Rational decisions based on incorrect assumptions

Recently, Marco Rubio gave a speech in which he more or less boasted about calling Trump out as a con man " five days ago." This hits on a question Joseph and I have been discussing and texting over for quite a while now, why did it take so long? Why did topics like Trump University go unmentioned until the candidate was on the verge of cinching the nomination?

Joseph suggested glass houses. Lots of Republican candidates would prefer that the topic of for-profit education not come up. I am sure there is something to that but I think there is a bigger and scarier factor.

What if the people in charge of the Republican Party actually believed what they read in the paper? Even without the threat of a third party run (though that may have been the main factor), the Party had plenty of reason to be reluctant to piss off Trump. He had money, power, media access, a devoted following and a proven willingness to play nasty.

Balanced against the considerable risks of attacking Trump, what were the risks of letting him be? That depended on who you listened to. Among those with good track records, there were basically two camps: the guardedly nervous and the confidently optimistic. The first group (Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall, Jonathan Chait, et al.) considered a Trump nomination a long shot but still something to be taken seriously, partially because long shots do come in and partially because Trump would almost certainly exert considerable influence even if he didn't win the primary. The second group (which included most major data journalists) argued that Trump had virtually no chance of winning, was “not a real candidate,” and would have no significant impact on the rest of the race.

Even at the time, a lot of us pointed out problems with the optimistic camp position. The statistics cited were piecemeal and didn't come together in a coherent argument. Important parts were left out of the historical analogies. Conflicting evidence was ignored. Narratives took the place of models.  Nonetheless, the optimistic position was the overwhelming establishment favorite.

Working from those favored assumptions, the delay in hauling out the serious charges against Trump would have been entirely rational. Why engage in a costly battle against an opponent who was already on the verge of imploding?

And when those assumptions have their final, fatal encounter with reality, outcomes like this were entirely to be expected:

So many things are happening right now - mostly with the actors in question having no clear plan for what they're doing - that it's very hard to know where our politics will be a week from now let alone in six months. But there's one thing we can see clearly and it's worth noting: top Republican stakeholders are breaking a lot of china right now that will be very, very hard to unbreak. What seems most relevant to me is that almost all of this is being done with no clear sense of an end-game or even a clear plan.

‘If you’ve made them cry, you’ve succeeded in getting your point across’

More Success Academy details worth mentioning.

Mother of Girl Berated in Video Assails Success Academy’s Response

By Kate Taylor FEB. 25, 2016

In two lengthy interviews, she said that she did not know what was happening in her daughter’s classroom before she saw the video. She said that she was so upset by what she saw — and by the network’s rush to rally around Ms. Dial, while showing little concern for her daughter or other students — that she took the girl out of the school in late January.

Ms. Miranda said that while Ms. Dial had apologized to her, the teacher had never apologized to her daughter. She said that a public relations specialist for Success drafted an email for her, asking The Times not to publish the video, and that at a meeting Ms. Moskowitz held at the school on Jan. 20, Ms. Moskowitz asked the parents to support Ms. Dial and to defend the school to the paper. Ms. Miranda said that when she stood up, identified herself and objected that Ms. Moskowitz was asking parents to support the teacher without even showing them the video, Ms. Moskowitz cut her off.

“She’s like, ‘You had enough to say, you had enough to say,’ and she tried to talk over me,” Ms. Miranda said. “So I just really got frustrated, and I just walked out, and the parents that were concerned followed me, and the parents who were against me and for the teacher” stayed in the auditorium.

Ms. Miranda took her daughter home that morning and did not bring her back to the school. The next week, after confirming that there was a seat in the regular public school where her younger son is in prekindergarten, she withdrew her daughter and placed her in that school.

...

The video was recorded surreptitiously in the fall of 2014 by an assistant teacher who was concerned by what she described as Ms. Dial’s daily harsh treatment of the children. The assistant teacher, who insisted on anonymity because she feared endangering future job prospects, shared the video with The New York Times after she left Success in November.

After being shown the video last month, Ann Powell, a Success spokeswoman, described its contents as shocking and said Ms. Dial had been suspended pending an investigation. But a week and a half later, Ms. Dial returned to her classroom and her role as an exemplar within the network.

...

In an interview and at the news conference, Ms. Moskowitz dismissed the video as an anomaly, but Ms. Miranda’s daughter, now 8, said that Ms. Dial frequently yelled at students for infractions like not folding their hands. She said that she did not remember the specific incident captured on the video, but that she was afraid to ask questions in Ms. Dial’s class, because asking Ms. Dial to explain something a second time would lead to a punishment. She said Ms. Dial had on other occasions ripped up children’s papers when she thought they were copying others’ work.

She said she did not complain to her mother, because “I was scared of Ms. Dial.”

It is important to remember that we are talking about a literal "model teacher," someone whom the Success Academy officially held up as an example to train others, and she was promoted to that position because (and this is supported by everything else we know about the program) Ms. Dial provided the school with exactly what it was looking for, a high pressure environment that would get the most out of the students who could stand up to it and would chase off those that couldn't.

From the previous NYT article in the series:

Success is known for its students’ high achievement on state tests, and it emphasizes getting — and keeping — scores up. Jessica Reid Sliwerski, 34, worked at Success Academy Harlem 1 and Success Academy Harlem 2 from 2008 to 2011, first as a teacher and then as an assistant principal. She said that, starting in third grade, when children begin taking the state exams, embarrassing or belittling children for work seen as slipshod was a regular occurrence, and in some cases encouraged by network leaders.

“It’s this culture of, ‘If you’ve made them cry, you’ve succeeded in getting your point across,’” she said.

One day, she said, she found herself taking a toy away from a boy who was playing with it in class, and then smashing it underfoot. Shortly after, she resigned.

“I felt sick about the teacher I had become, and I no longer wanted to be part of an organization where adults could so easily demean children under the guise of ‘achievement,’” said Ms. Sliwerski, who subsequently worked as an instructional coach in Department of Education schools.

This is the business model. You design everything around the sole purpose of optimizing one arbitrary metric regardless of the toll on the students, families and faculty, a metric that is very probably losing its value as an indicator of academic progress thanks to these practices.

In an age of open-carry, that video would have ended very differently

From TPM

"I must say: I am completely baffled by the Trump and evangelical numbers. Bizarre," Michael Cromartie, the Vice President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, first said in response to a query on the topic.

Cromartie said that either evangelical voters are not prioritizing their values when they go to the ballot box or the definition of "evangelical" or "born again Christian" has grown too broad.

“The definition of evangelical is starting to get elastic," Cromartie said "In the past, evangelicals were people who had moral and culture conservative values and they cared less about the economy and jobs. ... Either they have put on deep dark sunglasses and are saying they like a person who speaks bluntly and emphatically about the fact that we don’t win anymore or the definition has grown too broad."

In exit polls, large numbers of Republican voters identify themselves as "evangelical or born again." In South Carolina, 70 percent of Republican voters identified as evangelical, according to a report in the National Review. But if you look more closely at the numbers, the National Review's analysis indicates that Cruz performed better in counties in South Carolina where voters reported they went to church more often. Trump, meanwhile, did better in counties where voters went to church less frequently.

This is just the latest chapter in a long-running thread. Traditional Fundamentalist Protestant evangelicalism has been dead as a political force for years now, long since replaced by a more manageable social reactionaryism. Though they share many positions, social reactionaries are generally in favor of popular public secular displays such as Xmas pageants, by definition more inclined to undo social reforms and far, far more willing to play nice with other denominations.

And, of course, more likely to vote for agnostic sybarites who promise to make America the way it used to be.


Here's what evangelicals were like when I was young.

[Courtesy of Joe Bob Briggs]

Still don't want to push the 1964 analogy too far, but...

One of the many lessons this campaign has taught us about the press is that many, perhaps most, pundits are really bad at what George Polya would call inference by analogy. Rather than looking at historical parallels as the source of plausible hypotheses about the underlying relationships (relationships that can be explored, tested and very slightly extrapolated beyond the range of data), a shocking number of otherwise smart people seem to believe that these parallels suggest that history is simply about to repeat itself. For all its intellectual trappings, that reasoning is no more sophisticated than that of the sports fan who always puts on his lucky underwear before a big game.

Trump is not Goldwater and both the country and the Republican Party were very different in 1964 than they are today. With that in mind, there are some parallels worth considering. I've already posted the Daisy spot in response to Cruz's comments on nuclear weapons. LBJ's ads are even more relevant to recent developments in the Trump campaign.

Goldwater had similar issues. [Make sure to mute the sound if you're in public.]

The Living Room Candidate - Transcript
"KKK," Johnson, 1964

MALE NARRATOR: "We represent the majority of the people in Alabama who hate n-----ism, Catholicism, Judaisim, and all the -isms of the whole world." So said Robert Creel of the Alabama Klu Klux Klan. He also said, "I like Barry Goldwater. He needs our help."

As noted many places, the moderate wing of the GOP is freaking out over Trump (see here and here)

The Johnson campaign brilliantly exploited a similar reaction to Goldwater.

The Living Room Candidate - Transcript"Confessions of a Republican," Johnson, 1964

[TEXT: Confessions of a Republican]

REPUBLICAN: I don't know just why they wanted to call this a confession; I certainly don't feel guilty about being a Republican. I've always been a Republican. My father is, his father was, the whole family is a Republican family. I voted for Dwight Eisenhower the first time I ever voted; I voted for Nixon the last time. But when we come to Senator Goldwater, now it seems to me we're up against a very different kind of a man. This man scares me.

Now maybe I'm wrong. A friend of mine just said to me, "Listen, just because a man sounds a little irresponsible during a campaign doesn't mean he's going to act irresponsibly." You know that theory, that the White House makes the man. I don't buy that. You know what I think makes a President - I mean, aside from his judgement, his experience - are the men behind him, his advisors, the cabinet. And so many men with strange ideas are working for Goldwater. You hear a lot about what these guys are against - they seem to be against just about everything - but what are they for?

The hardest thing for me about this whole campaign is to sort out one Goldwater statement from another. A reporter will go to Senator Goldwater and he'll say, "Senator, on such and such a day, you said, and I quote, 'blah blah blah' whatever it is, end quote." And then Goldwater says, "Well, I wouldn't put it that way." I can't follow that. Was he serious when he did put it that way? Is he serious when he says I wouldn't put it that way? I just don't get it. A President ought to mean what he says.

President Johnson, Johnson at least is talking about facts. He says, "Look, we've got the tax cut bill and because of that you get to carry home X number of dollars more every payday. We've got the nuclear test ban and because of that there is X percent less radioactivity in the food." But, but Goldwater, often, I can't figure out just what Goldwater means by the things he says. I read now where he says, "A craven fear of death is sweeping across America. What is that supposed to mean? If he means that people don't want to fight a nuclear war, he's right. I don't. When I read some of these things that Goldwater says about total victory, I get a little worried, you know? I wish I was as sure that Goldwater is as against war as I am that he's against some of these other things. I wish I could believe that he has the imagination to be able to just shut his eyes and picture what this country would look like after a nuclear war.

Sometimes, I wish I'd been at that convention at San Francisco. I mean, I wish I'd been a delegate, I really do. I would have fought, you know. I wouldn't have worried so much about party unity because if you unite behind a man you don't believe in, it's a lie. I tell you, those people who got control of that convention: Who are they? I mean, when the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party — either they're not Republicans or I'm not.

I've thought about just not voting at this election, just staying home — but you can't do that, that's saying you don't care who wins, and I do care. I think my party made a bad mistake in San Francisco, and I'm going to have to vote against that mistake on the third of November.

MALE NARRATOR: Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.

And, of course... Florida

I realize we've been hammering the charters pretty hard lately, but the intention has never been a blanket condemnation. There are a lot of good ideas here and even more good people, but, at present, the whole enterprise has at least two fatal flaws: a naive approach to metric-based policy and a childlike faith in the power of markets to overcome conflicts of interest.

The result has been exactly what any reasonable person would have expected.

John Romano writing for the Tampa Bay Times

Rep. Erik Fresen ['named “legislator of the year” by Florida’s for-profit college lobbying group, the Florida Association of Postsecondary Schools & Colleges'], a font of smiling insincerity, wants the state to turn most of its school construction and renovation funds over to companies that run charter schools.

Never mind that traditional schools outnumber charters about 6-to-1. Never mind that from 2009 to 2014, charters got $312 million in capital funds and traditional schools got a pat on the head. Never mind that practically 1 out of every 4 charters eventually closes and that taxpayer money is forever lost.

Nope, let's forget all of that for a minute and focus on Fresen, a Republican from Miami.

The guy the Miami Herald reports earns $150,000 a year consulting for an architecture firm that specializes in — I can't make this up — building charter schools. The guy whose sister and brother-in-law are executives with one of the state's largest charter operators.

Now, who thinks that might be a conflict of interest for a politician in charge of divvying up construction funds between charters and traditional schools?

...

The schools were to have "special emphasis on expanded learning experiences for students who are identified as academically low achieving.''

That sounds like at-risk kids. Poor kids. Minority kids.

And yet, all these years later, that's not what's happened.

For instance, based on the data included in the Florida Department of Education's school grades released Friday, 68 percent of the students in traditional Hillsborough County schools are considered economically disadvantaged. And yet, in the county's three dozen charter schools, only 30 percent of the students are economically at-risk.

So maybe Hillsborough is an outlier. An aberration.

Except poor kids also are underrepresented at charter schools in Pinellas County. And Pasco. And Hernando.

In South Florida, where charters are everywhere, the numbers are truly disturbing. Let's look at the schools where more than 80 percent of the students come from low-income families. Can we agree those are the situations where charters might do the greatest good?

Well, in Miami-Dade, more than 51 percent of traditional public schools fall into that category, and only 35 percent of charters. How about the reverse situation? Schools where less than 20 percent of the students come from low-income families? That would be 1 percent of the public schools, and 13 percent of the charters.

In other words, the numbers are opposite what they're supposed to be. Charters seem to be catering more to wealthy families and leaving the poor kids behind. And, as a bonus, the state keeps taking money away from those public schools to give to charters.

...

This is not a knock on charters. Many are truly exceptional, and some are succeeding in situations where public schools failed.

Instead, this is a plea to parents. To taxpayers. To anyone who cares about public schools. Your Legislature has sold what remains of its dark soul to the growing industry of for-profit education. Lawmakers will talk fancy about being fiscal watchdogs, but it's all a ruse to cater to companies that see students as living, breathing profit margins.

Here's more on the story from the Miami Herald.

I should have posted this quote a long time ago

 "[A]chievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)"

 Donald T. Campbell via Wikipedia.

With that in mind, take another look at this and this.

I don't have time to write this up...

... and I'm not crazy about the central debt metaphor, but Josh Marshall (who has been perhaps the best political analyst on the Trump story) has an essential post on the GOP's loss of control. If you do a search for "Trump" on our blog, you'll see we've been making some similar points for a while now.

We've also talked about the implications of a messy primary fight. In another much shorter post, Marshall nails that one as well.

As you read this, keep repeating to yourself, "second graders"

The following is from Boston area teacher Emily Kaplan's account of her earlier experiences working for a no-excuses charter school. If you've been following the Success Academy story, parts of this will sound very familiar:

 Sixteen seven- and eight-year olds sit in a circle on the floor. On the wall to their left— the first thing they see upon entering and exiting the classroom, always done in complete silence— is a list of individual “Assessment Goals.” (This “no excuses” charter network creates its own high-stress tests, which all students take at least five times per month, beginning in kindergarten.)
...

The teacher speaks to them in a slow, measured tone. “When I left school here yesterday, after working hard all day to give you a good education so you can go to college, I felt disappointed. I felt sad.”

Shoulders drop. Children put their faces in their hands.

“And do you know why?” The teacher looks around the circle; children avert their eyes.

One child raises her hand tentatively. “We didn´t do good on our tests?”

The teacher nods. “Yes, you didn´t do well on your assessments. Our class average was very low. And so I felt sad. I went home and I felt very sad for the rest of the day.”

The children nod resignedly. They´ve heard this many times before.

Suddenly, one child, an eight-year-old who has been suspended for a total of sixteen days for repeatedly failing to comply with school rules, raises his hand. The teacher looks at him. “I am noticing that there is a question.”

The child tilts his head. “What does average mean?” Several children nod; it seems that they, too, have been wondering this, but have been too afraid to ask.

The teacher sighs. “It´s a way to tell if everyone in this room is showing self-determination. [This is perhaps the most maddening part for me. Good teachers live for these kind of pertinent, engaged questions. I don't care if your desk is on fire, you make time to answer them. At the very least, you say "that's a great question, but we'll  have to come back to it later." -- MP] And what I saw yesterday is that we are not. Scholars in Connecticut College” —at the school, children are “scholars,” and classrooms are named after four-year colleges— “are not less smart than scholars in UMass. But the scholars in UMass got a 78% average.”

One girl pipes up. “And we only got a 65%!”

The teacher moves the child´s clothespin a rung down on the “choice stick” for speaking out of turn.

“And the scholars in Lesley got a 79%. The scholars in UMass and the scholars in Lesley are not smarter than you are. They do not know how to read better than you.” She looks around. “They do not know how to write better than you.” Suddenly, her voice rises in volume. “Scholars, what can we do to show UMass and Lesley that we are just as smart as they are?”

The children look to the list of “assessment goals” posted on the wall. They raise their hands, one by one.

“I will read my work over so I don´t make mistakes.”

The teacher nods.

“I will begin every sentence with a capital letter.”

“I will do my best work so you don´t get sad anymore.”

The teacher smiles. “Good.”

This teacher— with whom I co-taught a second grade class— is now a high-level administrator and “instructional coach” at the school. It is her job to ensure that the school’s instructors (almost all of whom are white) to “teach” using these dehumanizing, teacher-focused tactics with their students (almost all of whom are children of color from low-income families.)

...

At this school, children are deprived of a comprehensive, developmentally appropriate, and humane education; instead, they are subjected to militaristic discipline, excessive amounts of testing (well beyond that which is already mandated by the state), a criminally deficient amount of playtime (in a nine-hour school day, kindergartners have twenty minutes of recess) [I take it back. That twenty minutes of play is the most maddening part -- MP], and lack of access to social-emotional curricula— all so that the people who run their schools can make a political point.

Let me go a bit further. I've seen close up a number of educators, schools and programs that provided kids of color from poor families with "a comprehensive, developmentally appropriate, and humane education" and (once you get past the cooked data) did a better job closing the achievement gap than most of the no-excuses charter schools.

Ayn Rand: a continuing saga

An Ayn Rand quote:

Collectivism is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.

One thing that seems to be not well considered is that, in a state of nature, collectivism is also required for survival.  Absent science-fiction (or possibly bleeding edge tech) we all require the efforts of other people to come into existence.  After all, people all had stages with mothers and with early infant care, in which they could not reasonably be an autonomous individual. 

The author of the linked piece on Ayn Rand points out:

The fly in the ointment of Rand’s philosophical “objectivism” is the plain fact that humans have a tendency to cooperate and to look out for each other, as noted by many anthropologists who study hunter-gatherers. These “prosocial tendencies” were problematic for Rand, because such behavior obviously mitigates against “natural” self-interest and therefore should not exist. She resolved this contradiction by claiming that humans are born as tabula rasa, a blank slate, (as many of her time believed) and prosocial tendencies, particularly altruism, are “diseases” imposed on us by society, insidious lies that cause us to betray biological reality.

The trouble here is that biological reality involves dependence.  At the very basic level, people are from families and not individuals that spring into existence (a point I first heard on Youtube).  Is not a natural drive towards cooperation a key element of family?  Which doesn't mean that you can't have vicious competition, both within and between families -- consider the War of the Roses, or the fiction series a Song of Ice and Fire. 

Looking at animal behavior doesn't make things any better.  Most mammals have some degree of child care and assistance for offspring.  That makes a strong biological argument unlikely. 

That doesn't mean Rand is irrelevant -- it's an odd perspective and it can highlight some social conventions that need examination.  But, as a complete system, it starts out on really shaky ground.

The Other Seccret Success Academy Tape*

 [* Until the next one pops up.]
 
As mentioned before, there is reason to believe that at least part of the success Success has had at raising scores on some (though notably, not all) standardized tests can be attributed to selection biases that that effectively filter out many of the kids most in need of help (ESL students, the learning disabled and virtually all of the homeless).

This filtering does not appear to stop with the admissions process, at least when it comes to LD kids. Success is currently facing a wave of damning and credible accusations (not to mention lawsuits) around this issue. Perhaps the best reporting on this story has come from Juan Gonzalez, who has been on this for a long time:

The Upper West Side Success Academy charter school has touted itself for not trying to push out kids with special needs or behavior problems, but a parent has audio to the contrary.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, August 30, 2013, 2:30 AM

[emphasis added]

The tapes, a copy of which the mother supplied the Daily News, poke a hole in claims by the fast-growing Success Academy chain founded by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz that it doesn’t try to push out students with special needs or behavior problems.
Nancy Zapata said she resorted to the secret tapes last December and again in March after school officials used their “zero tolerance” discipline policy to repeatedly suspend her son, Yael, kept telephoning her at work to pick him up from school in the middle of the day and urged her to transfer him.
...
 “There was a point when I was getting a call every day for every minor thing,” Zapata said. “They would say he was crying excessively, or not looking straight forward, or throwing a tantrum, or not walking up the stairs fast enough, or had pushed another kid.”

What school officials did not do, Zapata said, was provide the kind of special education services that her son’s individual educational plan, or IEP, requires.
...

At one point in the tapes, a Success official can be heard telling Zapata:

“We’re technically out of compliance because we aren’t able to meet what his IEP recommends for him.”
...
 In the tapes, however, another Success administrator is heard acknowledging that Yael’s tantrums are related to his speech disability.

“He is getting really frustrated when people can’t understand what he’s communicating, and you can’t blame him for that,” the administrator tells Zapata.

In a second meeting, the mother asks why Success admitted her son through a lottery but is not providing him all the services he needs.

“If they have those special education needs, you’re absolutely right that they need to be fulfilled,” an official replies, but then quickly adds that the network doesn’t offer smaller special ed classes in kindergarten.

 “We will help them find the [appropriate] DOE placement,” the official says.

In other words, lottery or not, kindergarten kids like Yael who need smaller classes should find a public school that has one.

 A few quick observations on the explicit and implicit here.

Starting with the explicit, the administrators are coming out and saying that they were knowingly violating this disabled student's civil rights by denying him legally required services and that they had no intention of spending the money to fix the problem. What's more, they wouldn't provide even accommodations for any infractions despite the fact that some were trivial while others were, by the administrators own admission, the result of the student 's disability.

On an implicit level, it is difficult to read this as anything other than a systematic and very effective way of getting rid of kids who put a disproportionate drain on the school's time, money and resources and who are unlikely to do much to improve the school's test scores. In particular, the policy of having (in many cases single) parents have to take off work because their kids were crying or not keeping their eyes forward is exactly what I would do if I were in their place and lacked all sense of common decency.

Just when you thought Hulu's anti-trust issues couldn't get any worse

Hulu has always been a great example of two important business principles:

First, that it is nearly impossible to get in trouble for anti-trust violations these days (Hulu was a partnership of ABC/Disney, NBC/Universal and Fox);

And second, no business model is idiot-proof (though it does take a great deal of incompetence to screw up something this close to a monopoly).

Because it has been so poorly conceived (starting with wildly optimistic estimates for advertising revenue) and badly run, Hulu's backers have been backing away for a while now and the company would love to find another pair of deep pockets, and since it has a near monopoly on its corner of the market, it offers potential buyers a unique opportunity to screw over the consumer.

Nathan McAlone writing for Business Insider

Time Warner is deep in talks to buy a 25% stake in Hulu, but the company ultimately wants episodes of current TV seasons to be kicked off Hulu, according to The Wall Street Journal. This isn't a condition for investment, but it puts Time Warner fundamentally at odds with something that has been an integral part of Hulu's business model and has helped the service snag 10 million subscribers (for reference, Netflix has about 45 million US subscribers). [Those two numbers practically meaningless. Hulu has a two-tier model (ad-based and fee-based) so most of its viewers and possibly most of its revenue come from non-subscribers. -- MP]

Why does Time Warner want to cripple Hulu's big advantage?

The company sees "next-day" TV content as something that undermines the value of its pay-TV packages, The Journal reports. Time Warner fears that Hulu's popularity, especially built on the back of current TV seasons, will accelerate cord-cutting, or the ditching of cable subscriptions altogether.

At its core, the argument comes down to whether you believe the big bundle, the 500-channel cable package, can be saved. Time Warner clearly does, and it wants to bulk up its own TV Everywhere packages, which are tied to a cable subscription. From this vantage point, it's easy to see why Time Warner sees Hulu as undercutting its business.

Time Warner is closely aligned with one of the most hated and antiquated industries in the entire economy, cable TV. That industry is being pressured by new technologies. Of those, perhaps the most threatening are services that allow viewers to see the most popular content cable offers a few days later on the internet for free. If those services were split up over a wide range of providers, Time Warner and the cable companies would probably have to deal with the new landscape by rethinking their business models, improving their product, cutting prices, and doing a wide range of other things we'd like to see.  Unfortunately, since so much of this potential competition is concentrated in one horribly managed company, Tim Warner apparently believes it can just buy a stake in the train wreck and force it to stop providing those services to the consumers.

"Slam the Exam" = "Game the System"?

Some 2,300 Success Academy students attended a "Slam the Exam" rally before last year's state English tests. The network goes to great lengths to make sure students are ready for the exams. ( Photo by Success Academy )

Over at the teaching blog:

It is notable and more than a little disheartening that this reporter, like most of his colleagues, seems to see all things that improve achievement scores as equally desirable, even those tactics that only serve to undermine the validity of the test.

Losing money to build market share

This is Joseph.

A remarkable statistic from the Guardian:

A recent article in The Information, a tech news site, suggests that during the first three quarters of 2015 Uber lost $1.7bn while booking $1.2bn in revenue. The company has so much money that, in at least some North American locations, it has been offering rides at rates so low that they didn’t even cover the combined cost of fuel and vehicle depreciation.

These numbers only have to be vaguely correct for there to be serious concerns about predatory pricing.  Because below the cost of fuel and vehicle depreciation is selling at a dead loss.  Of course, Uber is a very smart company and they have created a class of independent contractors to try and make a direct link between costs and revenue tricky to do.

But, I think we can all agree that when losses exceed revenue then the endgame is not likely to be a new system of rides that are more cost effective.  There may be economies of scale, but they are not likely to overcome that kind of problem (not the revenue doesn't exceed losses . . . which is a very long way from profits). 

Just something to ponder when we make direct comparisons between costs of taxi cabs and Uber car services, like here.  These prices aren't going to be this low forever, unless Uber has a clever car plan to reduce costs of acquisition and repair.  And that's the part of the plan that I am most interested in.

While we're on the subject...

Check out the name of this Krugman post:

Working towward a notion of plausibility -- Krugman on models

I know I always promise I'm going to come back later and tie things together, but thiss time I really mean it.

Paul Krugman -- Making And Using Models

And that really gets at my point, which is not that existing models are always the right guide for policy, but that policy preferences should be disciplined by models. If you don’t believe the implications of the standard model in any area, OK; but then give me a model, or at least a sketch of a model, to justify your instincts.

What, after all, are economic models for? They are definitely not Truth. They are, however, a way to make sure that the stories you tell hang together, that they involve some plausible combination of individual behavior and interaction of those plausibly behaving individuals.

Take, for example, the famous open letter to Ben Bernanke demanding that he call off quantitative easing. The signatories declared that “The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.” OK, how is that supposed to work? What model of the inflation process do you have in which an expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet translates into inflation without causing an overheating of the labor market first? I’m not saying that there is no possible story along those lines, but spell it out so we can see how plausible it is.

What I said in my Mundell-Fleming lecture was that simple models don’t seem to have room for the confidence crises policymakers fear – and that I couldn’t find any plausible alternative models to justify those fears. It wasn’t “The model says you’re wrong”; it was “Show me a model”.

The reason I’ve been going on about such things is that since 2008 we’ve repeatedly seen policymakers overrule or ignore the message of basic macro models in favor of instincts that, to the extent they reflect experience at all, reflect experience that comes from very different economic environments. And these instincts have, again and again, proved wrong – while the basic models have done well. The models aren’t sacred, but the discipline of thinking things through in terms of models is really important.