Well, this looks interesting

I want to be careful not to get ahead of myself on this -- still waiting for some good, solid reporting before I get too confident -- but, assuming things are as they appear, here are a few quick thoughts, some or all of which may have to be retracted as I learn more.



The story of SpaceX has always been as much or more innovation through disruption than innovation through technological advances. (And yes, this is one case where I actually do buy the beneficial disruption narrative.) They took tech that had been sitting on the shelves of a sclerotic industry for years and literally got it off the ground. I'd argue that the auto industry is relatively responsive and fast moving compared to aerospace, but Musk still seems to have managed to do something similar here, partially I suspect by requiring less testing than companies like Volvo, GM, Mercedes-Benz.

Still, this is a very cool development, particularly in terms of data. Tesla has always had a progressive approach with intellectual property. If this liberal attitude extends to sharing data...

This should (but won't) cut the head off of the myth of the regulatory monster holding back all progress on autonomous vehicles. We can all ignore the obvious fig leaf of "advising drivers to keep their hands on the wheel." There will be hands-free driving (check out the video) and there will be accidents (though probably fewer than there would have been without the technology). If Tesla didn't feel they had a handle on the regulatory and liability issues, they wouldn't have rolled out the system.

This should also make people rethink Google's role in the narrative. Tesla's approach appears to be entirely different (Musk doesn't even have plans to use LIDAR for his cars in the future). Even the companies that are using a more similar approach appear to be advancing on their own faster than Google.

Of course, Mountain View is filled smart people and a tremendous amount of great innovation and research flow from the company, but its "leadership" in the field of autonomous vehicles has always had as much to do with PR as with engineering.

Dean Dad on assessments

Of interest to our discussion on education reform:

Instead, I’m a fan of the “few, big, dumb questions” approach. At the end of a program, can students do what they’re supposed to be able to do? How do you know? Where they’re falling short, what are you planning to do about it? Notice that the unit of analysis is the program. For assessment to work, it can’t be another way of doing personnel evaluations. And it can’t rely on faculty self-reporting. The temptation to game the system is too powerful; over time, those who cheat would be rewarded and those who tell the truth would be punished. That’s a recipe for entropy.

I very much agree with this point of view.  It is hard enough to measure on thing well -- when you try to do both personal evaluation and program evaluation using a single measure then you have problems.  If you make the tests "high stakes" for one party and "low stakes" for the other then interests are misaligned.

Everybody has an interest in how many students from a particular program pass the actuarial exams, because both the students and the faculty want the same thing (people to pass).  This has made these tests look good as tools for evaluating both students and programs (similar value can be found in any licensing exam). 

But to pull apart "the course is poor" and "the instructor is poor" is a very hard thing to do, like with all correlated variables.  And it presumes that the largest effect size is the teacher, which may be true if the teacher is extremely poor.  But like a lot of tasks that improve with practice, I suspect teaching ability will end up being a second order effect for experienced teachers. 

Teach For America's aspect dominance*

From a pretty good Slate article by Jessica Huseman [emphasis added]:

In the current parlance of Vegas schools, teachers are now “superheroes.” Beginning in January of this year, the city embarked on a rambunctious teacher-recruitment campaign titled “Calling All Heroes” that aimed to bring about 2,600 new teachers to the district. The effort—which could be considered creative, desperate, or desperately creative, depending on your point of view—featured the superintendent of the Clark County School District, the nation’s fifth-largest, zip-lining down Vegas’ famous Fremont Street. Last winter, Vegas school officials enlisted volunteers in Boston to spell out the district’s website address into a Boston snow bank. And in a district-created Web video, two elementary school–aged news anchors announced: “Breaking news! Turns out that we are in crisis, as we have a severe hero teacher shortage!”

...

As baby boomers retire and applications drop to both traditional education schools and alternative programs like Teach for America, a growing number of school districts are expected to face teacher shortages comparable to Vegas’. But Sin City’s attempted remedies might be most instructive in teaching us what not to do when scrambling to fill teacher vacancies nationally. The emphasis has been on using glitzy, if mostly inexpensive, strategies to get teachers in the door with far less focus on holding onto veterans who are already there.

This is followed by quotes from two new teachers: Jayne Gray, a veteran from Los Angeles and Jessica Recarey a first-year Teach for America recruit. You might assume that TFA supplied a significant share of the applicants. You'd be wrong.

I don't want to single out Huseman on this. Most stories that mention the program give the impression that it's fairly large and many suggest that it's cost effective. Neither is the case.

From Wikipedia:

Year	# of Applicants	# of Incoming Corps Members	# of Regions	Operating Budget
2003	15,708	1,646	20	$29.8M
2004	13,378	1,626	22	$34.0M
2005	17,348	2,181	22	$38.4M
2006	18,968	2,464	25	$55.6M
2007	18,172	2,895	26	$77.9M
2008	24,718	3,614	29	$122.3M
2009	35,178	4,065	35	$153.4M
2010	46,359	4,493	40	$176.0M
2011	47,911	5,066	43	$229M
2012	48,442	5,800[21]	46	$244M
2013	57,000	6,000[22]	48

TFA is a big deal in terms of influence and fund-raising but, in terms of boots on the ground, it is a fairly minor player. It is widely perceived as being much larger than it is partly because the people behind the organization are so good at managing the media (you can be almost certain that Huseman didn't just happen on a TFA recruit when looking for new teachers to interview).

We can go back and forth on the role of TFA in education reform in general, but if we're talking about ways to address a teacher shortage, the table above makes it difficult to treat the program as more than a footnote.


* "Aspect dominance in forest ecology typically refers to the plant life embedded within an ecosystem community that is most apparent or obvious. This generally will be the plant life that is tallest and most readily observed. However, this approach ignores the life existing on ground level, which may have a greater biomass. This is illustrated in biology by the “Daisy Field” metaphor. Imagine that you are walking through a meadow and you come upon an area covered in daisies in full bloom. Because the daisies rise above the groundcover to form a canopy, it is human nature to assume that daisies are the dominant species and to refer to the area as a daisy field. However, the reality is that grass may in fact be the dominant species, it just may be the eye is drawn to the daisies.


From What You See is not Always What You Get:Aspect Dominance as a Confounding Factor in the Determination of Fishing Dependent Communities
Steve Jacob, Michael Jepson, and Frank L. Farmer

Two anecdotes on command economies

This is Joseph

Mark Evanier:

When I was a kid, one of the reasons we were taught that Communism was bad was that since there was no competition, there was no choice. The markets all sold the same kind of bread and the same kind of canned beans and the same kind of salad dressing…and if you didn't like it, too bad. You couldn't go to another store and find an alternative. For some reasons, people who think Communism is the greatest evil on the planet cheer on big companies getting bigger even though it leads us in the same direction.

A quote from an article by Gary Leff (via Marginal Revolutions):

It would have made more sense for United Airlines staff to offer a larger incentive for passengers (who did not have to be at their destination that evening) to agree to take a later flight, she adds. Virginia Shiller says the staff were only permitted to offer volunteer an amount totaling several hundred dollars, but it may not have been enough of an incentive to persuade volunteers to take a later flight. “It was totally irrational. They probably could have gotten a volunteer to take $2,700. They have these formulas. It’s like something they do in socialist countries.” 

 One of the interesting features of modern economies is that we still have command economies but they are corporations and not government bureaus.  I suspect part of the reason is transaction costs -- you cannot make everything open to constant bidding without gross inefficiency.  The other is that people like to have power. 

However, the United States seems to be an outlier on the degree of focus on corporate command economies.  I am starting to wonder if this is because the country is so large.  The smaller the country, both in geography and population, the easier it is to create effective mixed economies.  Canada has managed it by being under-populated and very decentralized.  England is geographically small, isolated from hostile neighbors and, even today, has fewer people (63 million) than the United States (325 million). 

It seems worth thinking about. 

Andrew Gelman: Hoisted from the Comments

This is Joseph

This comment from Andrew Gelamn showed up on an earlier post:

Joseph:

A related issue came up a few years ago regarding Mankiw's views on taxes: he seemed to think that the state should only tax things that are “unjustly wrestled from someone else.”

This seemed a bit odd to me, given that when you consider sales taxes, income taxes, import taxes, etc.: presumably almost none of these are taxing things that are unjustly wrested.

I think the usual view is that taxation is, from the government's perspective, a way to raise revenue; and, from the taxpayer's perspective, a cost of doing business. But Mankiw seems to view taxes as a sort of punishment or fine.

I actually don't think Mankiw has fully thought these ideas through, which seems strange given that his field is economics and his specialty is public communication.

Or maybe he just hasn't communicated well enough. Here's what I wrote in that earlier discussion:

"I realize that [Mankiw and his collaborator] are trying to be provocative, but I think they're being provocative in the context of an argument among economists that I don't fully understand. It's sort of an academic version of those all-black paintings in the Museum of Modern Art that can only be understood as responses to earlier paintings (as described, for example, in Tom Wolfe's book, The Painted Word)."

I rather liked this comment because it made me think that it was possible that I was missing the major thrust of the argument.  I am quite familiar with the "taxes are theft" line of thinking and I'd rather assumed that this was just a dressed up version of that argument.

But maybe there is a big piece that I am missing.  Given that, what I think would be the most useful thing would be for the defenders of this orthodoxy to insert some context.  Even if it is hard to grasp, saying something like "It's hard to grasp if you don't have a sense of the arguments that this is in response to" would be very useful (maybe with a couple of these arguments.

Immanuel Kant wrote the almost unintelligible (at least in English translations at the time I was in graduate school) critique of pure reason and followed it up with the (far more understandable)  Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, that I had not trouble following.  I still never quite managed to connect it to what was in the critique, but at least I had an idea of what the whole thing was about.

Does nobody read primary sources?

This is Joseph.

I get confused about whether people read sources or just rely on summaries of them a lot in modern discourse.

For example, Niccolo Machiavelli is famous for saying that it is better to be feared than loved (with the codicil "if you cannot be both").  But nobody keeps reading and notices that he then puts several paragraphs (and then Chapter 19) pointing out that it would be even worse to be despised and hated.

So being tough only works (in his formulation) if it generates fear but does not give rise to hate.  That suggests a rather different balance of strategy, that looks like:

• Feared and Loved
• Feared
• Loved
• Hated or Despised

Yet I often see that quote used to justify tough actions and to avoid appeasement.  But being both feared and loved is the best possible outcome, and being hated is definitely worse than being loved.  So, in an odd sort of way, he is actually pushing moderation in action (not too soft, not too nasty) which I would never of picked up on without actually reading the book again.  Even the Wikapedia page doesn't really make this hierarchy clear.  

[The discourses, where he talks about how to make a republic work, are also of great interest and likely a lot more topical than how to be a tyrant]

The welfare state

This is Joseph

Matt Yglesias talks about the issues regarding opposition to the welfare state:

This is why thoughtful opponents of the welfare state have generally avoided making the argument that capitalism is good because it promotes human well-being. Since capitalism does promote human well-being, "capitalism promotes human well-being" sounds like a good argument in its favor. But it turns out that capitalism plus a large welfare state promotes human well-being even more. So you either need to embrace the welfare state (the correct answer) or come up with another justification of capitalism. One that frequently arises is what Greg Mankiw has referred to as the "just deserts" perspective in which "people should receive compensation congruent with their contributions" and we should aim for a society in which public policy ought to ensure that "every individual would earn the value of his or her own marginal product."

So if, for example, you are blind and inability to see makes it hard for you to earn a living in an unregulated market that's too bad for you. Your vision impairment means your ability to contribute to market production is limited, and therefore it is morally appropriate that your living standards be limited as well. By the same token, if a combination of genetics and childhood living conditions have left you with an IQ that is 2 standard deviations below average (this is about five percent of people) then, again, it's just the case that you deserve to have a much lower standard of living than society could provide for you if it were willing to do more redistribution.

Mankiw's moralized capitalism seems bone-chilling to me but I don't really think I can prove him wrong. It is, however, pretty trivial to see that Mankiwism isn't a Christian worldview.

This is really the major challenge of neo-conservative or libertarian thought.  You can argue that government is inefficient, but that is an argument for good government and not an argument for trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Proponents of the welfare state can easily argue that the focus should be on improving the role of government -- improving both efficiency and accountability. 

The only argument for the just desserts argument that I can think of (as absolute adherence to economic efficiency as the main determinant of human value seems like a dead end) is that it produces more economic efficiency on the long run.  The problem is that areas of very low levels of government do not create vast periods of economic growth.  You can have growth flourishing despite great conflict (see the American Civil War or the War of the Roses).  But when the state actually collapses (see the English Civil War or recent events in Syria), you end up with people like Hobbes arguing for more government. 

Nor have experiments with lesser versions of this worked out well.  The data is inconclusive with respect to tax cuts for the wealthy, but the trend is not supporting this mechanism. This makes it hard to figure out why this viewpoint is so generally popular.  After all, nobody is arguing that we should have a French Revolution or even massive taxes.  Instead, the current argument is whether we should redistribute wealth to look a little bit more like other industrialized nations.

Are we all missing an argument? 

"So long and thanks for all the fish"

I've fallen into this trap before.

I'm driving down the road channel surfing the radio and I come across a snippet of something that sounds interesting on one of the NPR stations. I stop and listen long enough to start to get into the topic before I realize that this is RadioLab.

Now I am faced with a difficult choice:

I can change the station despite having become curious about what's going to happen;

Or I can continue to listen until the inevitable annoyance and disappointment kicks in.

I have been in this situation often enough to know that these are the only two possibilities. No matter how promising the opening or how intriguing the subject, I will regret it if I listen to the whole thing.

RadioLab beautifully illustrates the somewhat counterintuitive principle that if you're going to imitate someone, you are often better off imitating the mediocre than the great. The show is clearly trying to be the next This American Life. All of the cute touches and distinctive mannerisms are aped, but without any sense of taste, proportion, style, or restraint. The result is an overproduced, painfully self-satisfied show narrated by two grown men who can't get enough of each other.

All of this might be forgiven if the people behind the show were anywhere near as smart as the TAL crew and had something of interest to say.

One of the reasons that This American Life works is because what might otherwise tip over into excessive production on another show is supported by a foundation of extraordinarily solid journalism. No one is better at bringing clarity and insight to a big story like patent abuse or the financial meltdown of 2008. The chatty tone, the sound montage and all of the other potential distractions only serve to enhance the story because the reporting is so good.

RadioLab specializes in even bigger topics like the nature of language. Unfortunately, this added ambition only highlights the producers' limitations. Instead of clarity we get oversimplification; instead of insight we get lots of TED talk style geewhiz pseudo-profundities.

Which brings me to today's show ("today" being a relative term but anyway...).


When I tuned in, a researcher was discussing her work with dolphins in the sixties. I stuck with it through the discussion of giving the animals LSD, but then they got to the weird part...

When I turned the radio back on, the story featured a different researcher had moved to the present day. The methodology was more conventional but the annoyance factor was just as high.

Putting aside an enthusiasm level that would have been slightly excessive had the reporter been the first astronaut to land on Mars, the approach to the underlying scientific questions was awful.Even Malcolm Gladwell would've thrown up.

The big payoff also contained the most unintentionally telling part of the program, but first a little bit of background: according to the program (and I have no reason to doubt this), each individual dolphin has a distinct signature whistle. The reporter (who was also the producer of the segment) and the hosts consistently discussed this in anthropomorphic terms as the dolphins' names.

As an experiment, the researchers had come up with something like a voice recognition system for dolphins that categorized certain sounds as "words" and would also "speak" certain new words that represent, among other things, individual divers.

The big climactic moment came when one of the divers "spoke" her name, at which point one of the dolphins turned and "spoke" his signature whistle. This is where we hit the unintentionally revealing part. One of the hosts asked if this represents a major linguistic breakthrough, at which point the reporter suddenly switches to conscientious mode and tells us how rigorous the researcher is. We are told this would have to happen 35 times before... Then we literally get the sound cue from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a discussion of all of the deep philosophical conversations we might have with dolphins in the future.


This is what thirty plus years of TED Talks leads to, an entire generation of journalists and writers who think this is what science is about: take some isolated study or statistic, ignore the context and previous body of research, and instead start drawing sweeping inferences and telling elaborate narratives.

Preferably with lots of cute banter.

We have little evidence that our approach is effective, but at least it's inhumane -- UPDATED

Children deserve an opportunity to play. If you deny them that opportunity, you'd better have a damned good reason.

This excellent article by Tim Walker (a former teacher in the U.S. now based in Finland) illustrates a couple of points we've been making about the education reform movement over the past few years.

The first is just how tough on kids many of these policies are, from crushing workloads to harsh discipline to attrition practices that routinely discard kids who can't handle the strain. The underlying (and sometimes explicit) assumption of the movement is that what matters is optimizing certain metrics that appear to correlate with future earnings. Even if the policies perform as promised, that doesn't mean we should ignore the other costs kids have to pay.


But what if these new policies aren't actually better than the more humane ones they're replacing?

As with the education reforms of the sixties, the major precipitating factor of our current reforms was fear that we were falling behind other countries, particularly, in this case, Finland, but if you look closely, you'll notice a strange contradiction: arguments that start out with the premise that we need to be more like countries such as Finland and Canada,  often end with the conclusion that we need to employ the opposite educational approaches.

“The changes to kindergarten make me sick,” a veteran teacher in Arkansas recently admitted to me. “Think about what you did in first grade—that’s what my 5-year-old babies are expected to do.”

The difference between first grade and kindergarten may not seem like much, but what I remember about my first-grade experience in the mid-90s doesn’t match the kindergarten she described in her email: three and a half hours of daily literacy instruction, an hour and a half of daily math instruction, 20 minutes of daily “physical activity time” (officially banned from being called “recess”) and two 56-question standardized tests in literacy and math—on the fourth week of school.

That American friend—who teaches 20 students without an aide—has fought to integrate 30 minutes of “station time” into the literacy block, which includes  “blocks, science, magnetic letters, play dough with letter stamps to practice words, books, and storytelling.” But the most controversial area of her classroom isn’t the blocks nor the stamps: Rather, it’s the “house station with dolls and toy food”—items her district tried to remove last year. The implication was clear: There’s no time for play in kindergarten anymore.

...

But Finland—a Nordic nation of 5.5 million people, where I’ve lived and taught fifth and sixth graders over the last two years—appears to be on the other end of the kindergarten spectrum. Before moving to Helsinki, I had heard that most Finnish children start compulsory, government-paid kindergarten—or what Finns call “preschool”—at age 6. And not only that, but I learned through my Finnish mother-in-law—a preschool teacher—that Finland’s kindergartners spend a sizable chunk of each day playing, not filling out worksheets.

Finnish schools have received substantial media attention for years now—largely because of the consistently strong performance of its 15-year-olds on international tests like the PISA. But I haven’t seen much coverage on Finland’s youngest students.

So, a month ago, I scheduled a visit to a Finnish public kindergarten—where a typical school day is just four hours long.

* * *

Approaching the school’s playground that morning, I watched as an army of 5- and 6-year-old boys patrolled a zigzagging stream behind Niirala Preschool in the city of Kuopio, unfazed by the warm August drizzle. When I clumsily unhinged the steel gate to the school’s playground, the young children didn’t even lift their eyes from the ground; they  just kept dragging and pushing their tiny shovels through the mud.

At 9:30 a.m., the boys were called to line up for a daily activity called Morning Circle. (The girls were already inside—having chosen to play boardgames indoors.) They trudged across the yard in their rubber boots, pleading with their teachers to play longer—even though they had already been outside for an hour. As they stood in file, I asked them to describe what they’d been doing on the playground.

“Making dams,” sang a chorus of three boys.

“Nothing else?” one of their teachers prodded.

“Nothing else,” they confirmed.
...

And there’s no such thing as a typical day of kindergarten at the preschool, the teachers said. Instead of a daily itinerary, two of them showed me a weekly schedule with no more than several major activities per day: Mondays, for example, are dedicated to field trips, ballgames, and running, while Fridays—the day I visited—are for songs and stations.

Once, Morning Circle—a communal  time of songs and chants—wrapped up, the children disbanded and flocked to the station of their choice: There was one involving fort-making with bed sheets, one for arts and crafts, and one where kids could run a pretend ice-cream shop. “I’ll take two scoops of pear and two scoops of strawberry—in a waffle cone,” I told the two kindergarten girls who had positioned themselves at the ice-cream table; I had a (fake) 10€ bill to spend, courtesy of one of the teachers. As one of the girls served me—using blue tack to stick laminated cutouts of scoops together—I handed the money to her classmate.

With a determined expression reminiscent of the boys in the mud with their shovels, the young cashier stared at the price list. After a long pause, one of her teachers—perhaps sensing a good opportunity to step in—helped her calculate the difference between the price of my order and the 10€. Once I received my change (a few plastic coins), the girls giggled as I pretended to lick my ice cream.

...

“Play is a very efficient way of learning for children,” she told me. “And we can use it in a way that children will learn with joy.”

The word “joy” caught me off guard—I’m certainly not used to hearing the word in conversations about education in America, where I received my training and taught for several years. But Holappa, detecting my surprise, reiterated that the country’s early-childhood education program indeed places a heavy emphasis on “joy,” which along with play is explicitly written into the curriculum as a learning concept. "There's an old Finnish saying,” Holappa said. “Those things you learn without joy you will forget easily.”

After two hours of visiting a Finnish kindergarten, I still hadn’t seen children reading. I was, however, hearing a lot of pre-literacy instruction sprinkled throughout the morning—clapping out syllables and rhyming in Morning Circle, for example. I recalled learning in my master’s degree courses in education that building phonemic awareness—an ability to recognize sounds without involving written language—was viewed as the groundwork of literacy development.

Just before lunch, a kindergarten teacher took out a basket brimming with children’s books. But for these 5- and 6-year-olds, “reading” looked just like how my two toddlers approach their books: The kindergartners, sitting in different corners of the room, flipped through pages, savoring the pictures but, for the most part, not actually deciphering the words. Osei Ntiamoah told me that just one of the 15 students in her class can currently read syllable by syllable. Many of them, she added, will read by the end of the year. “We don’t push them but they learn just because they are ready for it. If the child is willing and interested, we will help the child.”

...

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, kindergarten students like that of the Arkansas teacher are generally expected—by the end of the year—to master literacy skills that are far more complex, like reading books with two to three sentences of unpredictable text per page. “These are 5- to 6-year-olds!” the Arkansas teacher wrote in disbelief.

More than 40 states—including Arkansas—have adopted the Common Core State Standards, which contain dozens of reading expectations for kindergartners. In the United States—where 22 percent of the nation’s children live in poverty (more than 16 million in total)—the Common Core’s emphasis on rigorous language-learning in kindergarten could be viewed as a strategy for closing the alarming “Thirty Million Word Gap” between America’s rich and poor—holding schools accountable for having high expectations for their youngest students.

Furthermore, unlike the reality of teaching kindergarten in Finland where the poverty rate is 10 percent and the student-teacher ratio is typically 14:1 (based on national guidelines), most American kindergarten teachers don’t have a choice whether or not they teach reading. Under the Common Core, children should be able to “read emergent-texts with purpose and understanding” by the end of kindergarten. Ultimately, they’re expected to, at the very least, be able to decode basic texts without the support of a teacher.

“But there isn’t any solid evidence that shows that children who are taught to read in kindergarten have any long-term benefit from it,” Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor emeritus of early childhood education at Lesley University, explained in a video published by the advocacy group Defending the Early Years.

Research by Sebastian Suggate, a former Ph.D. candidate at New Zealand’s University of Otago studying educational psychology, confirms Carlsson-Paige’s findings. One of Suggate’s studies compared children from Rudolf Steiner schools—who typically begin to read at the age of seven—with children at state-run schools in New Zealand, who start reading at the age of five. By age 11, students from the former group caught up with their peers in the latter, demonstrating equivalent reading skills.

“This research then raises the question,” he said in an interview published by the University of Otago. “If there aren’t advantages to learning to read from the age of five, could there be disadvantages to starting teaching children to read earlier?”

[note: I fixed a couple of garbled sentences shortly after posting this. -- MP]

P.S. Thoreau points us to this relevant story from Minnesota:

Two Edina elementary schools hire recess consultant

Playworks reports that its partner schools boast drops in disciplinary incidents and increases in participation and focus in class.

The aim is to build skills that would make kids “incredibly successful adults,” said Shauna McDonald, executive director of Playworks Minnesota. “It’s about creating opportunity.”

Mathematica Policy Research and Stanford University studies found that Playworks resulted in less bullying and more learning focus in schools.

Playworks has offered its services or had its staff in elementaries around the metro area — including schools in the Minneapolis, St. Paul, Anoka-Hennepin and Minnetonka school districts — and across the country.

...

Edina school officials say that data collected through the fall will determine whether Playworks will eventually be rolled out at all schools. Its implementation wasn’t spurred by any extreme uptick of behavioral issues, but rather a desire for quality playground experience, said Susan Brott, district communications director.

After kids have a lot of fun playing outside, it can be difficult getting them settled down and focused on classwork. Everybody knows this and has known this since we introduced the concept of a classroom. What has always been in dispute is whether these difficulties warrant the elimination of unstructured play.

The supporters of Playworks are using an old rhetorical dodge: starting out with a universally accepted premise and a highly questionable conclusion, they focus all of their arguments and evidence on A andd hope that people don't notice its weak connection to B.

Three from Marketplace, presented almost without comment

I'm trying to prioritize my blogging, both in terms of reducing total time and focusing on finishing up some of the massive backlog in the draft folder. I've even been avoiding sites like Mike the Mad Biologist because each visit tends to add to the to-write pile.

I should probably add Marketplace to the do-not-visit list, but life in LA means a lot of time behind the wheel and that's one place where I can't seem to kick the news habit.

As a compromise, here are brief descriptions of three stories and one series that I'd like to write more about:

In perhaps the ultimate in past-posting, the latest slot machine fad has people betting on historical horse races.

On the class stratification front (insert Eloi/Morlock reference here)...
   Similar credit scores = true love

The Marketplace website (which I'm not a fan of) hadn't put up a link last time I checked but Kai Ryssdal closed a recent show by mentioning an app that cancels your Comcast subscription for you.

And finally, I definitely want to blog in the future on this exceptional series on gentrification.
   York & Fig

New York Times definition of the week: "full-fledged investigation" = one Google search UPDATED

Brad DeLong has a very good overview of the ethical train wreck surrounding the New York Times review of Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger biography, but there's one aspect of the story that I think deserves more attention.

 Here's a quick recap (pay close attention to the dates).

Things started with the NYT assigning the review of conservative historian Ferguson's book to the remarkably like-minded Roberts, thus making a positive review quite a bit more likely.

Niall Ferguson’s ‘Kissinger. Volume I. 1923-1968: The Ideal­ist’
By ANDREW ROBERTS SEPT. 30, 2015

That would probably been enough to raise some eyebrows, but it turns out that the connection between Ferguson, Roberts and Kissinger went a bit deeper than that. The outcry prompted the paper to append this to the review:

Editors’ Note: October 2, 2015

After this review of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography of Henry Kissinger was published, editors learned that the reviewer, Andrew Roberts, had initially been approached by a publisher to write the biography himself; he says he turned the offer down for personal reasons, and Ferguson was eventually enlisted to undertake the task. In addition, Roberts and Ferguson were credited as co-authors of a chapter contributed to a book edited by Ferguson and first published in 1997 (Roberts describes their relationship as professional and friendly, but not close). Had editors been aware of these connections, they would have been disclosed in the review.

It was also the subject of a column by the New York Times public editor.

Conflicts and Kissinger: A Tale of Two Book Reviews

By MARGARET SULLIVAN
October 2, 2015

In the italic identification line appearing with his review of a new biography of Henry Kissinger, Andrew Roberts is described only as “the Lehrman Institute distinguished fellow at the New-York Historical Society.” And that is true.

But Mr. Roberts also seems to have what many reasonable people would consider a conflict of interest as a reviewer: He was Mr. Kissinger’s earlier choice to write his authorized biography, according to an interview with a United Kingdom newspaper, The Scotsman.

The Times Book Review editor, Pamela Paul, told me Thursday that she was unaware of this before the publication of a Gawker piece that makes much of that relationship and of Mr. Roberts’s acquaintance with the book’s author, Niall Ferguson.

...

She made the point that Book Review editors cannot realistically open full-fledged investigations into their reviewers’ backgrounds. If Mr. Roberts had told editors that he had turned down the chance to write the book himself, Ms. Paul said that it might not have disqualified him as the reviewer but that she would have had him acknowledge that information in the review.

There's a lot to discuss here, but let's just focus on the part about "full-fledged investigations." Exactly how much time would it have taken to uncover this particular issue? If I wanted to check for potential conflicts of interest between two public figures, my first thought would be to do a Google news search of both names. Obviously, search results are a moving target, but you can get a pretty good idea of what the results would have looked like by setting an appropriate date range.

When I tried this search, here was what I found in the fourth result:

Londoner's Diary: Niall Ferguson’s struggles with Kissinger’s life

    Monday 10 August 2015 15:30 BST

Ferguson, a professor at Harvard, was first mooted back in 2004 but only after Andrew Roberts backed out (and in doing so returned a £400,000 advance).

PS While most of us are familiar with Ferguson (see Andrew Gelman's comments below), Robert's record, though remarkably similar in style and substance, is less well-known. This will give you some idea why the New York Times decision to assign him the Ferguson/Kissinger review was so questionable.

From Wikipedia:

Although Roberts's 2006 work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 won critical acclaim from some sections of the media,[20][21] The Economist drew attention to some historical, geographical and typographical errors,[22] as well presenting a generally scathing review of the book. The news-magazine referred to the work as "a giant political pamphlet larded with its author's prejudices".[22]

One claim made by Roberts in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 was that Harvard historian Caroline Elkins had committed "blood libels against Britain" in her Pulitzer prize-winning book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.[23] Elkins was subsequently vindicated when files released by the National Archives showed that abuses were described as "distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia" by the Solicitor General of the time.[24] The Foreign Secretary William Hague subsequently announced compensation for the first round of victims with statements that the British government "recognises that Kenyans were subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment" and "sincerely regrets that these abuses took place" during the Kenya Emergency.[25][26]

Controversial journalist Johann Hari alleged that Roberts' writings defended the Amritsar massacre, the concentration camps for Afrikaners during the Anglo-Boer War and mass internments in Ireland. Hari also wrote that Roberts addressed the expatriate South African Springbok Club that flies the pre-1994 South African national flag and calls for "the re-establishment of civilised rule throughout the African continent".[27] Roberts responded by saying that he did not realise the Springbok Club was racist when he took on the speaking engagement.

Occam's Razor

This is Joseph.

I know Mark is often lukewarm about Kevin Drum.  But he has been asking some pretty good questions lately, and I think this one about Hillary Clinton is quite good.  I find, in practice, that people tend to assume that others know about he things that they do.  Many of my most geeky friends who are good with coding also tend to not be the biggest fans of the Clintons. 

I wonder if much of the email and server issues are about what they could know that one could do with such a set-up if they were intending to be nefarious.  But it seems, from the emails, that Hillary was not especially adept with technology, asking to be taught how to use an iPad. 

So I am starting to side with Kevin Drum -- the private server is looking more like an idea that seemed cool at the time, and nobody thought that it would ever look bad.  After all, people are still not attacking Colin Powell over exactly the same practice when he was Secretary of State.

Ken Levine shows us how NBC shows get on the air

 A rocket scientist I know once observed the fundamental similarity between LA's two defining industries: entertainment and aerospace. Both exist from deal to deal, lining up risky, hugely expensive projects. Each of these projects require much of the work to be done from scratch, so much so that it's often like setting up a new business every time a deal goes through.

There are, of course, limits to the analogy. In business terms, perhaps the biggest is the nature of the customer. For all the talk of a private age of space exploration, aerospace is still a business driven by government contracts. This entails a certain level of craziness, as Ben Rich spells out in his memoir (just look up 'navy' in the index)...

... but those issues pale next to coping with the unpredictability of the viewing public. As screenwriter William Goldman famously put it "Nobody knows anything." Studio executives have to decide whether or not to spend a hundred million dollars based on only a rough idea of what the customer might want. The good executives like Moonves, Silverman, Tartikoff or, in the cable world John Landgraf (all of whom may have been worth their enormous compensation packages) can be both derivative and original, quick to jump on trends while they're still hot but also willing to try something or someone untested but promising.

At the other extreme, you have executives who are so overwhelmed by the uncertainty that every decision has to be based on precedent, not so much because to maximize profit as to minimize blame. Once again, Goldman has lots of smart observations on this topic.

Another smart observer who's made perhaps as many pitches as Goldman is Ken Levine. Levine regularly satirizes the networks and his favorite target is probably NBC which, for at least fifteen years, has been the home of the worst executives in the industry. Here's the beginning of Levine's take on what the pitch for the new NBC show Blindspot might have gone.

WRITER/CREATOR: We got this totally cool idea. It’s like a mix between the Bourne movies, PRISON BREAK, MEMENTO, the old game show CAMOUFLAGE, and what shows do you like?

NBC: BLACKLIST.

W/C: It’s also like BLACKLIST.

NBC: We’ve been looking for another BLACKLIST. And another HEROES.

W/C: Ours is that too.

NBC: That’s okay. We’re remaking HEROES.

W/C: Well, if you ever want to remake THE BIONIC WOMAN ours is also like that show.

NBC: THE BIONIC WOMAN was a bomb.

W/C: Wait. I forgot. We took out THE BIONIC WOMAN elements.

NBC: So what’s the series?

W/C: Well, we don’t actually have a concept yet – what’s it about, what happens every week, who all the characters are – we still need to tackle those details.

NBC: So what are you bringing us?

W/C: An opening scene.

NBC: An opening scene? That’s it?

W/C: Yep. Something with sizzle that you can promote all summer. Who cares if it has legs?

NBC: Well, like I said, we’re looking for another BLACKLIST. And that’s BLACKLIST. We’re sort of hoping they’ll figure something out this season.  What’s your first scene?

W/C: We’re in Times Square. It’s night. Crowded. And someone discovers a duffel bag. Just sitting in the street. And it has a tag that says CALL THE FBI.

NBC: Wouldn’t they call the FBI anyway?

W/C: You know that. And I know that. But NBC’s audience doesn’t know that.

NBC: You think they’re that dense?

W/C: BLACKLIST.

NBC: Good point. Go on..

It goes on in this vein for quite a while, leading to a very funny if predictable pay-off. You should check it out. There is, however, one point Levine doesn't mention that I like to stress. Good studio executives can make their companies lots of money; bad ones can cost them even more, but both the good and the bad take home huge paychecks, and the truly awful usually manage an obscene golden parachute on the way out.

The Daraprim story

This is Joseph.

The drug Daraprim jumped in it's cost from $13.55 a pill to $750 per pill after it was purchased by a new company:

“This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients, it is us trying to stay in business,” Mr. Shkreli said. He said that many patients use the drug for far less than a year and that the price was now more in line with those of other drugs for rare diseases.

“This is still one of the smallest pharmaceutical products in the world,” he said. “It really doesn’t make sense to get any criticism for this.”

Aaron Carroll is skeptical:

“Trying to stay in business”? If the company couldn’t make money at the same price the old company was, then why did they buy the drug? And asking people to pay WAY more to fund other drug development seems like gouging sick people with no choice. I’m having trouble understanding the optics of this. 

The ability to boost the price dramatically was certainly a way to maximize profits, but it does so at the cost of increasing health care costs.  And because the drug is infrequently used, it is unlikely you will see a lot of competitors manufacturing the drug. This is especially true, here, with a closed distribution system being used.  If you can't get enough drug to do a bioequivalence study, then you can't enter the market.

How we navigate these issues is tricky . . .  That said, there is something to be said about competitive market failure if the barriers to entry allow one to increase the price by so much and yet you don't immediately lure competitors to get their share of the $749 per pill (or so) in profit. Similarly, blocking the proof of equivalence between two agents is also a complete barrier to entry and not necessarily helping matters at all.

EDIT: The company has dropped prices from the $750/pill level.  However, the underlying issue of market failure remains, unless we think that social media should be a way of enforcing market discipline on companies.  Usually, this only influences the most egregious cases. 

Cliches so hoary it hurts to type them

From Space.com

"Star Trek: Renegades," the 90-minute first installment of a planned Internet series, was released on YouTube Monday (Aug. 24). The film is not a part of the official "Star Trek" universe — it was financed primarily by three crowdfunding campaigns over the last several years — but it does feature characters and actors familiar to Trekkies.

...

"Together, they assemble a new elite strike force, consisting of rogues, outcasts and criminals, led by the fearless yet haunted Lexxa Singh (Adrienne Wilkinson). ... The Renegades’ mission is simple: take on an army and stop their leader, Borrada (Bruce Young), from destroying the Earth," the website adds. "Outnumbered and outgunned, the ragtag crew is in an adrenaline-pumping race against time and space. But they soon find their foes are the least of their concerns: the real trouble may be coming from within!"

I watched about a half hour and...

I really dislike punching down. It's seldom funny and never pretty and, even when it's well done, it raises the question "Can't you find anything better to make fun of?" Criticizing a fan film, even a fan film with professional aspirations, would seem to be the essence of punching down. The weaknesses of this particular film, however, are a very good fit with another of our ongoing threads. So...

I watched about a half-hour and, other than some well done prosthetics, it was every bit as bad as you might expect, from the clumsy exposition to the uneven acting to the endless stream of cliches.

It's that last one I want to focus on. The producers raised nearly $400,000 on Kickstarter and Indiegogo not only to make yet another film in the over-explored Star Trek universe, but to make one with perhaps the most overused premise imaginable, a pitch that wasn't all that fresh when Robert Aldrich made it fifty years ago. Even if the final film had been well executed (and it wasn't), there was little chance of it being anything more than competent hack work.

My concern here isn't that Renegades is a bad film, but that it's bad in a way that suggests bigger problems in the way we fund projects these days. By some accounts, this is supposed to be something of a golden age for new ideas. Between venture capital and crowd funding, you might assume that it has never been easier for creative and innovative people to get money, but the assumption behind that assumption is that there's a strong positive correlation between how creative and innovative a proposal is and how likely it is to get funded. What if the correlation is weak? Hell, what if it's negative? That may seem like a strong statement, but between this and Soylent and numerous other examples, you have to wonder.