessors, memory, electronics, etc. But anyways, that’s neither here nor there except to illustrate that my reason for thinking this ‘depth first’ thing is a good idea might not be general enough.
Maybe I’m making some other error along the way. I look at my kids and get the sense that they can’t tie what they learn to anything useful. They don’t really ‘get’ what it’s for or why it matters. Probably means I ought to spend more time helping them see that.
As always, thanks so much for your responses Lucia, I value hearing your thoughts and ideas highly. 🙂
Kenneth,
Sure. But the hates and fears generally already exist. Germany felt they had been screwed over after WWI and, in fact, they had been. Demagogues don’t arise from nowhere. And in the case of the Middle East, it’s not just one man on a white horse. It’s entire governments and the religious infrastructure. Kemal Ataturk driving the mullahs from power in Turkey is the sole exception and that may not last. The Libertarian ideal that governments are rational actors is simply ludicrous.
Oliver,
I’ve considered this more thoroughly now. It’s not that there must be no standards. It’s that government bureaucratic involvement is what messes it up.
Why is a government bureaucracy going to make a better decision about standards, what they should be, how they should work, etc. than people shopping around for the best educational ‘product’? [Edit: I don’t think the bureaucracy would make better decisions.]
Would there be no standards if the government didn’t enforce them? I think there would be. There was no law that said PC’s had to support an RS-232 port in the old days. There’s no law that says they have to support a USB port today. Nobody mandates adherence to some standards, it’s just that nobody will buy a product that doesn’t adhere to certain standards.
Whatcha think? 🙂
Mark,
And a parallel port for the printer.
However, lots of people buy iPads and they don’t come with USB or memory cards. I also remember when you had to buy a gameport input card to connect things like joysticks to PC’s.
DeWitt,
“Kemal Ataturk driving the mullahs from power in Turkey is the sole exception and that may not last.”
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Indeed. When I visited Turkey last year, the impression I got is that there is a huge divide between secular Turks, who are quite western/European, and who seem to consider Ataturk the best thing that ever happened to Turkey, and religious Turks, who support the current president, and want government and laws based on their religious beliefs. Heck, secular Turks still hang Ataturk’s picture in their offices and homes… and the guy has been dead for more than 75 years. He is like a combination of Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson for the secular Turks.
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There was a time, when I was in my 20’s, that I actually thought libertarian ideals were plausible. Experience long ago dissuaded me from that thinking, and nowhere more than in international relations. The libertarians have locked themselves into a governing philosophy I find disconnected from reality, which ensures they will never be taken seriously, and so never participate in government. If they would drop the crazy stuff, they might be taken more seriously by voters… but they won’t.
DeWitt,
Sure. Who’s to say that iPads should be required to support standards where people don’t care about them? Let the people decide by voting with their dollars.
DeWitt, begging your pardon, but thinking that governments are rational actors is a libertarian concept is ludricrous. Very limited to no government is the libertarian ideal because governments are not rational actors. In a previous statement I noted that to avoid conflicts it is best to deal with the governed and not the government.
If it were the governed who wanted wars why would governments draft soldiers and print money to wage wars?
We would no much better on foreign policy by promoting true free ,trade and free travel and exchange of ideas with foreign enities.
It amazes me when I hear those who put down new approaches and ideas out of hand when the results of conventional thinking have produced such obviously bad outcomes.
Kenneth,
Ok. I stand corrected.
How many libertarian governments exist in the world today? I’m betting that it’s not very different from zero. Many existing governments are authoritarian, if not outright tyrannies. You have to live in the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. Adopting a libertarian foreign policy in a non-libertarian world is a recipe for disaster.
By the way, look up the definition of demagogue. One wouldn’t be able to come to power if the governed didn’t have emotions, fears and prejudices for them to play on, i.e. weren’t always rational actors. Ignorance comes into play there too.
If you believe Myers-Briggs, the majority of people are feelers, not thinkers and are less likely to be swayed by a purely rational appeal. To put it another way, do you think it’s possible to end the Palestine/Israel conflict by a rational appeal to each population? I don’t.
The success of demagoguery is precisely why the direct election of US Senators was such a disaster. Now the Senate is populated mostly by demagogues from the right and the left, Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren, for example.
DeWitt, why do you think that authoritarian governments always attempt to keep their subjects from communicating with the outside world? Also I would like to hear yours and SteveF’s ideal for dealing with these issues. I do not think you are content with perpetual conflicts and wars.
Kenneth,
Please clarify: how I would deal with which issues?
I am agreeing with Kenneth Fritsch here. Our answer for the world as it was and is are some of the largest and most capable military resources on the planet. Since WWII we’ve had mixed success. We are probably the most blamed country in the world. A people to people approach across borders doesn’t have to substitute for all of the status quo. We want to trade with all people, not isolate and wall them off from ourselves. Economic interdependency across the globe favors less conflict yet what we see is often the opposite of that. Lately we have somewhat xenophobic remarks from Trump that gets some political traction, but illustrates the opposite of what most libertarians think. Our immigration laws are a good example of missed opportunities of liberty for those not lucky enough to be born in the U.S. A free market is somewhat inconsistent with closed borders. Just at it would be if a resident of one state could not work in another one. I also agree that libertarians never get elected to anything. People seem to prefer watching the left and the right both drift left. With social liberties that’s usually Okay with me, but we are losing ground most days with economic freedoms.
Here is a start: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves”.
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In the long term, countries get the government, and the standard of living, their populations merit. Japan is largely devoid of natural resources, has a paucity of land suitable for agriculture, suffers earthquakes, tsunamis, and typhoons, and yet is a rich country. Why? I think it is because the cultural values most Japanese people live by tend to grow wealth: dedication to education, high savings rates, prudent long term investment, little political corruption, very low crime rates, etc. Japan does have some problems, of course, but considering its “natural wealth”, Japan is huge success. Compare Japan with Brazil: vast fertile farmlands, no violent weather, no earthquakes or tsunamis, and lots of mineral riches. Yet Brazil struggles with economic growth, is rife with corruption at all levels of government, has almost unbelievable crime rates, including violent crimes, and has very lax penalties for misdeeds: first degree mass murder can bring no more than 30 years in jail. Most murderers are back on the streets in a decade or less. The personal saving rate is minuscule, and many people run up huge personal debts on credit cards with 20% per month interest rates, leading ultimately to bankruptcy. Capital is constantly in short supply. The government supports an enormous, generously compensated, and mostly useless bureaucracy, while untreated sewage is dumped into rivers and streams, the government runs a huge deficit, infrastructure is antiquated, and public schools are so poorly funded that they are a joke: poor kids have basically no chance. Based on many years of observation, I have been forced to conclude that Brazilian culture itself is what holds the country back, just as Japanese culture enables economic growth.
At every level, personal, regional, and national, the influence of culture on outcomes is clear. Groups like ISIS exist because people in the region tolerate (and often explicitly support) their activities. Muslim terrorism exists because muslim societies tolerate, and often directly support, terrorism. Once again, it comes down to culture, and in the Middle East, culture is strongly associated with religion.
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Which is why I say the situation in the Middle East has little prospect for improvement…. the cultures involved will not allow peace, and it is foolish to imagine they will any time in the foreseeable future. Cultural changes are very slow, and when preservation of the current culture is the highest priority for a government, cultural change can come nearly to a stop…. as in Iran.
Hey Mark –
==> “Is it the bureaucracy that’s screwing up our educational system? Policies like ‘No Child Left Behind’?”
Not all standardized testing is equal. There is norm-referenced standardized testing and criterion-referenced standardized testing. The former, IMO, basically, tells a teacher and student nothing much except how one student stacks up against another based on, essentially, an arbitrary set of criteria (i.e., they don’t correlate particularly well with much of anything important). In other words, it’s pretty useless. It reinforces a rather bizarre concept that education is a competitive process. Just another example, of the many in our society, where people get seduced by putting numbers on something – into thinking that’s somehow, necessarily, meaningful. The validity of norm-referenced standardized testing (in the sense of measuring what it purports to be measuring), is pretty low.
Criterion-referenced standardized testing tells both a teacher and a student something useful w/r/t what a student knows and what they need to focus on next to reach certain goals (and in that sense, is more useful than norm-referenced testing for the rational that Lucia gave for standardized testing). IMO, the ultimate effect of standardized testing tends to be pretty antithetical to what the goals of eduction should be. Reliance on standardized testing encourages convergent thinking and passivity instead of encouraging students to lean meta-cognitive abilities to structure their own learning processes and to build their skills for divergent thinking.
I would suggest that if you’re interested in examining the value of norm-referenced standardized testing, take a look at how they deal with testing in Finland.
As an aside – although I disagree with a great deal of his ideas about education, you might like to read about what J. Scott Armstrong (the prominent “skeptic”) has to say about the deleterious effects of bureaucracy on education (some Googling can turn it up…he wrote some stuff that discusses education at Wharton…something that in particular I find interesting because of my background. If you are interested and can’t find it, let me know and I’ll dig it up). IMO, he does get a lot right even if some of his fundamental arguments are way off the mark.
And of course, there’s also a classic book that discusses the deleterious effects of bureaucracy on education a great deal:
http://www.amazon.com/Pedagogy-Oppressed-30th-Anniversary-Edition/dp/0826412769
There’s probably a lot there that you won’t like from a political framework…but there is also a ton of important discussion about the negative impact of educational bureaucracy…
And Mark – two more things:
==> “I was abstracting from personal experience, but then again I’m an oddball who learned things all out of order (in some areas) on my own.”
Don’t be too facile with your determination that you learned things “all out of order.”
A lot of people make weakly-supported assumptions about the sequence in how people should learn concepts, and from that basis go on to design curriculum which is, again, actually pretty arbitrary. Some of my favorite examples can be seen in the sequences in which 2nd languages are taught (for example, where concepts such as making words plural or using articles are seen as simple and elementary and taught early, even though very sophisticated 2nd language speakers who are quite capable of expressing complex thoughts, still make errors with those very “elementary” components). I also think of math instruction, where it is assumed that kids should smoothly go from one-digit multiplication to multiple-digit multiplication – without taking on the conceptual jumps involved. Or that you should go lockstep from addition of fractions to subtraction, multiplication, and then division of fractions without really taking on the conceptual complexity of dividing fractions in comparison to adding fractions (there’s a reason why division of fractions is often taught for four or five years straight before students catch on. Basically, they’re given concrete instructional models for adding or subtracting fractions before being asked to work at a more abstract level, but told to memorize an algorithm for dividing fractions right from the gitgo (invert and multiply), where many students are not given a basis for understanding the concrete processes involved first).
==> “From personal experience, I liked the idea because ‘depth first’ motivated me.”
You might be interested in reading some of Ted Sizer’s stuff
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/education/23sizer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
…who wrote a lot about emphasizing “depth over breadth.” Probably you’re not *that* interested…but just to let you know that there is a lot of theory that supports creating educational experiences for kids that are in line with your own personal experience.
Mark
The difficulty with generalizing this specific thing is that you are relating a situation where delving in depth into something you specifically found fascinating motivated you. But it’s rather difficult for a teacher with a class of 20 to find something to dive into in depth that motivates all or even most of the 20 in the same way.
Think about this: What if the “in depth” subject the teacher had selected was the art, the history of decorative art with a particular emphasis on textiles? Would that have motivated you? Perhaps. And perhaps not.
It’s possible that in your case, it was the fact that you already were fascinated with something that motivated you to plunge into that in depth.
I’m not saying depth is not motivating. I don’t even have hugely strong opinions about depth vs. breadth.
That said: I suspect, ideally there is a balance of breadth and depth. But in that case, children need some options in deciding which topics to cover in greater depth. My grade school did that to some extent. (We could pick from choir, art, home ec for 1 period devoted to a non-academic topic.)
We had some flexibility in high school, but the school was too small to permit very much in the way of choosing different things. (The teaching was generally good .. but really, not much choice.)
Joshua
I’d be interested in reading. But googling results in way to many irrelevant hits. Do you know a link with something especially relevant?
Joshua,
Thanks. I’m unfamiliar with the distinctions but now that you point them out I’ll look into them.
Regarding Finland, J. Scott Armstrong, and “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, again, thanks! I will certainly look at the first two. I’m not sure I’ll run out and buy the book, but it’s not inconceivable that I might at some point.
I appreciate your taking the time to point me towards relevant material I haven’t looked at, particularly since it seems like stuff I’d be unlikely to stumble across on my own.
Regarding your second comment, I actually find that highly interesting (I like your examples about language in particular). I will certainly look into it. Without yet having done so though, I’d like to clarify that by ‘out of order’ I meant the simple case where there was literally other stuff was needed to be understood in order to master the target material. An overly simplistic example might be Ohm’s law; a kid isn’t going to get Voltage = Current * Resistance until that kid understands what multiplication is.
I appreciate your response Joshua, thanks! 🙂
Lucia,
Bravo! I think you’ve nailed this. This is what I was dimly groping for in thinking that I was making a mistake generalizing from my specific experience.
People care about different things and find different things interesting. Even besides this, what motivates them can be different. I was always interested in figuring out what I could do, or the limits of what I could do. My brother was quite different; he didn’t care about applications but he cared a lot about the abstract theories and found them interesting. I expect applications requiring studies in depth for the sake of the application would have bored him to death.
Even so, I still suspect there are a bunch of kids out there who don’t find education interesting because they don’t have a concept of what on earth it’s for.
Thanks Lucia!
DeWitt
I see this as evidence in favor of not having the government impose standards. People buy the iPads w/o USB or memory cards because iPads are useful w/o them.
Going by to my previous comment that I’m not against breadth before depth– provided breadth isn’t including ‘useless’ stuff, I might expand that to forcing everyone to learn stuff that, well, really, not everyone needs. Breadth before depth and for everyone is good provided you don’t start adding to breadth to the extent that there is no time for depth in any area of interest. Yet it is very difficult to get anyone to admit that their area might not be “essential” breadth.
This isn’t just an issue in primary and secondary school The same can happen with various sorts of college credit requirements. Should “cultural diversity” be required? What about a foreign language? Phys. Ed? Why not music? Or art? Schools have been adding or subtracting various ones of these. Whether this breadth should be seen as essential for gaining a college degree is a very real question. Obviously, if breadth requirements increase ridiculously, there will be no possibility for depth in a 4 year degree or degrees will need to take 5 or 6 years.
Mark –
==> ” I’d like to clarify that by ‘out of order’ I meant the simple case where there was literally other stuff was needed to be understood in order to master the target material. ”
Again, I’d caution about being too quick in making assumptions. A useful concept in education is the “need to know.” If you target some discrete concept and through struggling with it, gain an understanding that you need to throw it into reverse and master an underlying concept, you’ve established a “need to know.” You will then have a richer context for connecting to your investigation into the more basic concept. Compare that to someone who might have started with that basic concept with the explanation from a teacher that “you need to master this concept before you can move on to the more subsequent concept.” Then may be no intrinsically meaningful “need to know” – only an extrinsic motivator. For some learners in particular, an intrinsic motivation is more important than an extrinsic motivation. (And how sad it is that many of those students get that intrinsic drive to learn stamped out of them because they aren’t following the prescribed, one size fits all model, and wind up thinking that they’re not capable of learning because a bureaucratic educational system can’t accommodate their intrinsic motivations). And I would argue that ultimately, the ability to find intrinsic motivation and integrate it into your learning paradigm is a key attribute of an effective learner. One problem with our standard educational paradigm, IMO, is that it overly-relies on extrinsic motivation as a driver. I’ve seen that problem manifest a lot with students at the graduate level – where they tend to get really lost if they haven’t nurtured and developed their skills for finding, and then making good on (having a sense of themselves as knowing how to move forward from), intrinsic motivation. I have found this to be true even with many who were quite successful at earlier levels because responding to extrinsic motivation was, basically, equated with success or being a “good student.
(sorry for the soap box rant) 🙂
Mark
Perhaps.
But don’t discount other factors like…. well… you are in the presence of a bunch of potential play mates and if possibly you’d rather play. Or, sadly, some kids might not have mastered reading very well, and when assigned the task to read a lesson in the social studies book are so frustrated, their minds wander and they decide blowing spit balls would be more fun. The depth vs. breadth argument might be meaningless there. Joshuas notion of standard based testing is more relevant. One needs to identify that these kids are having trouble reading and set them to improving their reading rather than decreeing the time for working on that is past and trying to get them to learn social studies by… telling them to read about the topic!
More generally. Teachers do have a challenging task. I’m not convinced people who “study” education and learning have nailed down what the ‘best’ methods for teaching are. And there are lots of reasons why implementing studies to test whether certain methods really work ‘better’ than others are difficult to do properly. So their short coming in knowing which methods are “best” aren’t necessarily the fault of researchers in education. (Though… I gotta say.. I think there is a lot of bunk out there.)
Lucia –
Here’s what I found from a quick search:
http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1151&context=marketing_papers
I could have sworn that I read something of his that was similar, but a lot longer and with a lot more supporting evidence. Don’t seem to be having much luck finding it, though…maybe I just made it up. (Been reading a lot lately about how much of our “memory” is pretty much just made up).
Joshua,
It never occurred to me it was a rant until you apologized. I won’t accept the apology because that would imply one was required. It wasn’t– not remotely!
I was mostly directing that towards folks like SteveF…who never waste their time reading my comments but when they do, suffer unendurable pain from the experience.
To be fair, I’ve been known to disagree with you too. But the info on education is interesting.
I actually remember my first conversation with another little girl about an educational practice. I met Jenny the summer before 2nd grade. We had just moved up from El Salvador. She was telling me about learning to read. She said something like, “You haven’t learned phonics?! You’re going to be way behind.”
That didn’t happen because… well.. I learned to read in Spanish, and then mom had us cram in English before moving to the US. Phonics is so “natural” in Spanish you end up getting into the flow. You really don’t need endless lessons on the various ways “ough” might be pronouced when you see it in a word.
I actually don’t know what method my mother used. I think it was “Buy Dick and Jane books. Read with us a little. Then leave us alone. Take us to the library during the summer.”
Bear in mind: we already had the general concept of reading down.
Still, the result is I’ve always been a bit interested in people having vociferous arguments about phonics vs. whole language. My gut feeling is that the best methods must mix the two. But I really don’t know.
Joshua,
Yes. I think I agree with you regarding the ‘need to know’ idea, and intrinsic vrs extrinsic requirements. Again personal experience, I never cared unless I understood why I had to care. A teacher or parent could drone on all day about how important it was, I wasn’t about to take their word for it.
I want a ray caster for a 3d game engine. Eventually, it becomes obvious that this is impossible without grasping some trigonometry. Sudden presto magic! I care about trig, it’s important because the thing I was trying to accomplish in the first place was important, and I become competent with it.
heh. Whole language vs. phonics is a good proxy for political ideology..not unlike climate change.
We could discuss that, and once it’s been cleared up, move on to clear implications of nature vs. nurture in pedagogy and epistemology. 🙂
Certainly, the pendulum pattern in educational fads tends towards an unfortunate zero sum game relationship between different pedagogies.
Interesting thought, though, after reading your comment about phonics and Spanish vs. English…that I haven’t thought of before. Since Spanish is much consistent, phonetically, than English…I would imagine that might lower the potential return on a phonetics-based approach for Spanish. Maybe there’s more reason to try to have students memorize phonics rules in English because the translation of letter to sound is a more complex process. I wonder if a phonics-based approach is more prevalent in American schools in part for that reason, in addition to the ideological proxy warfare aspect that probably has more relevance in the U.S.
Lucia,
🙂 Yeah. Based on peripheral clues I speculate that Joshua and I disagree fundamentally about lots of things. It fascinates me that we (er, Joshua and I) agree as much as we do, actually. Note: I do not suggest or imply that I believe this to be the case with you Lucia (in fact I do not), but for my part, when I leave out my assumptions about what I think Joshua must believe about X Y or Z and just focus on what he actually explicitly says, I often find much of what he’s got to say to be pretty reasonable.
(I don’t think this applies to you because I don’t think you operate on the basis of unstated assumptions about what people must believe in the first place.)
Interesting as always, Mark. Time to hit my sack (as my partner’s son used to say)…
Joshua,
It may be that in Spanish, no one argues about phonics because kids just pretty much learn the alphabet and the very few cases of letters that are pronounced more than one way. For example, there is a hard ‘c’ and a soft ‘c’ with easy to remember rules, same with ‘g’. I think that’s it… All other letters are pronounced 1 way and 1 way only. Right. (Do I mis-remember?) I guess there was a bit about ‘pp’ being said more strongly than just ‘p’.
Technically, I think those rules are phonics, right? We didn’t spend a lot of time on these rules in preparatoria, but discussing and using them to sound out words would make the lessons “phonics based”. We did discuss and apply the rules all without having any class time specifically devoted to “learning a new more complex rule of phonics”. After all…what new more complex rules?
This has been my sense.
Joshua,
Much of what you write about climate change IS actually painful to read…. because you appear to know nothing of the science involved, and so see everything through the lens of ideology and politics, rather than through rational technical analysis. There is a lot of political and ideological baggage associated with climate science, of course, but you seem unable to differentiate between politically motivated nonsense (from both sides) and reasoned technical analysis. That makes much of what you write about climate change disruptive…. and a waste of peoples’ time. Judith grew tired enough of your endless and empty rants to put you on moderation, though I was surprised how long that took.
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When you actually know something about a subject (like, it appears, education), what you write is not bad… and reading what you write is not painful.
Lucia,
I think you are right about Spanish versus English. Portuguese (a close cousin of Spanish) is very similar. I learned Portuguese 100% by ear, and reading or writing (simple) Portuguese was automatic once I knew the few basic rules for the sounds letters make. The idea that “spelling” would be a grade school subject for Portuguese speakers, like it is in English, is absurd…. if you can hear the word, and you know the basic letter sounds, you can write it on paper. OTOH, gendered inanimate objects (eg a car is male, a table is female) are much more arbitrary, even though most female nouns end in ‘a’ and most male nouns end in ‘o’. So when a baby is learning Portuguese, people always say nouns with the gendered article preceding the noun, making the gender absolutely clear, even when the word ending is irregular.
In the ESL program I volunteer teach in we spend a great deal of time dealing with the English idioms and idiosyncratic spelling challenges. I link this to some of the idiomatic differences between “Frontera” (Spanish at the Texas border), ” ‘Spanol Cubano” with it’s distinctive accent, “DF”, the accent and style of Mexico City, Colombian, etc. But the spelling in Spanish is so intuitive and I see the students struggling to piece together our complex Americanized English and make sense of it.
Re: Mark Bofill (Comment #138058)
Sorry it’s been a couple days, Mark, but I haven’t been ignoring your post! Here are some thoughts that I had:
Undoubtedly bureaucratic involvement has lots of problems. But what are the alternatives?
“Shopping around†only actually gets you the best product if a) you actually have choices, and b) you are sufficiently informed to make those choices. There’s also a fundamental issue that the people doing the shopping (presumably, the parents) aren’t ultimately the owner/recipient (the student).
There are severe practical (let alone socioeconomic) reasons why we have have limited choices for schools. I’d also argue that very few parents (nor anyone else) are equipped to evaluate an entire school system or curriculum in detail. And where would that information come from? Standardized testing? That has its problems as is being discussed in this thread. What then? Advertisements?
Contrary to what has been suggested in the comments, iPads are not a good model for public education. For one thing, there is plenty of choice. Most people can apparently afford what is essentially the premium class of iPad (or other tablet), so economics are not a barrier to choice. It is just as easy to go to a store and buy an alternative to the iPad; at worst you can mail order. The penalties “choosing wrong†are fairly minimal and temporary. Most of the products perform quite similarly (“First-world†problems with your iPad, anyone?) If you don’t like your new iPad, you can immediately take it back and get something else, or at worst you might have put up with some annoyances for 2-3 years, until your next “refresh.â€
Choosing an iPad has very little in common with choosing an education.
Sure, there could be more voluntary standards. Some schools already adhere to various standards that are separate or go beyond government-enforced standards. That can be a good thing. But removal of all government enforced standards?
First of all, public schools receive taxpayer money, and provide services to taxpayers (and/or their children). Right there, you have a compelling reason why the schools should be accountable to government standards. The taxpayers demand to know how their money’s being spent and that their kids are receiving adequate services; the answer that they get is some set of standards against which the service (here, public education) gets compared.
Accountability aside, let’s assume for the moment that we don’t want government bureaucracy setting education standards. So who would set those choices, and carefully would they choose them, and how much choice would they leave us?
To pick up on your computer industry analogy, it almost didn’t matter which standard got adopted for serial communications, so long as we got a standard. We ended up RS-232, which was adequate then and is still with us today. When USB became prevalent enough, manufacturers started adding USB by default, which was fine. Eventually it became built into the “standard†chipsets from the (i.e., near-monopoly) suppliers, and RS-232 was purposely eliminated, so that choice was actually taken away. But ultimately, it’s still a fairly small thing. It could be USB, it could have been FireWire, it may be USB 3 or Thunderbolt or a bastardized combination in the future; they’re almost interchangeable items as far as the overall functioning of the device.
The “committee†is still meeting somewhere on this one, but I for one am pretty sure that algebra, or U.S. history, or (most fundamental) reading and writing aren’t just interchangeable modules in our education.
So that looks like more than enough for one post. 🙂
Whatcha think?
Oliver,
Thanks for your response!
Regarding (a), I agree wholeheartedly. I think the market system addresses this well though. I think the government provided tax paid for ‘free’ system is a barrier to this. I’m not ‘rich’ but my wife and I make a substantial amount of money every year. Still, we don’t pay for private school for our kids because there’s public school; it’s convenient and it’s ‘free’. I haven’t tried with my step kids, but with my daughter many years back I did investigate private schools, they are hard to get a kid into even if you’ve got the money, in my experience. I think without ‘free’ public school there’d be much more demand for private schools an average kid could qualify for. In short, I think there’d be many more private schools to choose from.
Regarding (b), this is an interesting issue to me. Should people / parents be the ones to choose what education their kids get? I get what you’re saying, believe me. I think lots of people make dumb decisions. But they’re parents, they’re already making decisions for their kids. The bottom line is that somebody has to roll the dice and make a call, and there’s never a guarantee that the decision will be a good one, be the decision maker a parent or a bureaucrat. At least in the case of having a parent make the call, if they make a bad call, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.
Do they get the best product? They get the product out of the available set of products that they choose. Who’s to say what ‘best’ means in this context? If it’s what people voluntarily choose, that seems to me to be as good an approximation of ‘best’ as anything else.
I’m not sure I know what these are.
Yes. Advertisements. Our school is part of the blah blah coalition, we adhere to blah blah standards, our graduates have such and so college graduation rate and so on.
There’s always some risk that consumers will make poor choices. As I argued above, anytime there is a choice there is a risk, and in some percentage of the cases the risk will manifest. There’s no magic solution that guarantees good outcome in every scenario. The best we can do, in my view, is as far as practical and reasonable let people make up their own minds. This is generally better in my view than having a government bureaucracy make the call for them.
Joshua,
I’ve starting reading about Ted Sizer. It sounds like the ‘Essential Schools’ based on his ideas are right in line with what I was talking about. It’s very interesting! I wonder how graduates of those schools are doing today.
hunter
Bear in mind:
We arrived when I was just in 1st grade. So I wasn’t munch behind on the struggling with phonics the American’s had, but I had the advantage of the very first few months being with a language with such simple phonics that I had established the mechanics of reading. I suspect that, if anything, this helped.
Also: my parents were American. So they spoke English at home in El Salvador and obviously continued to do so in the US. This put me at a tremendous advantage relative to most kids in ESL.
Monday, I’m going to have to write a post about my mom the chemistry teacher teaching pre-school kids in the migrant program. It’s sort of funny. I think Joshua especially might like it. Heck, everyone might.
Oliver
I agree with you. But I would argue that many can make fairly good decisions despite this.
Oliver,
BTW, with respect to standards, I think the New York Regents system where ultimately kids are given ‘New York Regents’ diploma’s only if they achieve certain standard might be useful.
https://www.hesc.ny.gov/prepare-for-college/your-high-school-path-to-college/regents-requirements.html
I’m pretty sure private school kids can also take these and get the “NY Regents” stamp on their diploma. But I also think they don’t need to take them in any particular order. The private schools can also grant their own diplomas, so kids can get a diploma w/o passing the regents.
The NY regents also grants an “advanced” degree and “with honors” diplomas, with the later for kids who got at least 90% on all their tests.
The existence of this sort of thing permits private high school latitude, while still creating a standard that, if met widely by their students, lets them demonstrate that their kids do learn. Parents could decide whether they think this is an important metric for their kids.
For some kids, really, it’s not. My neighbor’s daughter has Downs. She’s high functioning, but clearly, few people would expect any school to get her to the point where she gets 90% on the full spread of all topics covered in high school. In contrast, we might well hope her brother or sister do that well– though obviously not all kids do. But parents might rationally select different programs for the three kids.
SteveF, thanks for the reply, but I was more specifically looking for an ideal in how best to deal with foreign nations and their populaces.
Interesting that Brazilians do not save and the Japanese do and further Brazil’s governments have inflated their money supply while Japan’s goverment would like to inflate it has not been able to accomplish much – not unlike what recent US Federal Reserve attempts have failed to do. Japan has a tremendous government debt that continues to increase at a high rate which is ironic given the culturally driven savings tendencies of its citizens. The day of reckoning for the Japanese is fast approaching given this huge debt (think higher interest rates) and the attributes of the Japanese culture will not save the day. It appears the Japanese are even more complacent about their government debt than we in the US are. How do the cultural differences explain those different reactions?
Japan has been following the Keynesian model faithfully in recent times with the expected poor results. Governments are often credited or aided by entities out of their control – in Brazil by natural resources and in Japan by the work ethic and savings rates of its citizens.
“Climate Communication” is what they say; “CAGW persuasion” is what they mean. Somewhat like the difference between debate and a sales pitch; the time for debate is over, they say. Note there are two kinds of persuasion too. At one end, converting skeptics or lukewarmers into true believers. At the other end, dazzling them with arguments until they close the sale. The key here being to get them to sign before they can think of good comebacks to the salesman’s (one sided) arguments. After they sign, communication ends. Other “communicators”, like time share condo salesmen, used car salesmen, and maybe even some insurance salesmen, use this trick.
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Aside, in real science, a case can always be reopened, so the “truth” may win in the end. As opposed to cases where a decision is made and that’s the end of it, right or wrong. Steve M’s current series on Deflategate is fascinating, but will it make any difference to point out the errors made by the investigators and legal team?
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Back to insurance. Life is a gamble. Every decision you make is based on uncertain and unknown information. Even insurance is a gamble. Sometimes the odds are known better than others, but the house always wins in the long run. Property is one thing; you know what you are risking and what the payout would be. Life insurance is another; the payout doesn’t get you back your life. Liability insurance is yet another; you have no idea what it is you might do or not do which could cause you to lose everything. Who knew how much it cost to not bake a cake? There’s no way to know all the risks, and you can’t get insurance for the worst risks. So the “communicators” are right to stick with FUD. FUD works.
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Joshua (Comment #138084)
Nice one. Isn’t it remarkable how strong beliefs and strong evidence can have such weak correlations.
Hey Mark –
I actually taught for a while at one of the flagship schools of the Essential Schools Coalition. I left the country for a couple of years right after that (traveled in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia)..and then moved to a different part of the country when I came back to the U.S….so I didn’t stay in touch with many graduates (or many former colleagues)…so I don’t have much of a sense of how things went over time. There’s also always the “Hawthorne Effect” to account for when you’re trying to assess the impact of new and energetic educational practice, so it would be a tough assessment to make.
Unfortunately, it was very difficult for many of the educators to put many of the core principles of the philosophy into practice. Some reasons for that (in no particular order): Almost all of the educators were more entrenched in the predominating educational paradigm than they realized. Despite their best intentions, it was really hard for them to break away from a system that they had done well in themselves, and that indeed, built in them a sense of their selves as successful educators. Secondly, to put many of those principles into practice required a new skill set that they just hadn’t developed yet (a problem that diminishes over time). Third, translated into practice, the radical nature of the core principles (vis a vis the traditional paradigm) became more stark than when they are looked at on paper – which created a fair amount of negative blowback from the community. Fourth, putting those principles into action really strained resources that were already stretched too thin – mostly because they required a more individualized approach: one of the reasons for our predominating educational paradigm is that it can be seen to function well as a kind of “crowd control” for delivering education as a mass consumer product.
From what I saw, while there was a lot of energy for creating a different model when they started out, there was definitely a trend towards becoming more like a traditional school as time went on.
I will say, though, that to the extent that the “Essential” schools really put the core principles into practice… I would guess that graduates would do well, as they would come to know themselves better at learners. As I alluded to before, many of the “best” students had a lot of trouble with the principles of an “Essential School” because they were used to a system (in their earlier educational experiences) where they were considered very successful and where they were rewarded for waiting to be told what to do and then following instructions well. When it was turned around a bit, and when they were told that they were going to have to make some of their own decisions as an active participant in structuring their learning process, they often resisted. Prioritizing different skills can upset the apple cart a bit, not the least because other students that they had considered beneath them surfaced with a skill set that fit better with the new environment. I have little doubt, however, that many of them were nonetheless strengthened in their functionality as lifelong learners. (not to say that there isn’t always a point of diminishing returns if you’re trying to use an educational paradigm that students don’t buy into – that whole thing about intrinsic motivation again).
Ledite –
==> “Isn’t it remarkable how strong beliefs and strong evidence can have such weak correlations.”
Heh. I wonder whether more often than not, they are inversely correlated?
Joshua,
That’s fascinating. It makes sense when you think about it; I guess people do what’s worked for them in the past, it’s what they know. Even when explicitly trying to change their practices and behaviors. This is probably a good thing to remember and watch out for in other areas in life; it’s hard for people to change, and they tend to do what they’ve always done. The bit about putting the principles into actual practice creating blow-back also makes sense to me, doing fundamental things differently can be disturbing and frightening. Is this right? Who the heck knows?!? Not to overlook your other points, I agree that it is resource intensive to individually teach kids. Absolutely.
Have you read any of Ted Sizer’s ‘Horace’ books and would you recommend them? I’m halfway convinced to pick up a used copy of ‘Horace’s Compromise’ on Amazon.
Joshua
I strongly suspect the level of resources required for different pedigogical methods becomes a very an important issue when a method is put in practice.
When I was in 6th grade, the local school system decided to build a middle school where all the students were going to cover material in a self-paced system. The architecture was more open to facilitate all this “self-paced openness”. The difficulty was the teacher student ratio wasn’t doubled or tripled over the previous level. The new school didn’t have a batch of “teachers assistants” etc.
I was lucky my side of town went to the other middle school that stuck to the ‘old fashioned’ method. The new fangled school was soon perceived as a disaster. The project was given up. I think eventually, the installed walls and barriers of some types.
I do think self pacing can work. It works for homeschool kids. But if implemented in a public school, it requires a lower student teacher ratio, especially if an entire middle school of 800 students is suddenly transitioned from the previous “teacher gives a lesson to 20 kids” system. Most of those 800 students will not suddenly transform into self-teaching student units in August when classes start. Beyond that: they have so many other students to play with– a factor not present in home schooling.
Hey Mark –
It’s kind of funny, but although I taught at the school I never read the books. That’s kind of for two reasons. The first is that by working at the school, I would constantly hear references to the philosophy/pedagogy. I didn’t need to read the books to find out about the ideas the books presented. (For example, “Depth rather than Breadth was a kind of mantra at the school). The 2nd is because from everything that I heard, I was already quite familiar with the principles being espoused from my previous studies in pedagogy, developmental psychology, educational psychology, and epistemology – and my previous work in trying to walk the line between educational theory and practice.
But why let not having read the books get in the way of forming an opinion as to whether you should read them? 🙂 I would say that you should read at least Horace’s Compromise; from what I’ve seen, you’ve already intuited a lot of the key principles (I mean, really, I consider them to be pretty much basic common sense about how a lot of people learn best), but I would imagine that it would be interesting for you to see them laid out in an organized and comprehensive framework.
If you do read one of them, find me somewhere on the Interwebs and let me know what you think/criticisms you might offer.
Thanks Joshua, you bet.
I appreciate (but have come to expect) the honesty of your response BTW.
Lucia –
==> “I think eventually, the installed walls and barriers of some types.”
The problems that crop up with implementing an “open classroom” concept is a classic example of the complicated nature of walking the line between educational theory and practice.
Of course, the problem is bigger than just with middle schools. IIRC, it’s the architecture (fine arts?) building at Harvard that was a great example… It was built so as to reinforce and openness to enhance collaboration and interaction among students…but what wound up happening is that the students modified the build environment so as to create “cubbies” where they could be walled off (distracting sounds was one big factor but far from the only one)…
FWIW, I don’t think that it’s so much that a more individualized educational paradigm requires more adult supervision, but that a poorly designed program that tries to individualize instruction with kids that aren’t prepared for a different paradigm, and with teachers that haven’t developed the skill set to individualize instruction, doesn’t wind up looking very good. Comparing outcomes to the real outcomes of the more traditional paradigm doesn’t really take place in such a situation because in addition to not living up to unrealistic expectations, it also just feels really unfamiliar (as Mark spoke of), and so it’s easy to determine that the results are a failure w/o really examining the question empirically. (Such an examination would require the very difficult task of defining carefully, and agreeing upon the outcome measures that we’re striving for – e.g., students who are good at doing what they’re told to do, or students who are good at learning something new because they’re intrinsically motivated to do so, or some combination thereof).
It is possible to design a “didactic environment” that facilitates more individual “natural” learning (as Armstrong might describe it)…of the sort that you might see in a Montessori classroom (a woman who was way ahead of her time in her understanding of pedagogy, developmental psychology, and epistemology. It’s kind of hilarious to read that paper I linked by Armstrong if you are familiar with Montessori’s theories, and Piaget’s to some extent also, because what he writes is pretty much a page out of their books).
But creating such an environment is far fromm *easy* or obvious…in addition to which in the end, I think that there are some constraints that do, indeed, require some greater degree of teacher/student interaction. (Sizer suggested that you couldn’t have a successful high school if any teacher was responsible for working with more than about 50 students or so; otherwise how could a teacher really understand what makes a student tick?). But I don’t think that the increased resource demands is really so much the crucial factor (not to say it isn’t important) so much as the deceptively radical nature of what it would mean to increase the amount of individualization in our educational practice.
At any rate, one key is to look at the founding principles of design in the predominating educational paradigm – which was, to a large degree, to create a passive workforce that would be productive within a top-down, industrial work environment. Unfortunately, such a design became, to a large extent, a sort of social sorting mechanism that perpetuates the existing social class structure. If you look at our educational system as a kind of black box where you look at the input and you look at the output, it isn’t surprising to see that “success” in that system correlates so strongly with SES status.
OK. Go ahead and tell me *that* wasn’t a soap box rant!
I was thinking of the Graduate School of Design building, Gund Hall.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1972/10/12/gund-hall-an-evaluation-pbabfter-three/
Joshua,
Yes, that was getting into the soapbox-rant region.
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At risk of provoking contention after this love-fest, I observe that even with SES accounted for (say, kids in the same family) there are big differences in educational outcome which seem, well, related to how smart the student is, as well as the expectations they perceive.
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My personal background is relatively low middle class. But within my family, doing your best in school was clearly expected, and that message was, I suspect, more important than SES.
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As an employer, the very last thing I want is a passive worker. I want employees who are aware, competent, and able to work productively, absent “top down” direction. Whatever you imagine about what employers want, you would be prudent to actually ask employers what they want. I suspect you will find the answer is fairly consistent: smart, competent, honest, responsible and creative. Nobody is looking to employ a drone.
I think individualized education does require more ‘teachers hours per student’. I’m leery about calling this “supervision” because ‘supervision’ tends to sound a bit like “babysitting”.
The fact is, at some point, individual students get stuck. While it’s useful to let or force them to try to work through sticking points, efficient use of times means that at some point the teacher/coach/whatever word you want to use needs to either show how to get past the sticking point. This might mean pointing the self learner to an resource that is appropriate right now or showing the learner how to do something so, having failed to be Newton and develop calculus or mechanics on their own, they can manage to start applying the principles at much earlier age than Newton himself did.
If no one is available to help the frustrated student through sticking points in some reasonable time frame…. well…spit balls are fun to make and spit. And my sense is, on the balance, a higher teacher/student proportion tends to be required than in traditional systems.
But oddly, in the lower levels (gradeschool/middle school) the amount of training required of these adults in relatively low. The material the students are mastering is not complex. Even if someone wants ‘depth’, and the job might be to point them to suitable material at the right time.
Could I be wrong? Of course.
But if I am correct– and I tend to believe I am, this means is that if self-paced learning is to be remotely efficient in measured in terms of student learning and student hours, someone appropriate need to be available to help at the right time. If the teacher/student ratio is too low, no one will be available at the right tiem.
The lecture method or any teacher led method has disadvantages, but students who want to learn are at least presented material in an order that permits them to learn if they follow along. Teachers may need to repeat similar lessons over time– but they don’t have to have a zillions options available at any and all times to dovetail with somewhat unpredictable need of any 1 of 20 or so students.
And despite the criticisms by many, it’s clear that some of the criticism of “teacher centered learning” are overblown. This method has worked at least to some extent for a long time. Most people recognize that over 40 population in the US is not entirely populated by people who have failed to learn to read, failed to learn math, have zero motivation to continue learning, fail to grasp concepts and so on. The method works to some extent. And it can be very time effective relative to some other methods.
Better methods might exist. In fact I’m sure they do. Encouraging kids to self pace might work. But I strongly suspect 100% self-paced requires a low student/teacher ratio– though some of the teachers might be what is called “assistants”.
Kenneth,
The situation in Japan is unusual. Most Japanese government debt is now owned by the Bank of Japan. I’m not sure anything like this, certainly not on this scale, has ever happened.
Japan is following the lead of the US as is the EU. ProportionallyJapan has a lot more debt to purchase. The great and unwarranted fear of deflation makes central banks take extreme measures. They are so certain their policies will work that when they do not the answer is more of the same.
Japan is not following anyone’s lead, they are the leader and have been doing it longer. As of 2012, their debt to GDP ratio at 196% was worse than Greece at 164% and much worse than the US at 96% as of 2013. What’s odd, though, is that the BOJ now owns almost all of that debt. The US Fed doesn’t own anywhere near as large a fraction of US debt, something like $2.5E12 of $18.1E12 total. Europe is considering trying to follow Japan. They have a long way to go.
Japan seems to want the yen to be closer to 200/$ from the value of ~80/$ it was 2012. The current exchange rate is ~125/$, so they’re about half way there.
DeWitt,
I think the desire for a depreciated currency in Japan is driven by the dependence of the Japanese economy on exports. At 80-90 Yen per dollar their exports are much too expensive. European exporters are not unhappy about the 25% drop in the Euro either. These currency swings have impacted US exporters negatively; the advantage of our historically lower costs for energy, petrochemicals and labor have been largely eliminated by the recent appreciation of the Dollar.
SteveF,
Exactly. It’s a currency war, the new form of mercantilism. Instead of applying tariffs to restrict imports, you devalue your currency. Like most wars, currency wars never end well.
DeWitt, I was referring to Quantitative Easing with the US taking the lead. However on further review I found that Japan had used that approach back in 2001. As Bernanke has related in acacdemic publications these debt purchases by central banks are used to combat price deflation and to produce price inflation. Bernanke’s reference to helicopter drops of money in order to produce price inflation while obviously not serious does show a central banker’s fear of price deflation.
Overall in my view the amount of price inflation that central bankers thought this easing would produce (and boost the economy) has not occurred. It is the velocity term in money price equation that is evidently failing these bankers.
Now that the US is reducing the easing and the EU and Japan are easing, the dollar will appreciate and help US imports and hurt US exports. When and if the US raises rates substantially and the EU and Japan continue easing this effect will increase.
Kenneth,
“Overall in my view the amount of price inflation that central bankers thought this easing would produce (and boost the economy) has not occurred. It is the velocity term in money price equation that is evidently failing these bankers.”
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That and other important factors, including the disconnect between the theoretically available money at low interest rates and what is actually available for consumers and small businesses. Pressured by the Fed and bank regulators after the catastrophe in 2008, banks have tightened lending rules and rates to the point that people often either don’t qualify, or just walk away because of unfavorable loan conditions and rates. The difference from pre-2008 seems to me huge. It doesn’t appear to matter what your credit history is or your net worth, the offered loans are not a good deal. The only exception looks like an LOC secured by a residence with lots of equity; essentially a zero-risk loan for the bank.
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IMO, the banks are simply failing to do their primary job: accurately evaluate and price risk….. everyone isn’t a terrible credit risk, but that appears to be how the banks are acting.
Kenneth,
An injection of liquidity was required for the crisis in 2008. But further injections to stimulate the economy didn’t work for Japan in 2001, so why does anyone think they would work for anyone else now? I’m not sure they really do. As I said, competitive devaluation is mercantilism in a different form.
The thing is, though, exports only get you so far. Eventually you have to transition to a service economy. China is at that stage now. Currency devaluation punishes the consumer.
Of course, one can argue that the crisis in 2008 was the result of a bubble bursting that had been created by easy money earlier.
SteveF,
At extremely low interest rates, everyone is a credit risk. One failed loan would wipe out the profit from a very large number of good loans. Which illustrates the fallacy that extremely low interest rates are good for the economy. Banks are only going to go for sure things: well secured loans or government securities.
That’s a cogent point you make, DeWitt, in post #138140.
Ed Yardeni argues that easy money can be DEflationary if it stimulates excess production over consumption.
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Seems also as if the devaluations in the developed economies mean eventually the replacement by faster growing nations.
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Or does the debt burden and economic malaise mean social breakdowns? civil wars?
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Kyle Bass thought the end would have already happened for Japan, but he also calls it ( a borrowed term ) the end of a debt ‘super-cycle’, which would end unpredictably.
DeWitt,
Banks and lenders do not exactly make money on interest rates. They make money on the margin between what money can be borrowed for and what it can be lent for.
That margin actually changes, per class of risk, very little.
And in many ways, since the central banks are lending money to bankers at very low rates, the banker margins are actually wider. especially as a percentage of the over all gross rate. Example:
Federal Reserve Prime Rate for banks is, say, 0.0025% to leading banks.
Their prime rate might be 2.5%. 2.5% is 10X their cost of Fed funds.
In a high interest market, where Fed Prime Rate would be 9.5%, the lender rate to customers might be 12%. Basically the same margin, but a much smaller margin in terms of total cost of funds.
The basic rule is “The House Always Wins”.
hunter,
Yes, but look at it from the point of view of the borrower. 2.5% looks higher compared to near zero than 12%, or 11.5% compared to 9%. And I don’t think that Dodd-Frank is helping either.
The banks are looking for higher interest rates to improve profits.
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-11-14/2014-outlook-banks-want-higher-interest-rates
Unintended consequences of artificially low interest rates:
Corporations can and have borrowed at these low rates to buy back stock and increase values.
Wealthier and more sophisticated investers have been able to reap more wealth from the stock market bubble created by the Federal Reserve while the less sophisticated and less wealthy have been earning little with fixed incomes.
Many of the retired and near retired who traditionally use fixed income returns for a goodly portion of their income have suffered – and I would guess that most do not even know the source of their problem and have not heard the apologies made by the Federal Reserve who claim it is for the better in the long run which has some irony for those who might not have a long run.
This link is more current on interest rate increases and bank profits and stock values.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/how-to-trade-bank-stocks-as-fed-rates-rise.html.
“Accountability aside, let’s assume for the moment that we don’t want government bureaucracy setting education standards. So who would set those choices, and carefully would they choose them, and how much choice would they leave us”
This isn’t so hard. School boards. Decisions should be made by people as close to the situation as possible. Local school boards have been mostly doing a good job since before the Little House on the Prairie times – the kids at that time got a remarkably good education, especially given that half of them had to be absent for harvest and such. Mostly better than we’re doing today by many measurements.
Decisions should be made by people that the community knows, and whom they can fire or tar and feather if need be.
There is no obvious reason why the federal government, or even state governments, need to be involved in local education, aside from – maybe sometimes – taking taxes from rich areas to help poorer areas educate. There is no obvious reason to think that they would do a better job than a local school board, and plenty of evidence from experience that they don’t. They are no wiser than local people, even if they think so.
MikeR
I’m not convinced this is true. I’ve looked at history New York regents tests for physics. They were different in the past– mostly because multiple choice became so economical. But they weren’t harder than they are now. Some aspects were in some ways easier. One from around 1930s just asked you who was credited with certain discoveries. Either one knows or doesn’t know. But in someways, that sort of question was a ‘gimme’ for students who didn’t really understand physics.
Some aspects of the test would be harder for students today. But that’s merely that questions were asked in words without giving sketches in cases where we might give sketches these days. Sketches are cheap now, so there is no need for students to develop the skill of recognizing what the person is describing with words. But the problems themselves were then often easier (less trig and so on.)
Also: Honors students around here are taking calculus junior and senior year. They are also taking AP physics, chemistry and so on. Many in senior year take all AP classes. That was not the case when I was in high school. Not by a long shot. The classes weren’t even oferred.
It’s certainly the case that adults often think they learned all the important stuff and are upset their kids might seem weak in those things. But my sense is parents don’t notice any problem when the parents don’t know something because they never learned it. They get very upset if they think they knew something at an early age and think their kids don’t get it.
Possibly one reason people perceive students get a lesser education is a larger proportion go to college. So people think “many who go to college aren’t prepared for college” and then also note “that wasn’t the case in the past” and come to the wrong conclusion about education. The more correct one might be: In the past, most of these people would have taken blue collar jobs in a factory and never gone to college.
OT:
I have this day stared into the face of heck and madness and come away daunted and dismayed.
If there is a God and afterlife, and if I am to be punished for my wickedness in life, I have come to understand that there will be a stripped set screw involved with my eternal torment.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here…
Average IQ scores have been increasing significantly over the past century and for most nations.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/13/american-iqs-in-1900-averaged-67-points
I agree with Lucia that the best students at least take higher level math and science courses in high school.
Kenneth,
No doubt an enriched intellectual environment makes people more capable at solving problems in an absolute sense. But I don’t think humanity has undergone a dramatic increase in native intellectual ability over a span of a few generations, and it makes little sense to me to compare reasoning capacity from a century ago to today’s; that’s apples with oranges… or may with bananas. The re-norming of IQ tests to account for general influences of environment and technology seems to me perfectly reasonable.
.
A more interesting question, and one I have not seen answered, is if there has been a significant change in the spread across the population (or if you prefer, the standard deviation of normed test scores). My guess is that the spread remains comparable over the past hundred years… people just don’t evolve that fast.
IRT to test scores, part of the answer is very likely that more people are getting more exposure to test taking and developing better test taking skills. People learn to do the things that get them rewards, as they have since who knows when.
hunter
Plausible. Also, it may be that people get more exposure to the types of things that are tested on IQ tests.
I don’t know exactly what’s emphasized, but suppose, for example being able to understand ‘abstraction’ or ‘understanding abstract comcepts’ is important. Well… kids today will be exposed to maps which require understanding that the map is a representation of some physical layout. Nowadays most kids will have seen a map, likely seen people using maps, and had someone explain them. In the 1800s, many kids might not have. So the latter would have had little practice in this skill. When tested, even those who ‘got’ the concept might take a more time to do it– or get frustrated and give a wrong answer before sorting it out and getting it right.
In the meantime, kids in the 1800s, might have practiced other mental skills that are less tested (and possibly less testable) on an IQ test.
The fact is, it is very difficult to measure actual intelligence in a fair way and more so as technology and society changes. I’m sure it varies from person to person, and IQ tests can detect real differences. But they are also almost certainly imperfect.
SteveF,
I wouldn’t be surprised if the measured spread of raw scores on IQ tests increased. It’s possible who got tested changed. Binet created his test in the 1900s. While use may have been widespread in France (where the work was funded so they could do mass screening), it’s possible tests were only administered to a subset of kids in the US for at least some time.
Perhaps tests would tend to be admistered to kids of people who knew the test existed and wanted their kids tested. That could introduce a bias both in the mean and the spread.
I would think that this discussion should include looking at analyses of the performance of voucher schools versus public schools. Government subsidies of private activities often carry the same weaknesses of the government run activity or new unintended ones.
Public schools have the obvious weaknesses in not allowing choice of schools and a natural tendency to orient the system to the average student. It also suffers from the same malady of states where public workers are unionized and politicians willingly use taxpayer money to buy their votes at election time. This relationship creates a situation where union efforts to maintain high teacher employment and pay become the foremost issues and ones to which the politicians submit.
How much voucher schools in reality overcome these weaknesses might come from a detailed analysis. I have always suspected that there might well be a limiting factor not acknowledge that affects educational results and creates a plateau that cannot be readily lifted no matter the resorces expended.
I am well aware that politicians are not about to seriously address a limitation like family and parents.
Kenneth,
I’m not really concerned about what politicians address.
They can. But I don’t think we can achieve universal access to education for children without government involvement. Some (in fact most) kids from low income families would have no education if their education was not funded by the public purse. In my view, the question is what sort of thing the public purse ought to pay for, and how.
For example: It sounds like SteveF’s parents were of quite limited financial means. What level of education would SteveF have if there had been zero access to a public school, charter school and so on and they’d had to pay every penny out of their pockets? Would charity have swooped in? If so, might that charity not have possibly been one with a very strong social POV? I don’t know the answer to these, but it seems to me that on average, outcomes for kids of that sort would be unappealing.
I know my mother-in-law would have gotten no education w/o public support for kids education. How do I know? During the depression when they didn’t have money to pay tuition, the RC school kicked her and her brother out. The pair were in 3rd & 5th grade. They then went to public school.
No charitable person came along to pay their bills.
If someone thinks the government shouldn’t fund elementary or high school education at all, I think they should state that straight out. I currently disagree with that notion, but if an argument can be made for how that would work, I’d be happy to hear it stated directly.
When there is a consensus that no alternative to a failing government program exists we are much more willing to accept mediocrity.
My point in my previous post was that we need to compare outcomes of voucher versus public schools. I have read about studies showing that there is little to no differences found in a number of analyses.
“I’ve looked at history New York regents tests for physics. They were different in the past– mostly because multiple choice became so economical. But they weren’t harder than they are now.” To my mind, this is probably addressing the wrong side of the issue. What percentage of kids came out of school unable to read? What percentage couldn’t multiply? Didn’t know anything about Thomas Jefferson?
I grew up in California in a day when our public schools were among the best in the nation. (I went to one and learned calculus senior year, about forty years ago.) What I hear now is that California spends a lot more per student than they did in my day, with far worse results.
I’m still waiting to hear a logical argument why state and federal governments need to have a role in local education. What cannot be done on the local level? Obviously there may be special exceptions, but why should those exceptions drive the whole system?
As others have said, we spend more than $10,000 per elementary student nationwide. That’s $300,000 for a class of 30. Just think about that class of 30 and tell me how you’re going to spend all that money, counting everything. It just can’t be done locally; you can’t even come close.
MikeR,
I looked at those tests for reasons having nothing to do with this blog post and did so a while back. So I am bringing it up because it’s the one I happened to look at and it happens to be a test that has been given for about a century.
I don’t know the answers to your other questions. If you know how many didn’t know how to multiply or read, that might be useful. But also, it would be useful to compare graduation rates. If the standard was for ‘special needs’ and/or unmotivated or low intelligence to simply not continue in school, while the now continue, comparing the average who had not acquired basic skills at high school graduation needs to be done cautiously.
That’s a good question. But has anyone here said they need to have any sort of major role? I’ve said we need some tax payer support– which does mean government. But government involvement doesn’t necessarily mean “federal”. I tend to support more local control. I don’t have anything against the feds or states creating tests that locals can chose to use or not depending on whether those tests are useful to the local teachers, students and so on. Locals– and school boards could decide what metrics to use to figure out if a school is adequate.
But I do favor districts and the state organizing things so parents have some say and so that there is some competition for students and funds among schools.
With benefits, I suspect the teacher is about $75K of that. There’s the building. Books — for elementary should be less than $200 per kid as these can largely be reused– so $6K. My 2-3rd grade class had access to a piano– I don’t recall if it was rolled in. There was some audio visual material. And it’s nice for a school to have a library and some other facilities. There’s going to be some janitorial.
Not sure where that much goes– but things do cost money.
FWIW, when I was in 2nd-3rd, my elementary classes were 20 kids, and I suspect at the elementary level 20 is better than 30. Later on, not so sure.
Here is a link to a reasonable and realistic argument for abolishing the public school system.
https://mises.org/library/enterprising-education-doing-away-public-school-system
OK. A couple of more links then I’ll take a break and let you folks get on with your discussions with non-boring people:
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/03/instead_of_a_war_on_teachers_how_about_one_on_poverty/
and from a link in that article:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/firing-linethe-grand-coalition-against-teachers
FWIW – I’m agnostic on a lot of this stuff. I like reading takes from different perspectives – not in the least from people whose perspectives I don’t agree with. I don’t always find it particularly interesting to discuss the material, however, with people who don’t seem to me to be engaging in good faith or who mistakenly assume/argue that I’m engaging in poor faith. Sometimes I go for it, and sometimes I find it to be too much of an energy drain.
OK – I lied. After reading Kennith’s comments…
One more link:
http://bostonreview.net/us/snyder-public-private-charter-schools-demographics-incentives-markets
Joshua,
Thanks for telling us you are agnostic. As all your links about charter schools are to poorly reasoned, non-substantive opinion pieces that criticize charter schools, one might have easily jumped to the conclusion you aren’t agnostic.
But evidently you prefer providing links to only one perspective.
If you think the content the numerous links you post isn’t worth discussing, why link then? You don’t have to link to articles you think uninteresting and which, in fact, turn out to be uninteresting and uninformative. I should think you should spare yourself the trouble of hunting down so many axe-to-grind non-substantive opinions pieces which would have the double benefit of sparing us!
You aren’t banned (as evidently you have been at Curry’s blog). But I do hope you develop better conversational skills. But perhaps your 6th grade teacher wasn’t skilled enough to help you develop your conversational skills. Pity. Maybe you could have benefited from a charter school. Or not.
SteveF:
People don’t evolve that quickly, but there does appear to be a direct link between nutrition and IQ. And there’s no question that children in the lower income brackets have more access to good nutrition these days than in same bracket 100 years ago.
Carrick,
Thanks. We are all richer now than 100 years ago, of course. If improving nutrition is a key issue, then I would guess that increasing average wealth would narrow test scores. Do you know if that article finds that is the case?
Carrick,
I found and read the article. As far as I can tell, neither they nor their references address how/if the distribution of test scores has changed over time; they discuss only changes in non-normalized mean scores.
.
BTW, I found the “20,000 years ago Europeans were as smart as people today based on height and head size” argument nothing but wild speculation…. and beyond silly. Hummm…. 20,000 years is (conservatively), 800 generations. Might there have been selective pressure to be smarter over those 800 generations? I have to believe there was.
SteveF,
It’s possible for IQ to evolve. It’s highly heritable– or at least it is so if one is of high socioeconomic level
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/ses-and-iq-heritability/
In contrast, IQ is less heritable if one is poor. This is probably because no matter genes you inherent, if you are poor, malnourished or so on, you don’t develop your potential. In contrast, the rich get enough food– so genes become a remaining factor.
Given the tradeoff between genetic factors the correlate with being able to get enough food and water (which could include height, strength, stamina, endurance, agility and so on) and factors that corelate with potential to have a high IQ provided you get enough nutrition and so on, IQ could evolve, but I don’t know how fast.
Anyway, the theory is it did evolve relative to other primates. But that’s more than 20,000 years worth of evolution and the may not only have been pressure but a bottle neck. Bottlenecks matter a lot.
Neither charter nor voucher schools are actually private schools nor represent a market approach. Those entities are government subsidized and the customers are not directly paying for services.
Also if there is no significant difference in performance of these schools then one could make a stronger case for the influence of family and parents and perhaps even neighborhood.
Perhaps we could discuss whether school attendance should be compulsory.
Kenneth,
I’m pretty sure vouchers are given to parents to use at schools of their choice. They can use them to send the kids to a private school. The school is not run by the government.
They are sort of like food stamps but for schools. There may be some requirements the schools be accredited in some way– but that’s not being run by the government.
It’s not in Illinois. Unless you count home schooling.
Lucia,
That is one study, which contradicts other studies, and it was some time ago (2003).
Perhaps more relevant is:http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v20/n1/pdf/mp2014105a.pdf
Yes, poor nutrition certainly can diminish intelligence, but I haven’t seen much data which suggests big differences in nutrition in most developed countries.
SteveF–
The issue discussed in the Khan’s post is that most studies have been done with people who are of middle or higher socioeconomic status in developed countries. In those studies, IQ is very heritable as it shows you your article.
Evidently, studies that have focused on specifically groups of people with lower incomes and poorer countries countries find low heritability. I’ll have to read your article in more depth to see if there is any contradiction– but it seems everyone agrees that intelligence is very heritable in developed countries for people who are middle class or higher.
We were discussing evolution over 20,000 years. I suspect there were periods when lack of nutrition affected evolution during that span.
Lucia –
==> “As all your links about charter schools are to poorly reasoned, non-substantive opinion pieces that criticize charter schools, one might have easily jumped to the conclusion you aren’t agnostic.
So once again, (as I have in the past) I have the good fortune to have you imply that you know that I think better than I.
You know, when I said that the research I’d seen returned no greater advantage to charters than TPSs, on average, and you asked that “if” I had read empirical research could I provide some links…and I took that to imply that I was lying….Mark said that he hadn’t seen you engage in poor faith and you explained that I misread your intent. I wasn’t exactly convinced but I thought that certainly I could have misread you. I stuck with that even though you condescended to say that my misunderstanding was understandable because “Often, at blogs, asking for citations is meant to communicate “I don’t believe youâ€.” when it wasn’t the mere act of asking for citations that I interpreted in bad faith, it was your rhetoric of after my saying that I had read the material you asked me for citiations in the form of “if> you have read empirical research.
But now we get back to the same kind of rhetoric from you, so I guess that my original interpretation was, indeed, correct.
——————-
==> “As all your links about charter schools are to poorly reasoned, non-substantive opinion pieces that criticize charter schools,”
Really? All of them? The Rand link, for example? How about the one that spoke of the implications of lack of response from CREDO critics to the most recent study, and which offered substantive criticism of how CREDO controlled for variables (at least in Newark)?
==> “one might have easily jumped to the conclusion you aren’t agnostic.”
Yes, one might have. Of course, to do so would mean ignoring other things that I said, like that the issue with charters (and vouchers) is extremely complicated and overlayed with ideological battling.
==> “But evidently you prefer providing links to only one perspective.”
I provided links to look at the issue from perspectives different than what people here might be ordinarily examine. I agree with some of the material in those links and disagree with some of it. I think some of the arguments raised are good and important, and some of them are poor or unimportant. People can either read the material or not and think whatever they will about the material.
==> “If you think the content the numerous links you post isn’t worth discussing, why link then? ”
It isn’t that I think that the material isn’t worth discussing. I think it isn’t (always) worth discussing with people who don’t engage with me in good faith – such as people who imply that I’m lying when I say things or that they know what I believe better than I know what I believe. I get nothing meaningful out of such exchanges, except sometimes some yucks and sometime a completely worthless pursuit of the kind of obsessiveness that is framed in that cartoon I posted for Mark. I’m not at all sure what that 2nd part is about…but it is what it is.
==> “You don’t have to link to articles you think uninteresting and which, in fact, turn out to be uninteresting and uninformative.”
I don’t think that the articles I linked are uninteresting. Nor to I thnk that they are uninformative. I just don’t see any value in discussing them with people who react to me as you do, who as far as I can tell, seek to pigeon hole me into having beliefs that I don’t have.
==> “I should think you should spare yourself the trouble of hunting down so many axe-to-grind non-substantive opinions pieces which would have the double benefit of sparing us!”
I find value in reading those articles, even though I variably agree and disagree with various elements. It’s the same as with the NYT article that you seem to have liked. I agree with some of it and disagree with other aspects. I don’t find it useful to only read articles where I agree with everything contained in them.
==> ” But I do hope you develop better conversational skills.”
I doubt that there will be any significant evolution in my “conversational skills.” I’m sorry that they don’t meet your standards, but I can live with that.
==> “But perhaps your 6th grade teacher wasn’t skilled enough to help you develop your conversational skills. ”
Yes, that’s probably what it was. If I had a better 6th grade teacher, I would have developed the conversational skills needed to imply that people are lying, or to make creative, juvenile insults like ones implying that others’ conversational skills are at an elementary school level.
==> “Pity. Maybe you could have benefited from a charter school. Or not.”
Perhaps you might read again the article that discusses what measure of development can be attributed to in-classroom experiences relative to experiences outside of the classroom. My guess is that my poor conversational skills are not the fault of my 6th grade teacher so much as my experiences outside the classroom. So maybe next time, you can demonstrate your excellent conversational skills by finding fault with my parents for my poor conversational skills.
Joshua
What are you trying communicate with “you know I think better than I” ?
As I told you before: you jumped to the wrong conclusion.
You seem to be telling me you jumped to a conclusion about what people here must think and you selected a one sided view for that reason based on your preconception of what people think. And when doing so, you supplied links to poorly reasoned opinion pieces.
(Naturally, the response is to read them and criticize them for being poorly reasoned substance free opinion pieces. Which. They. Are.)
No one has implied your lying. I told you the impression one would develop from the links you posted. As you seem to be reluctant to tell people what you believe, few would have any other way to guess what you think. That’s why I thanked you for telling us– it saves us from jumping to the wrong conclusion.
It’s dinner time. I’m not going to get into it anymore. It seems to me you want to see bad faith. So be it.
Joshua
What are you trying communicate with “you know I think better than I” ?
As I told you before: you jumped to the wrong conclusion.
You seem to be telling me you jumped to a conclusion about what people here must think and you selected a one sided view for that reason based on your preconception of what people think. And when doing so, you supplied links to poorly reasoned opinion pieces.
(Naturally, the response is to read them and criticize them for being poorly reasoned substance free opinion pieces. Which. They. Are.)
No one has implied your lying. I told you the impression one would develop from the links you posted. As you seem to be reluctant to tell people what you believe, few would have any other way to guess what you think. That’s why I thanked you for telling us– it saves us from jumping to the wrong conclusion.
Thanks for telling me your theory.
It’s dinner time. I’m not going to get into it anymore. It seems to me you want to see bad faith. (Others: does he frequently see it other places? I’m really not familiar with him until he appeared on this and the other recent thread.). I think most who look at your very first comments on this thread would note that your initial volleys were to arrive and post comments whose tone reads condescing. Yet, the locals de-escalated.
You don’t like it around here? Fine. Find some other place to drop first drop links, then suggest you don’t think it’s worth discussing the links you drop, then tell people you think the articles are of value. I know I can live without your oddball behavior. I doubt anyone is going to beg you to come back. Anyway, they can follow you to where ever it is you hang out. Not a problem for me.
==> “You seem to be telling me you jumped to a conclusion about what people here must think…”
See what I mean about pigeon-holing.
Here’s what I said…“I provided links to look at the issue from perspectives different than what people here might be ordinarily examine.”
Might. Not must.
Joshua,
Not sure what point you think you are making.
You acted on a theory about what people think and provided links based on that theory. I don’t see how you thinking they only “might” think those things rather than must matters. Either way, you decided to provide links based on the theory they those were their thoughts– as opposed to other things. Meanwhile you evidently elected to provided no links you would consider useful had they had other thoughts.
I don’t know if you are accusing me of pigeon holing you. But according to your explanation of your motives, with respect to your actions toward them were based on the conclusion they had those thoughts. As far as I’m concerned: since your actions were based on that assumption, you did jump to a conclusion as conclusions can involve actions just as much as then can involve thoughts.
Lucia,
.
I’ve had what I consider to be good conversations with Joshua where there was no issue of bad faith. This said, I go to what I consider to be substantial efforts to … mm .. avoid opportunities to give offense or grounds for misunderstanding or hostility*. I find value in being able to talk with Joshua specifically because I think his viewpoints are substantially different from mine, so the extra effort is worth it to me. It certainly needn’t be worth it to everyone. But besides, I enjoy talking with him.
.
Sort of verbose, but this is why I try to de-escalate issues with Joshua. Mostly.
.
My opinion (and I’m not confident of it) is that Joshua expects bad faith from ‘skeptic’ blogs, much as I’d expect bad faith over at warmist blogs. Still, I give him credit for trying to come over and communicate where I do not.
.
~shrug~
[*edit: I didn’t adhere to this in this thread, but I was overridden by a problem of personal conscience. I usually try to avoid giving offense.]
==> “I told you the impression one would develop from the links you posted. ”
Believe it or not, Lucia, I don’t need you to tell me what the impression that “one” would develop. You see, people can develop whatever impressions they’d like. IMO, a lot of it depends on whether they’re reading in good faith or not.
==> “As you seem to be reluctant to tell people what you believe, …”
Funny. First, if you want to know what I believe, you might consider asking. Second, I freakin’ told you what I believed (in part), and you implied that you know better than I, and that it isn’t what I actually believe (in particular the part where I said I’m agnostic – you just ignored the other comments that made, quite a few in fact, where I stated what my beliefs were).
==> “few would have any other way to guess what you think. ”
You don’t have to guess. You could ask. Or you could read what I said. Or you could not imply that what I’ve said about my beliefs aren’t actually what I belief. If you want to guess, that’s fine. It’s pretty much what I’ve come to expect so it isn’t the least surprising when it happens.
==> ” That’s why I thanked you for telling us– it saves us from jumping to the wrong conclusion”
Ok. I’m sorry. I thought there was an element of sarcasm. I didn’t realize that you were doing me the service of explaining to me what people might have thought. I suppose it’s like when you did the favor of ignoring my comment about why I though that your rhetoric suggested bad faith, and instead mischaracterized the situation (as one where all that happened was that you asked for citations – and then ignored/implied bad faith when I responded to your request for citations).
==> “You don’t like it around here? Fine.”
I like it just fine. It is what it is. Not remotely unusual in any way that I can tell. Not anything that i didn’t expect (from having interacted in the past with you and with many of the regulars here).
I mostly started commenting because I enjoy exchanging views with Mark – because in my experience, unlike most other “skeptics” I encounter, I (and amazingly despite his opinion that I’m a Poopyhead) he exchanges views in good faith with me (there are some other exceptions). Hmmm. After all of this…I wonder if that will change.
Anyway, I find discussing views about education, with people who exchange in good faith, interesting and worthwhile. What I don’t find particularly worthwhile is exchanging views with people on the topic who can’t get past their ideological warfare on the subject.
==> “Find some other place to drop first drop links, then suggest you don’t think it’s worth discussing the links you drop,”
You can repeat that, even though it isn’t what I said. It isn’t that I’m not interested in discussing the material. It’s that I’m not interested in discussing it with people who don’t exchange with me in good faith.
==> “I know I can live without your oddball behavior.”
Thanks for informing me of that. Because I had formed the impression that my “oddball,” 6th grade behavior was indispensable to your life
==> “I doubt anyone is going to beg you to come back. ”
Far from it. My guess is that much more likely would be that they’d lobby for you to ban me or put me in moderation. It is what it is.
==> “Anyway, they can follow you to where ever it is you hang out.”
I’m sure that they will be relieved that you’ve given them permission to do so.
Joshua
I didn’t say you need me to tell you anything. I get to tell you my view whether you “need” it or not.
Beyond that: Stuff and nonesense. If you post numerous links all with the same POV and never expressing anything to the contrary, people of will develop an impression of those views. This has nothing to do with “bad faith”.
Not responding to the rest of your nonesense.
Thanks for piping in, Mark –
I will say again that despite our many differences on a variety of issues, you have never displayed bad faith in our exchanges. I like to hope that I’ve consistently accorded you the same respect.
I have to say that I’m impressed that you have maintained that respectful exchange with me despite your opinion that I’m a poopyhead (is that one word or two?) who displayed questionable ethics by holding Judith to unreasonable standards).
Yes. I do expect bad faith [EDIT:
in particular] with people who have exchanged in bad faith with me in the past (as Lucia has done at a few other sites)… I like to think that what’s more operative is matter of giving people the benefit of the doubt and then reacting accordingly. I think that you will find that I didn’t show any signs of expecting bad faith with exchange with you over at Judith’s. You started in putting forth a good faith and I responded in kind. I don’t doubt, however, that defensiveness while exchanging on a “skeptic” site is an element at least to some degree.An interesting side note…I stumbled across some old exchange I had with Steve F quite a while back, over at Jeff Id’s crib. The exchange could be characterized, I think, as good faith give and take between people with strongly divergent views. I’m a big believer of sameosameo in the blogosphere as predominant…but sometimes things do change. Perhaps there’s a message there in why a small minority of exchange dynamics change (not that I have a clue what it is)
Joshua,
Nah, hasn’t changed. Maybe I’ll grow a pair of testicles and take the conversation with you over to Anders; the regulars there should enjoy that about as much as the regulars here are enjoying your company. 🙂 Get my fair share of the abuse?
Maybe. Seems a little masochistic though.
Mark –
==> “I usually try to avoid giving offense.”
If this is a reference to the “poopy-head” comment, I took no offense. I’m not offended if people lob an insult my way on the Internet (not to offend, but mostly my reaction is that they are displaying poor reasoning by judging the character of someone they’ve never met based on insufficient evidence and by extrapolating from just a tiny slice of information).
AFAIC, it doesn’t matter much if someone insults me…what matters to me is whether they exchange views in good faith. And I’ll say it again, I am impressed that you maintained a good faith level of exchange even as you insulted me and denigrated my character – at least to some extent. That’s an impressive feat to pull off. And it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It means that you are able to exchange views without personalizing them. It speaks highly of your ability to distinguish between positions and interests. It speaks highly of your ability to control for your own biases when examining issues, even issues that are highly polarizing.
I tip my hat to you.
==> “Seems a little masochistic though.”
OK. Somebody’s going to suggest that I have a mancrush, but it isn’t lost on me me that over at Judith’s, you maintained a respectful exchange with me despite some heavy lobbying from some regulars for you to treat me as they do (with a lack of respect).
==> “Maybe I’ll grow a pair of testicles…”
I’d say that your exchanges with me here and over at Judith’s displays more willingness to do something unpopular than wading over to Anders’ and, no doubt, receiving some flak.
FWIW, it would be interesting to me if you did go over there, and if you maintained a similar approach as that which you’ve taken with me. MikeR (I’m guessing he’s a semi-regular here) has gone over there and, IMO, been pretty good faith about his participation there. He has gotten quite a bit of flak. A fair amount of it, IMO, undeserved. But some of the flak that he’s gotten is, I think, at least partially explainable by some bad arguments he’s made (a bit hard for me to judge because of my technical and intellectual limitations when confronted with technological arguments). Sometimes there can be a fuzzy line between bad arguments and poor faith arguments.
There are some folks over there who, I think, exchange views in very much the same way that I encounter at “skeptic” blogs. I like to think, however, that in general people who go over there in good faith will be treated better than “realists” who go into “skeptic” dens in good faith. But from an abstract frame, I have to believe that there should be no significant differences, as from a theoretical perspective I don’t see any reason why identity-protective (identity-defensive and identity-aggressive) behaviors should be in any way contingent on views on climate change. I see the mechanism of causality there as being reversed, if anything, and I see the underlying causality as being more rooted in attributes of human psychology and cognition than in any particular ideological orientation.
If you do go over to Anders’ and maintain a good faith approach to exchange, you may just force me to confront something that I find kind of hard to reconcile: from a personal-identification standpoint I want to believe that a “skeptic” with a good faith approach will be treated better at Anders’ than a “realist” with a good faith approach would be treated here (please note, I’m not presuming to generalize from my own personal experiences as obviously, to do so would be very vulnerable to all sorts of biases)… but what will I do if I find that my more abstract understanding comes into such concrete contradiction with my personal identification framework? I kind of know even without that happening that my personal identification framework doesn’t really stand a chance – the chances that it is the result of anything other than bias are slim. But it’s a hard bias to extinguish.
[EDIT: I’m guessing that probably most of that was pretty indecipherable. If so, no problem – it makes sense to me 🙂 – but if you are interested in any further explanation, and are willing to cause Steve F unendurable pain, I’d be more than happy to try to clarify…]
Lucia,
“Others: does he frequently see it other places? I’m really not familiar with him until he appeared on this and the other recent thread.”
Do bears defecate in the forrest? Sorry, rhetorical question. Yes, seems to me Joshua sees bad faith in most any point of view but his own. His regular accusations of bad faith (explicit and implicit) are probably what pushed Judith over the edge and led to Joshua being moderated. Does Joshua engage in bad faith? According to him, never. But I think you can already see his refusal to engage substantive arguments contrary to his own POV. Maybe some think that does not qualify as acting in bad faith, but I am not among them.
Joshua,
A note that might not matter that much to you but is important to me:
You mistake Lucia if you think [edit: political] ideology is involved in her disagreement with you. As a Blackboard regular, I’m pretty darn certain Lucia is persuaded by quality evidence without much regard to which side of some ideological fence it lands on. So – if I came in with what she considered to be fluff links on the climate skeptic side, I’m quite sure she’d be not at all impressed. If I persisted after she let me know she wasn’t impressed, she’d eventually let me have it. She didn’t open fire on you because of an ideological difference.
I honestly believe is that Lucia approaches this stuff from what I think of as the ‘engineering’ perspective. Does it work? Why? What’s the substance? What’s the evidence, what’s the exceptions, what are the bounds/limits, how is it consistent or inconsistent, what’s the truth as far as we can figure.
I think this is generally true of the regulars here, to differing extents. It’s why I like the Blackboard so much.
Just saying, if you’re dismissing Lucia in your mind the way you’d dismiss certain regular combatants at Climate Etc. say, I think you’re making a mistake. ~shrug~
[Edit: BTW I think I get what you were saying, don’t worry about it.]
SteveF
I think that qualifies as bad faith. Yeppers.
I find this claim of his amazing
This from a guy who straight out refused to respond to comments on topics he brought up? And who seems to think one should develop a notion that he generally tends to share the views discussed in the poorly argued opinion pieces he links? I wouldn’t call what he does “discussion”, though I don’t doubt he finds whatever it is he is doing “interesting and enjoyeable”.
And beyond that: Why wouldn’t one develop the impression he mostly agrees with the content of the poorly argued opinion posts he linked. He did tell us this:
Note: I could explain why the first sentence suggests a bad faith on his part– insinuating someone made a claim no one made… but that would be a digression.
Instead I will point out those words suggest he does share the views of those who wrote the poorly argued opinion posts he linked. Or at least he does share them if we are to believe (a) the little he actually told us his views were and (b) the supporting evidence that he only posts links to things that support the view.
Of course, his view may be more nuanced– but as he appears reluctant to state it in words and prefers to merely drop links. Well…. nothing more to say about Joshua.
lucia:
I just wanted to say I don’t know if that was a joke or a typo, but either way, it made me chuckle.
Lucia,
Could actually be because of me. I’ve more or less invited him to do this to help me out by pointing out opposing viewpoints before over at Climate Etc.
Anyways, I’m all for dropping the Joshua discussion, it’s awkward, embarrassing, and feels like I’m being rude in all directions by discussing it. 🙁
Mark Bofill:
But, but… people are talking about a person being annoying with endless nitpicking of minor issues and semantics, and they’re not talking about me!
It’s a nice change of pace.
Lucia, school attendance is compulsory in IL. It was 6 to 16 when I last checked.
SteveF and lucia,
I’ll have to get the references, but I’m pretty sure that recent studies on brain chemistry and development show that exposure of the teenage brain to alcohol, nicotine, marijuana and other drugs of abuse will prevent the brain from reaching its full potential. Your brain continues to develop into the teens at least and altering brain chemistry during that time can have a significant effect on development.
Mark –
I read your 6:36 and will give it some careful thought. I thought about your previous response along similar lines…
I don’t feel inclined to respond, however (in fact, I kind of think that you didn’t write it with expectation or desire for a response – just to give me some info from your perspective and I think that there’s little doubt that it’s a discussion that’s best dropped)…perhaps in some other universe it would be something that we could discuss (I think it could be an interesting exchange w/r/t how people interpret the same evidence differently) but certainly not something that I think could be productive in this environment.
But again, I’ll take what you said under advisement.
Brandon,
LOL! 🙂
Kenneth
This is the current IL Board of Education page on homeschooling:
http://www.isbe.net/homeschool/
It starts “Home-schooling in Illinois is considered to be a form of private education. Parents who choose to educate their children at home are under a legal obligation to meet the minimum requirements stated in Illinois’ Compulsory Attendance Law ….”
Mark
None of this is your fault. You enjoy talking with him. He was kicked off by the fairly patient Judy Curry. You wanted to continue and thought that would work.
MarkBofill,
I suspect you think this because you’ve seem me do exactly that. Lots of people bring crummy links to bad skeptic stuff. I an others have criticized them for posting drek stuff. Not sure why anyone should think we are only allowed to do that to skeptics– which many here do with regularity.
Mark Bofill (Comment #138290),
That was an insightful comment. Yes, lots of people here focus closely on data, rational analysis, and look for factual flaws/inconsistencies in arguments, whether that is internal or external logic (eg the change in Gibbs free energy can’t be positive in a spontaneous process). I think that makes Joshua a bit of a fish out of water here… he just doesn’t think that way, and he takes some offense when someone asks him to support his views with more than opinions from favored links. Things can quickly go down hill from there, as you have seen in this thread…. Joshua is sort of Michael Tobis lite… just as reluctant to defend his views, but much less technically able to do so.
.
On a related subject, I would not waste my time commenting at Ken Rice’s blog (ATTP). You will be attacked by the rabid horde as evil, selfish, a den!er, a liar, or worse. The denizens at Rice’s blog are not interested in discussion: “the time for discussion is over” crowd is in permanent residence at that echo chamber. They are, IMHO, a bunch of know-nothing, arrogant, and obnoxious green advocates who wouldn’t recognize good science if it jumped up and bit them in the behind. I find them far worse than the rabble at WUWT.
Returning to the more interesting charter school issue itself, I think this is where stuff stands.
1) CREDO 2015 study shows that charters result in better outcomes for students. The only criticisms posted was to a non-substantive article. When I say this, I include the discussion of “Newarkâ€â€” which I already discussed in http://rankexploits.com/musings/2015/a-tale-about-pedagogy/#comment-138258. I’m not going to repost them. This is positive for charter schools.
2) A 2009 Rand Study shows no effect on some criteria (measured achievement) and some benefits on others (college enrollement). It also found the charter schools don’t skim students from local public schools. So this is neutral to positive for charter schools.
3) A study of teacher attrition rates indicates that attrition rates in charter schools are comparable if one matches for age and tenure of teachers. http://www.crpe.org/publications/brief-teacher-attrition-charter-vs-district-schools That is: new young teachers leave public school and charter schools at same rates. (One might expect new schools have more new young teachers as all will be recent hires. So this is what one might expect. So this is neutral for charter schools. (It is also of indirect importance as teacher attrition is only important to the extent it affects student achievement. Arguably it may, but if it turns out to have small effect, then so be it. Schools aren’t funded for the benefit of teachers. They are for the benefit of students.)
4) A study of student attrition rates indicates student attrition rates are lower at charter schools except for one group: special needs. So this is a positive for charter schools.
See http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2014attritioncharterpublic.pdf. I discussed this here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2015/a-tale-about-pedagogy/#comment-138268
it’s worth noting Rand seems to have published a flurry of reports on charter schools. The most recent one was in 2010.
http://www.rand.org/search.html?query=charter%20school
There is a rand article on vouchers behind paywall:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02374.x/abstract
They found improved outcomes for vocational students in Columbia who used vouchers. I didn’t find much more.
==> “That is: new young teachers leave public school and charter schools at same rates. (One might expect new schools have more new young teachers as all will be recent hires. So this is what one might expect. So this is neutral for charter schools.” [EDIT: assuming the effect is indeed, negative (as well as the interesting and related question of whether there is any association between teachers’ age and experience and student outcomes.]
Well, that’s interesting. In the material I posted (I’m pretty sure), there was some information regarding the impact of teacher attrition on educational outcomes. The evidence in the articles I linked (if I did link such articles – I know that I meant to) suggested that it is pretty strongly negative.
[Yes. You linked to an artitcle by an Elaine Magliaro who posted an opinion piece that seems to be based on no hard data. I googled and quickly found a report whose findings are based on an actual study.
Now even if controlling for teacher demographics the rate of attrition are the same, if there is a higher proportion of younger teachers at charters and younger teachers turn over more quickly (which would seem to be consistent with the articles explanation that a higher rate of turnover at the charters is partially a function of by “young and inexperienced teachers,”) then it isn’t exactly “neutral” for charter schools.
[It’s not bad. It’s not good. That makes it ‘neutral’. Not sure why you think that wouldn’t make it neutral. -LML]
I wonder what you would have thought, Lucia, had someone linked to your analysis of “neutral” in a discussion of charter schools?
[What’s your theory of what they would have said? My answer is: Depends what they other comments they provided to readers when linking. LML]
Also of interest is the question of whether the sample was representative. Also interesting is the influence of poor and urban environments, particularly in combination with the CREDO finding of better performance in charters in poor and urban areas. (actually, it would suggest even more strongly that there is something that the charters are doing well if they more than overcome for the higher turnover). Also interesting is how that article refers to the “charter effect” – and a lack of association w-between any such effect and the higher turnover (as is sometimes argued) with reference to the question of whether charters are more, less, or equally supportive of teachers.
I’m neither sure what you mean by “interesting” about the their referring to the ‘charter effect’ The term ‘charter effect’ like the sort of terminology used by someone doing a statistical study and looking for ‘effects’ from various postulated factors one of which is “charter schools”. In a study, “charter school” would be represented by a dummy variable and that factor was found to have no or little explanatory value for turn over. So, the “charter effect” had no explanatory value. The reported that finding. It is interesting to learn that it has no effect, but I sense your wondering about the use of the term. That use seems pretty routine to me. – LML
Too late to add an edit, apparently..but w/r/t turnover in the urban charters…of course the sample in the study referenced shouldn’t be extrapolated too far…but of particular interest would be to identify the age demographic of the teachers in the urban charters specifically…
==> “Yes. You linked to an artitcle by an Elaine Magliaro who posted an opinion piece that seems to be based on no hard data. I googled and quickly found a report whose findings are based on an actual study.”
See, to me the interesting thing would be discuss (if you’re interested in the questions related to teacher attrition and charters) the material that can be found from the links in that article,
[ Had your intention been for us to read and discuss links within her articles or even links within the linked articles that she linked, it was both poor communication on your part and very bad faith not to preface your link to her article by alerting people that your goal was for people to fish through the links and find guess which of the many links (including those to dead pages) your hoped to discuss. Better yet: you could have linked the interesting article back then just as easily as you are doing now. –LML]
or following less directly following the links in that article to other articles linked in the links:
http://all4ed.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/PathToEquity.pdf
http://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/4.full_.pdf
http://www.crpe.org/sites/default/files/brief_ics_Attrition_Aug10_0.pdf
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/schoolchoice/documents/briefs/brief_stuit_smith_ncspe.pdf
http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/EPSL-0705-234-EPRU.pdf
http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/how-teacher-turnover-harms-student-achievement
http://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/TeacherAttrition.pdf
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/TchTrnStAch%20AERJ%20R%26R%20not%20blind.pdf
http://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/NCTAFCostofTeacherTurnoverpolicybrief.pdf
And that’s only a fraction of the useful material referenced directly or indirectly in the article – with the implications of the findings in that article.
[It is ridiculous to try to claim an article is useful based on the fact that a small fraction of the links contain articles that themselves have good links or even that it has some links that are might be useful if a reader were to wade through, visit every link and find them. For what it’s worth, which I found this one “>by googling and already discussed it. Your reaction to my discussion of that article suggests you were unfamiliar with its content before I discussed it in comments. Now that it turns out she linked it, my reaction is the fact that Magliori would post her spin disregarding the substantive findings in a study she linked shows how tendentious her opinion piece was. My reaction that you seemed unfamiliar with it, but now include that in a set of links you claim would find interesting to discuss: yet more evidence of your bad faith in discussion. In any case, had you wished to discuss these when you linked the Magliori article instead of these articles you could simply have discussd them and linked them. You did not.–LML]
What I would find interesting would be to discuss the opinions discussed in the article or the vast amount of data that the article references.
[ Had you wished to discuss these you could simply have done so long ago. You did not. If you wished to discuss them now, you could have taken a stab at that now. You did not. Your pattern seems to be to claim to something would be interesting to discuss, then not discuss it. Moreover, in the thread itself, your pattern is to decline to discuss content of items you did link. All of this suggests extremely bad faith on your part, and more over, you more or less decreed you think it’s behave the way you are behaving by deciding it is ok to do nothing more than aim snark at participants you have deemed unworthy. So we don’t need to read your mind to know that you do engage in bad faith. –LML]
Material that can be found from a Google search could well, also, be of interest –
Yes. Which is how I found material you did not cite, did not link and now claim would find interesting to discuss, but which you did not link.-LML]
even if they are small-scale studies in a very particular context with samples that the authors say should not be considered representative and even though in fact, that article does show a higher attrition rate. But hey, if you’re interested in being able to determine neutrality, why bother with the other stuff. If the goal is to reinforce pre-existing conceptions, why bother?
[We’ve already inferred from your linking practices that your attitude toward linking a broad range of ‘other stuff’ is “why bother”. After all, you don’t link the other stuff nor do you discuss it. But if you are now going to tell us and confirm your attitude. All right then.–LML]
Are attrition rates higher at charter schools? Does a higher attrition rate associate with negative educational outcomes? Are they negative (or positive) across the board, or does it vary? Is there anything in the data that might help us to understand why there are higher attrition rates at charter schools? Is it only because of an association with age demographic of teachers or SES environment of the schools?
Uhhhm. Uhhmm. Uhhmm. Uhhmm. Uhhmm.
[All are questions you could have raised and discussed before if you were actually interested in this topic. You did not do so. All are topics you could extend an opinion on. Even now. But. You. Chose. Not. To. And you still continue not to discuss them though you claim you would find such discussion interesting. –LML]
Anyway, IMO those are all interesting topics of discussion. Perhaps one day I’ll discuss one of them with one of you somewhere else, eh?
Perhaps one day you will actually break down and discuss a topic you claim to find interesting. Doing so would demonstrate good faith on your part; we’ve very little of that. –LML
And with that, since I’ve been dis-invited, I’ll take my leave (sorry if I’ve caused you an sorus, Mark), and leave you non-rude folks to have your non-boring discussions, you know that is if you are interested in non-rude and non-boring discussions.
[Ciao. Have fun elsewhere. –LML]
Here is a link to some statistics on home schooled performance verus non home schooled. These data are from a site that obviously is promoting home schooling and the comparisons are not necessarily controlled using a proper peer group, but what I find more interesting is the within home school population and the lack of trends of performance with family income and amount spent on schooling and whether the parents teaching were certified or not. It might be saying something about motivated parents and its effect on education performance.
https://www.home-school.com/news/homeschool-vs-public-school.php
Kenneth,
That’s interesting. I imagine most homeschool kids parents are heavily involved in their education. Perhaps not as teacher but in oversight and involvement.
Of course, we don’t know whether there is some selection bias in who takes tests. Or at least I don’t because I don’t know what’s required of homeschoolers across the country.