One way of handling worrisome demographic shifts in the electorate

On the bright side, this does have a certain directness going for it (from Yahoo):

Boosted by major electoral gains in state legislatures nationwide in the 2010 campaign, Republican lawmakers in 32 states are pushing measures that would require citizens to show a state identification or proof of citizenship to vote. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, GOP lawmakers are proposing new limits on college students who vote in the state, potentially eliminating a key base of electoral support for Democrats in the state ahead of the upcoming presidential election.

As the Washington Post's Peter Wallsten writes, the measures have set off a partisan battle over voting rights across the country, with Democrats accusing Republicans of trying to suppress voters, including young people and minorities, who would cast their ballots for President Obama and other Democratic candidates next year.

In New Hampshire, Republicans are pushing to end rules that allow same-day voter registration in the state, which has often provided key swing votes for candidates from all parties in the state. State GOP lawmakers are also proposing new limits on students, including a bill that would allow them to vote in college towns only if they or their parents had established permanent residency in the state.

Some GOP lawmakers in New Hampshire have billed the measures as an attempt to crack down on voter fraud in the state--but recent remarks from the newly elected GOP state House speaker have suggested otherwise.

In a recent speech to a tea party group in the state, House Speaker William O'Brien described college voters as "foolish." "Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do," he said, in remarks that were videotaped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students, he said, lack "life experience" and "just vote their feelings."

GOP lawmakers in the state have distanced themselves from O'Brien's remarks.

Though not his policies.

A useful table and a few observations

Wikipedia has an interesting article on academic rankings. We could (and probably should) spend a lot of time going over this, but here are a few points to get things started:

1. This list seems to suggest that the USA has the best university system by a good margin. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve it, but this does make a case for being careful about making radical changes. When you're number one, unintended consequences can be a bitch;

2. As Joseph noted, California contains one of the two major clusters of major universities. Most Californians would like to keep it that way. I'm not so sure about most of Sacramento.

3. It's a good idea to go through this list periodically while reading Edward Glaeser (since it's obvious his editors didn't).

Universities and Growth

Mark had a really nice post about one of Edward Glaeser's points. Mark points out that it seems odd that Glaeser overlooked the schools in the Detroit area when he pointed out how important the Univeristy of Washington is to Seattle's success. Curiously, he did not mention Microsoft, which seems to also be an important explanation for Seattle's success. I think the underlying issue here is that simple explanations (location of schools) do not really describe complex phenomenon (relative prosperity) well.

If you look at the the top ranked schools, there are really two major clusters in the United States (one in the Northeast, peaking in Boston and one in California, peaking in San Franscisco). But the causal direction is unclear to me -- did these schools become excellent due to their proximity to vibrant economies or vice versa?

Or are these factors independent, which schools like Princeton might argue for.

What type of instrument or experiment could we use to decide on this?

These questions matter because we care about how to best handle things like economic slumps. It might be that there is no effective policy response (that would be worth knowing). But, at the very least, overly simple explanations should concern us.

If only there were a major university in the Detroit area

Maybe we could put one in Ann Arbor.

From Edward Glaeser:

But there was a crucial difference between Seattle and Detroit. Unlike Ford and General Motors, Boeing employed highly educated workers. Almost since its inception, Seattle has been committed to education and has benefited from the University of Washington, which is based there. Skills are the source of Seattle’s strength.

Part of an ongoing series.

update: Note to self -- unlabelled sarcasm may be a bad idea in a blog.

Felix Salmon shoots the elephant in the room

A few years ago, there was an infomercial for something called the AIM (Automated Investment Management) System. The developer, a disreputable-looking character with a cheap suit, a bad comb-over and the absurdly modulated voice of a smooth jazz DJ, explained to the 'interviewer' that with his system you would automatically sell a stock when it peaked and buy when it bottomed out.

Though the whole thing was scripted down to the last chuckle, you still half-expected the 'interviewer' to ask the obvious question, "If you have a sure-fire way of beating the market, why are you wasting your time selling audiotapes on basic cable at three in the morning?"

Linda Stern's recent column, "Saving up for a big down payment? Sucker!" raises similar questions. Fortunately, Felix Salmon is here to go off script:

This, in a nutshell, is everything that was wrong with the housing market before the crash — everything that we want to avoid going forward. Can’t Linda look around at the current devastated state of many people who bought with little or no money down, and see the dangers here? Evidently not. Instead, she seems to think it’s a bright idea to borrow more money than you need, to the point at which you’re pushing the envelope of what you can reasonably afford. And then take the cash you’re not using for a down payment, and “put your money to work for yourself.”

I barely know where to start on this. Here’s one way of thinking about it: banks are not charities, and that they expect to make money from their loans. They have a cost of funds which is lower than the mortgage rate that you’re paying; the difference between the two rates is their profit. You, however, if you follow Linda’s advice, have a cost of funds which is your mortgage rate: if you wind up getting a lower return on your savings than you’re paying on your mortgage, you would have been better off just using the money for a down payment. Needless to say, if there was an easy way of getting a higher return on capital than the mortgage rate, the banks would have done it already, rather than lending you the money. And it’s pretty delusional, frankly, to think that you can invest better than say JP Morgan. Yes, there are tax benefits to having lots of mortgage-interest payments. But they’re not sufficient to make the difference here.

Firing Teachers

Yikes.

In the same blog post we have:

But I also recognize that this is no panacea. At a minimum, making teachers easier to fire needs to be paired with extensive reforms: a move towards defined contribution rather than defined benefit plans (which make a mid-career job loss catastrophic); elimination of seniority and useless credentials as the primary criteria for setting pay; broadening the recruiting base by eliminating a requirement for ed degrees; and a shift towards paying teachers more, especially in math and science. I also think it's absolutely crucial to set up some sort of Federal bonus to recruit high-performing teachers to the lowest-performing districts--a bonus sizeable enough to attract top teachers, and available only on one-year contracts.

and

Let me start by saying that I think there are some jobs that are too important to let any consideration intrude other than the best way to get the job done. Nuclear power plants, firefighters, poison control--I don't want to let other social goals, no matter how laudable, hamper their mission.


Teaching is one of those jobs. I just can't prioritize making teachers' work environments fair, interesting, or pleasant for them--not if there's any potential conflict with the goal of providing the best possible education for kids. Particularly disadvantaged kids, since I basically assume that educated and competent parents are going to ensure that their offspring are educated and competent. But where there are needy kids, my entire focus is on them. I want to make teachers' lives pleasant only insofar as this advances the goal of helping kids who need a lot of help.

and

Contra E. D. Kain, however, I don't think that all organizations should strive to minimize turnover. Why do fast food restaurants have turnover rates in excess of 100%, when they could lower them substantially by paying higher wages? Answer: because in a dirty, stultifying job like fast food service, it costs a lot in wages to reduce turnover a little, and people won't pay enough for a hamburger to justify those wages.

Okay, this seems like a slippery analogy but let us go with it. Ms. McArdle would like to make teaching into a high turnover profession. Okay, I can deal with that. She also thinks that it is so high priority that considerations like humane treatment are secondary to child outcomes. Curiously, I can deal with that too.

But what are the low job security professions with a high level of responsibility, high educational requirements and no limits on costs? Medical doctors come to mind but it's unclear to me that they represent the wage level that we should be shooting for.

I think a much more plausible story is that we have cut education to the bone. It's a large part of many state budgets (see California as a key example). The lack of resources has been partially helped by using job security and a sense of vocation in order to keep employee costs low. So what precise program cuts are we considering to raise wages or to pay "some sort of Federal bonus"? Or are we talking actual tax increases?

After all, according to Wikipedia, we spend $11,000 per student and have 76.6 million students in the United States. Is this really a place where we want to increase costs from?

Or, is the alterative to make education low cost and low skill? It has had this model in the past in the US (with the one room school house model) but that seems to contradict the importance of teaching. A lot of things are important and should not be trivialized. But is this really the best way forward?

In other words, Good Will Hunting understood sigma notation

From Michael Winerip's NYT article:

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.

I'll have more to say about this later. I don't think Winerip really understands what's going on here but the story's definitely worth a read.

Update: it is now later.

Something else that shouldn't surprise people but probably will

I suspect Seyward Darby spoke for a lot of people on the left when she admitted growing disenchanted with Michelle Rhee (despite Rhee's remarkably consistent educational philosophy). Rhee was, of course, part of the Adrian Fenty administration in D.C. and Darby and the New Republic were big supporters, endorsing him in 2010 with the headline, "Why the fate of education reform rides on the D.C. mayoral race."

TNR's editors might be rethinking that support now:

Speaking on Morning Joe Tuesday morning, Fenty -- whose term in office was marked by battles with organized labor in the city, especially the teacher's union -- said that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was "right on the substance" and "right on the politics" when it came to the fight with unions and their supporters in the Badger State.

"I think it's a new day," Fenty said. "I think a lot of these collective bargaining agreements are completely outdated."

Analogy of the day -- it's your funeral

Once again, Mark Thoma gives us an elegant counter-argument to a dubious piece of conventional wisdom:

I keep seeing the argument that the way Social Security is funded -- the young provide the funds needed for the retirement of the elderly -- and the fact that tax collections can be viewed as one big pot of money imply that the government is not providing a service (insurance in this case) as you might see in the private sector:

The confounding problem is that many people believe the payroll taxes they pay go to fund the benefits they will receive, which is completely untrue. The payroll taxes go to pay current expenses of the US government. They are just a tax on labor. The government is spending every penny of those payroll taxes to pay for current expenditures. ... the [government] is free to use your premia to buy fighter jets and space shuttles!!

Some go so far as to argue this means it must be welfare. I disagree.

Consider (and apologies for the example) a firm that provides funeral services. This firm sells burial plots to the young, those still working, and it issues a promise. When the time comes, you have a place to be buried, and your payment will cover the following services (which are listed explicitly).

However, the firm does not take your money and put it into savings for the next however many years. Instead, it uses the money to cover the expenses of current funerals. Your money is used to pay for the services of the old, those who have passed away.

So, the money of the young is used to provide services for the old, just like Social Security. Does this mean that the people whose funerals were paid for when they were younger received welfare? Of course not. Does it mean they received no services from the firm? Again, no. It's even possible that when your turn comes (and hopefully it's far away), the funeral will cost more than you paid in advance -- the firm may have not anticipated future costs correctly. In that case, there will be an income transfer from the young to the old (the young will be charged higher prices to reserve a plot in the future), but that still doesn't mean it is welfare. Fundamentally, this is an advance purchase of a service.

While 'real' news shows were covering Charlie Sheen...

This is the sort of thing that makes me nervous

Having recently discussed the role of tenure and LIFO in preventing political abuses, this quote from Grover Norquist struck me as somewhat disturbing:

"Yes, the McKinley era, absent the protectionism, [is the goal]. You're looking at the history of the country for the first 120 years, up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that."

You'll notice he didn't say "absent the protectionism and the abuse of government power." Of course, that doesn't mean Norquist and his fellow travellers would bring back the patronage system, but it doesn't give me a warm feeling inside either.

The right likes it better but the left does it better

This Naked Capitalism post, "More Public Infrastructure Sale Tales of Woe," reminded me of an apt observation Felix Salmon made a couple of weeks ago while discussing Scott Walker's privatization proposals:

It probably comes as little surprise to note that the most lucrative privatizations have generally been done by parties of the left: I’m thinking in particular of the UK’s auction of 3G licenses, which netted the Exchequer $35.4 billion at the height of the dot-com bubble.

Right-wing parties, by contrast, are more prone to thinking of privatization as something inherently good, and of monies flowing to the government as a kind of taxation which is inherently bad.

What is this word, 'contract,' of which you speak?

The Daily Show continues its extraordinary coverage of the stand-off in Wisconsin.

Ultrasonic Remote/Observational Epidemiology cage match?

OK, maybe not, but I do have a quibble Brian's otherwise excellent observations:

One of the members of the ART [Algonquin Round Table] was Harpo Marx, one of the few members that not only didn't write, but left school early. When asked why he, a member of a comedy team that many of the members might have considered lowbrow, was a member, he replied, "Well, they needed someone to listen."

Rather than considering them lowbrow, the ART was pretty much packed with the brothers' friends and admirers. Herman Mankiewicz produced their best films, Alexander Wolcott's reviews made them stars, and as for Kaufman, here's a relevant anecdote from Dick Cavett:

In the years I was lucky enough to know Groucho, there was one trait of the elderly that I, at least, never experienced in him. The one where you have to pretend to be hearing an oft-told joke or story for the first — rather than the seventh or eighth — time.

With one exception. Kaufman had known and written for the Brothers Marx — the original Fab Four (then three) — and Groucho worshipped him.

It went: ‘Did I ever tell you the greatest compliment I ever got?”

I said no the first time and, also, the four or five times thereafter over the years. I can hear Groucho’s familiar soft voice in my mind’s ear: “The greatest compliment I ever got was from George S. Kaufman.” I expected a joke.

“George said to me once, ‘Groucho, you’re the only actor I’d ever allow to ad-lib in something I wrote.’ And that’s the greatest compliment I ever got.” (Each time, he teared slightly.)

I loved hearing this treasured story repeated. It was no trouble pretending to hear it for the first time.

Why we forgive him the puns

Today's column in the New York Times is another reminder of why Paul Krugman is so essential. It directly contradicts some of the most cherished conventional wisdom about the relationship between education and economic opportunity, but he doesn't say anything that I haven't been hearing from researchers and academicians.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

...

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

And then there’s globalization. Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.

As a statistician, I might quibble with the "If they're right."

So what does all this say about policy?

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

This is another point worth dwelling on for a moment. The educational reform movement likes to draw its poster children from poor urban and rural schools. Having taught in both Watts and the Mississippi Delta, I'm usually glad to see attention focused on these areas, but it's clear in this case that the plight of these kids is being used to market general changes in education that have little if any special relevance to the schools that need the help.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

Update: Lawrence Mishel makes some important related points here.