The Wages of Strauss* -- Part II (Josh edition)

[*Joseph (who knows more than a normal person should on these matters) took mild exception to the previous post in this thread, specifically the way I used Straussianism as a crude shorthand for an argument that goes back to Athens. He's right but I don't have the time to do it right. (What do you expect from a blog?)]

A few days ago, I argued that the conservative movement was based on "the assumption that governing must be done by the intellectually superior elite," so they had put in place "strategies and tactics designed to allow small groups to gain and hold power in a democracy" which left them "vulnerable to hostile takeover" such as the one launched by Donald Trump.

If I would have known about this piece by Josh Barro, I definitely would have included the following quotes:

It's not normal for a political party to rent frontrunner status to cranks and charlatans for weeks at a time. Disastrous candidates are supposed to be blocked by validating institutions. Policy experts explain that their proposals do not add up. The media covers embarrassing incidents from their past and present. Party leaders warn that they will be embarrassing or incompetent or unelectable.

The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions. They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse by allowing all complaints about offensiveness to be lumped into a box called "political correctness" and ignored.

Republicans waged war on these institutions for a reason. Facts about policy can be inconvenient — a reality-based approach would find, for example, that tax cuts increase the deficit and carbon emissions cause climate change. Acknowledging the validity of complaints about racism could require some awkward conversations with racist and quasi-racist voters in the Republican coalition.

Of course, we're now seeing the unintended consequence of the destruction of those institutions and the boundaries they impose around candidate acceptability: In doing so, Republicans created a hole that Donald Trump could fly his 757 through.

Josh Marshall is also making similar points:

If you look around over the last week there are a number of highly sophisticated Republican voices arguing that Donald Trump is the sort of demagogue and potential strongman our political system was designed to prevent from gaining power in our country. ,,, they would be far more credible if so many Republicans - not necessarily the same writers, but countless formal and informal spokespersons including numerous high-ranking elected officials - hadn't spent the last seven years ranting that the temperamentally cautious and cerebral Barack Obama was a 'dictator' who was trampling the constitution.
...

 Trumpism is the product of many things. But a key one of them, perhaps the key enabling one, is years of originating and pandering to increasingly apocalyptic and hyperbolic conspiracy theories, fantasies and fever dreams which put middle aged white men up against the metaphorical wall with a thug, foreign, black nationalist, anti-colonialist Barack Obama shaking them down for their money, their liberty, their women and even their lawn furniture.

Revisiting "The Battle for New York Schools: Eva Moskowitz vs. Mayor Bill de Blasio"

[from the teaching blog]

When following the education reform movement, it is enormously useful to step back from time to time and look at who was saying what a few years ago. As recently as 2009, it was almost impossible to find serious critics of the movement in the mainstream media (to highlight how much things have changed, I put together an e-book collection of my 2010 education posts, annotated but otherwise unrevised).

As far as I can tell, the Washington Post was the first of the major papers to start turning a tough, critical eye towards initiatives like charter schools, Common Core, and Glengarry Glen  Ross incentive systems. Recently, the New York Times has been aggressively investigating problems at Eva Moskowitz's Success Academies, but this is a relatively new position.

This  2014 NYT Magazine piece by Daniel Bergner is interesting on a number of levels, not the least of which being a reminder of how things have changed.

On the topic of scores, the U.F.T. and Ravitch insist that Moskowitz’s numbers don’t hold up under scrutiny. Success Academy (like all charters), they say, possesses a demographic advantage over regular public schools, by serving somewhat fewer students with special needs, by teaching fewer students from the city’s most severely dysfunctional families and by using suspensions to push out underperforming students (an accusation that Success Academy vehemently denies). These are a few of the myriad factors that Mulgrew and Ravitch stress. But even taking these differences into account probably doesn’t come close to explaining away Success Academy’s results.

First off, even at the time "vehemently" did not equate to "convincingly." There was already an enormous amount of evidence behind these accusations. Letting SA's denial go unchallenged did Moskowitz a huge favor, as did the unsupported claim at the end. Little more than a year later, the NYT itself was reporting on the Success Academies' "got to go" lists.

[Diane Ravitch was extremely upset both by how Bergner handled her interview and wrote a stinging post in response.]

As bad as this section was, the really troubling part (at least for me as a statistician) came later.

In talking to dozens of current and former Success Academy employees and parents, the critique with the most staying power involved the schools’ overly heated preparation for the state exams. A former fourth-grade teacher recounted that network employees made a mini­van run to Toys “R” Us and returned to unload a mound of assorted treasures in the back of her classroom. “It was a huge pile,” she says. “We called it Prize Mountain.” She would remind the pupils that a good score on a practice test meant a gift from the mountain.

Teachers also chart students’ results on the practice tests, posting their names and scores on classroom walls. Yet I heard from parents like Natasha Shannon, an African-American mother of three girls in Success Academy schools, that although the public posting could be painful for the children, it was important nonetheless.

...

For her part, Moskowitz asserts that the public charting is one aspect of the network’s emphasis on feedback, not only for the students but also for the faculty. Throughout the year, whether or not test prep is underway, scores on quizzes and writing assignments are analyzed at network headquarters. Each teacher’s outcome is tabulated, and bar graphs are instantly available to all faculty members. The teachers whose classes lag are responsible for seeking out advice from those who top the graphs, just as the students with red or yellow stickers by their names are guided to emulate the topic sentences of those whose stickers are green or blue.

Couple of points here.

1. We can go back and forth on different methods of rewarding academic performance in other contexts, but in this case we're talking about diagnostic tests. Doling out special rewards and punishments can and probably does undermine the quality of the resulting data. The fact that Bergner (and, to be fair, most reporters covering the story) seem completely unaware of fundamental education concepts is disturbing;

2. Even more disturbing (though we can't blame this one on Bergner.) is the fact that one of those model teachers whose advice was being sought was Charlotte Dial.

Musical Accompaniment

I was reading these posts by  Greg Sargent and Charles Pierce on the turmoil in the GOP over the upcoming convention and I realized that a familiar piece of music was running through my mind in the background, particularly when Pierce brought out the old family bible:

And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

—Matthew 13:42

The wailing is now at a pitch audible only to dogs and the teeth are gnashed right down to the gum line, and it's only March. The roosts are so full of chickens that the chickens are starting to cannibalize each other just to have a place to perch. The conservative movement is trying to govern itself again and the Republican Party, which has in that movement its only animating force, is being ground up by the process. A furnace of fire would be a vacation cabin in the Rockies compared to a spot in the withering wrath of one Erick Erickson and his endless escadrille of up-armored tricycles.

 
Next time you click on one of these stories in the Washington Post or (if you must) in Politico, I highly recommend queuing up this as a soundtrack.

Suspensions and Race

There's a new report on which groups are the most likely to get suspended. For kids who are African-American or who are disabled, the numbers are appalling. You can find my reactions at the teaching blog.

Budget spirals

I've recently gotten mildly addicted to the Trailers from Hell, not because any of them have been tell-all-your-friends great -- so far none have really blown me away -- but they're consistently pretty good and their subjects/presenters and their bite-sized length make them highly tempting (what would a three minute break hurt?). Occasionally, though, they hit on bigger topics like how budgets spiral out of control.

This segment on the notorious 1963 flop Cleopatra ("the only film ever to be the highest grossing film of the year yet to run at a loss") brings up lots of interesting points, starting with the fact that Fox actually had to sell off part of its lot to stay out of bankruptcy.

The Missing White House Tapes -- you can find everything on Youtube

A friend I grew up with was a big fan of comedy albums. One of his favorites was National Lampoon's Missing White House Tapes.

The Missing White House Tapes was a sketch comedy voice recording which was a satiric commentary on the Watergate scandal. It was a spin-off from National Lampoon magazine. The recording was produced by Irving Kirsch and Vic Dinnerstein. It was released as a single on Blue Thumb Records in 1973. In 1974 it was expanded into an album, which was subsequently nominated for a Grammy Award as Best Comedy Recording of the year.

The single consisted of a doctored speech, in which Richard Nixon confesses culpability in the Watergate break-in. Side One of the album contains additional doctored recordings of Nixon's speeches and press conferences. Side Two contains sketches performed by John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Rhonda Coullet, and Tony Scheuten.

I hadn't thought about, let alone heard the record for years, but recently something (I don't remember what) reminded me of it. A quick Google search later...





I made some notes for a post I might actually write up one of these days but, in the meantime, for those interested in the period it's a fascinating relic (not to mention a reminder that the National Lampoon brand used to be associated with humor).

Policy tangle

This is Joseph

One thing that I always find challenging is how to interpret different participation rates in education.  For example, this mini-post by Tyler Cowen suggests that Swedish men are under-represented in college level education.  The original OECD articles notes:

In contrast, only 31% of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in science and engineering went to women.

But this is the same percentage of men who go to university at all in Sweden. 

So what is the threshold to consider policy interventions?  Because if we see the low level of participation in science and engineering by women to require efforts to encourage women to enter these fields, then shouldn't Sweden be intervening to encourage men to complete Bachelor's degrees? 

I admit that just examining the participation rate is divorced from historic context (e.g. gender inequality), and I am sympathetic to these arguments.  But the general issues that under-participation in higher education are likely to bring seem to be the foundation for future issues for current generation of young men and seem to be worth understanding more clearly. 

When did following up become the exception instead of the rule?

From Jim Avery writing for Cracked.com:

In recent years, the national minimum wage has become a hot topic, with people debating about the importance of a living wage vs. the value of certain kinds of jobs. However, one CEO, Dan Price of Gravity Payments, shocked everyone on April 13 of this year by announcing that all of his employees would be receiving a minimum salary of $70,000 a year; not only that, he'd be substantially cutting his own salary to pull it off. In one of the many interviews he had after the announcement, he stated that he had learned how raises can mean the world to lower-income employees, especially after talking to one of his lower-paid workers, like a highly condensed version of A Christmas Carol.

Unfortunately, it wasn't all happy for Price, who ended up being sued by his brother shortly after the raises were announced. His brother Lucas owned about 30 percent of the company, and apparently wasn't happy with this newfound generosity.

...

Actually, it turns out there was a small error in the above paragraphs. We said that Dan Price was sued after the pay raise, but as it turns out, the lawsuit was actually filed before the controversial move. Also, by "small error," we mean "enormous mistake that changes everything about the story." Our bad.

According to Dan Price, the lawsuit was filed two weeks after the pay raise, which is true. However, Bloomberg did some digging and discovered that Price was served on March 16, nearly a month before. According to the lawsuit, Dan Price abused the company's assets to give himself a huge salary, while cutting down on what Lucas would be paid, in a somewhat Zuckerberg-esque move.

So when you look at that timeline, it seems a lot less like the headline is "CEO Has Change Of Heart, Becomes Generous" and more like it's "CEO Tries To Hide Douchebaggery By Acting Like Santa Claus." Though Santa probably doesn't pay elves much more than minimum wage either.

First of all, I don't want to take anything away from the Bloomberg article. It's a very well-done piece and the reporter  Karen Weise deserves a great deal of credit for breaking the real story. My concern is that a lot of other reporters stuck with the decidedly unreal story for far too long. This story broke in April; Weise came out with the corrected version in December.

You should read the whole thing

Brad DeLong has an excellent piece of long form economic history up at his blog. I'm going to try to revisit this in future posts if I have time (there's a lot here to talk about), but for now, here's a samplee presented without comment.

From Robber Barons by J. Bradford DeLong (1998)
First draft October 13, 1997; second draft January 1, 1998.

In the 1860s, on the western slope of California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, Colis Huntington and Leland Stanford won a government contract to build a railroad from San Francisco to the east. The government offered them, in incentives, $24 million in government financing and 9 million acres of land. They had then negotiated with the cities and towns of central California: if a town did not contribute funding to the railroad, the railroad would avoid that town--and it would in due course disappear.

It was claimed that Huntington, Stanford--then also Governor of California--and their partners had built the railroad without putting up a dime of their own money (see U.S. Congress, 1873).

By 1869 they had built the Central Pacific Railroad was built, from San Francisco out to Ogden, Utah, where it met the Union Pacific. The stockholders of the Central Pacific then discovered that the railroad was in horrible financial shape.

Some $79 million of stocks and bonds (including the $24 million from the government) had been floated, and the cash had been expended. $79 millon in cost of materials and payment for construction had been paid to the Central Pacific Credit and Finance Corporation. The Central Pacific Credit and Finance Corporation had spent some $50 million in wages and materials costs to build the railroad, and its shareholders had pocketed the remaining $30 million.

Who were these shareholders? Colis Huntington, Leland Stanford, and two of their other partners. Who were the Central Pacific executives who had approved this arrangement with the Credit and Finance Corporation? Colis Huntington, and Leland Stanford...

Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, is today a very nice place indeed.

One of these days, we need to have a discussion of Kickstarter...

... and about crowdfunding in general. Though some of the lines get a bit blurred, I think that most of us would like to see these sites funding deserving (fills a social need, is genuinely innovative) projects that can't get money through conventional channels. Most of use would also agree that it's a problem when the funding is diverted to high profile sequels, actors cashing in on their celebrity and products that major manufacturers would already be making if they were workable ideas.

Second only to the Pebble as one of the most successful Kickstarters ever, Coolest Cooler raked in more than $13 million in funding during its month-long campaign. The portable cooler is a barbecue-er’s dream, offering a battery-powered blender, a cutting board, waterproof Bluetooth speaker, a USB charger, and storage space for up to 55 quarts of chilled refreshments.
Unfortunately, the ultimate camping complement is becoming a nightmare for the company and backers alike. CEO Ryan Grepper announced last year that problems with the blender would delay the shipment of the unit this spring. Because it had to find a new source of blenders, the company also confirmed it was going to sell a select number of units on Amazon to “keep the lights on” and “make certain that every single backer’s Coolest can get made and shipped.” This decision caused an outcry among supporters, who wondered why these completed units were being sold to new customers instead of being sent to pre-order customers.

The wages of Strauss are Trump

[Yet another topic that I will have to rush through to get something on the blog -- literally dictated to my phone -- then hopefully come back later and fill in the details.]

If you start from the assumption that governing must be done by the intellectually superior elite and that handing over power to the masses will lead to disaster, you are basically faced with two choices:

You could openly tear down the democratic institutions of the country and replace them with something authoritarian;

Or, you can subvert the democratic processes so that a small, powerful group can hold power even when it entails regularly going against the will of the majority.





How can you accomplish the latter?

-You can make voting less representational, either by suppressing the vote of those who disagree with you or by seeing that it counts less through measures such as gerrymandering.

-You can make sure to control certain strategic points such as K St. or state governments during redistricting.

-You can take advantage of what might be considered inefficiencies in the issue market, finding voters who put so much value on one issue that they consistently undervalue the rest and are willing to trade them away.

-You can create a favorable media environment. For supporters you construct an immersive world of tailored news and opinion. With the mainstream media you undermine, manipulate, and intimidate.



Obviously this is just an outline. Each of these bullet points could be the jumping off point for long discussions, but I am working under the assumption that everyone reading this pretty much knows what would be said.

The point of this post is that, almost by definition, strategies and tactics designed to allow small groups to gain and hold power in a democracy are vulnerable to hostile takeover.

The fact that we just saw such a takeover isn't that remarkable; the fact it caught so many people by surprise is.

Hard to believe we've never heard of this guy

I've got a new post up at the teaching blog about showing kids how to spot questionable claims, using this article from the generally reliable Wikipedia as an example:

Wallace L. Minto (August 6, 1921, in Jersey City, New Jersey, United States – September 3, 1983) had a passion for science at a very young age. For instance, at age 13, he and his father, Wallace Milton Minto, stock piled more than 50 tons of uranium rich ore in Sparta, NJ. He was also the first to split the uranium atom while still a teenager. This nearly created an atomic explosion in his family home. At age 16, Wallace synthesized radium and invented what is now known as "Scotchlite". He had a copyright on his own periodic chart which renamed all the elements.

When only 16, he was a student at Columbia College and was later instrumental in convincing Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (dated August 2, 1939) stressing the need for the United States to expand its experimentation with Atomic Energy, leading to the Manhattan Project. Consequently, Minto sold his uranium rich ore to the U.S. Government for use in the Manhattan Project.[1]

On June 26, 1944, Minto was enlisted by Dr. Andrew H. Dowdy, director of the Manhattan Department of the University of Rochester, to take charge of the Special Problems Division of the Manhattan Project. Minto reported directly to General Leslie Groves and reportedly threw Groves out of his lab for tampering with his beakers.

A useful reminder of a key life lesson

This is Joseph

A useful reminder about following one's passion:

As I've written here before, I am not a big believer in the philosophy, "Never give up on your dream. If you keep at it and never surrender, eventually you will make it." I believe the person who came up with that also used to invent "can't lose" strategies for the game of Roulette. In any game where there's a chance of winning, there's a chance of losing and in any profession that requires skill, there are those who just plain don't have enough of that skill.

And it might not be skill at writing. It might be skill at selling the work, which can be a separate but equally-necessary talent. Before you throw good years after bad, ask yourself if there's something else you could be happy doing…

This is in the context of writing, but it applies to a lot of other things.  In a real sense, the time, space, and money to fail is a benefit of social class.  This doesn't mean that people are not happy as supermarket clerks or taxi drivers -- one can enjoy that type of job.  But it's rarely a passion the way fighter pilot or astronaut (or, heck, even writer) are. 

None of which is to say that one should give up easily -- that would be too far the other way.  But if things are not improving and one keeps encountering failure then the individual best decision is to think about ways you could end up happy pursuing another outlet for one's creativity. 

Context for the No-Excuses/Campbell's Law discussion

I've got a new post at the teaching blog that might be of interest.

Thinking about "teaching to the test"

Trade and Taxes

This is Joseph

This by Mark Kleiman point is excellent:

The Econ-101 case for free trade is straightforward: Trade benefits those who produce exports and those who consume imports (including producers who use imported goods as inputs). It hurts the producers of goods which can be made better or more cheaply abroad. But the gains to the winners exceed the gains to the losers: that is, the winners could make the losers whole and still come out ahead themselves. Therefore, trade passes the Pareto test.

especially when paired with:

So when the modern Republican Party (R.I.P), in the name of “small government” and opposition to “class warfare,” set its face against policies to redistribute the gains from economic growth, it destroyed the theoretical basis for thinking that a rising tide would lift all the boats, rather than lifting the yachts and swamping the trawlers. Free trade without redistribution (especially the corrupt version of “free trade” with corporate rent-seeking written into it) is basically class warfare waged downwards. 

I wonder if it is the combination of policies that is mobilizing opposition to trade agreements?  After all, to make trade deals work as a popular policy, it makes sense that one needs to make sure that the "losers" are also (at least potential) beneficiaries.  If certain social groups see trade agreements as making other people better off (while they are worse off) then it undermines the whole enterprise.

Now this argument is oversimplified (as the author acknowledges) but it's not obviously wrong and it makes sense as to why anti-trade candidates are starting to gain traction.  It's also worth noting that the decision to make trade free and taxes low is a policy decisions to favor certain groups -- not an inescapable law of markets.  Markets work fine in the presence of tariffs. 

Definitely worth thinking about