By The Time You're Talking About Prison-Like Schools, Love Isn't Enough

Michael Gerson dips his toes into what he deems the "prison schools" of the inner cities, and their efforts to build character. Apparently one doesn't need educational credentials to run a good school for inner city kids. One simply needs a prison-like environment and a whole lotta love:

Students are urged to be “Ginn men.” It is an ideal with the strong imprint of a particular man, Ted Ginn, the high school football coach who was seized with the initial vision for the academy. While possessing few academic qualifications, Coach Ginn has a credential often lacking in prison-like, urban public schools: a passionate belief in the potential of at-risk children. “You can’t have people around young people who don’t love kids,” he says. “If you don’t have love, you don’t have nothing.” Love creates a child’s internal desire to meet external expectations.

Even as he recognizes that the theory of inculcating "character" into inner city schools is predicated upon jargon-laden language, Gerson laps it up:

But the basic idea is sound and should be familiar to anyone who has read cultural anthropology or changed diapers. From the very earliest age, children need one adult — preferably more — who believes in them utterly. And that belief is expressed in a series of social and moral expectations. (At Ginn, for example, the boys must learn to iron a dress shirt, a ritual reinforcement of the fact that there are rules for everyone.) The early connection between love and rules creates behaviors — sitting still, keeping your hands to yourself, focusing, respecting others, deferring gratification — that make the educational task possible.

The problem with Gerson's notion, in practice, is that even the most loving of school principals (wardens?) cannot give enough love to every student, and perhaps not even enough love to any student, to make them believe that somebody "believes in them utterly". Frankly, the very creation of the prison-like environment Gerson notes, then blissfully ignores, is a hallmark of the very deep mistrust these schools have for their students. In fairness to Gerson, the school he visits does offer "life coaches":

The most innovative part of the Ginn approach is the use of “life coaches” — one for every 25 boys — who are mentors from the community, embedded in classrooms and available 24 hours a day. “You learn everything you can about the child,” one life coach said, “if they have a single parent, if they need extra cereal in the morning, who is having a bad day. If you catch it early, you’ve changed the course of his day — and maybe not just his day. Who knows what might be his choice on that day?”

It's difficult for me to see, however, how a "life coach" of unknown qualification can effectively track and mentor twenty-five children around the clock, no matter how much love he has to share. Life coaches cannot make up for struggling homes, poor parental guidance, food uncertainty and dangerous neighborhoods.

Here's the biggest problem, as reported on a right-wing education blog: No matter how much these schools hope to teach character, there's no evidence that it works. Quoting a report analyzing KIPP schools, a highly structured network of inner city charter schools with strict, often extreme and even bizarre, behavior codes and rules:

[T]he KIPP children showed no advantage on any of the measures of character strengths. They weren’t more effortful or persistent. They didn’t have more favorable academic self-conceptions or stronger school engagement. They didn’t score higher than the comparison group in self-control. In fact, they were more likely to engage in “undesirable behavior,” including losing their temper, lying to and arguing with their parents, and giving teachers a hard time. They were more likely to get into trouble at school. Despite the program’s emphasis on character development, the KIPP students were no less likely to smoke, drink, get high, or break the law. Nor were their hopes for their educational futures any higher or their plans any more ambitious.

What KIPP offers is consistent with what other studies have found -- better academic performance due to the fact that its students spend more time in the classroom. The rest is window-dressing, even if well-intentioned, that creates the prison-like environment that would keep somebody like Gerson from ever dreaming of sending his own kids to one of their schools.

Gerson, stepping into the role of "the blind leading the blind", complains that the political parties don't understand the issues facing these kids.

Republicans tend to ignore the urgency of this cultural challenge. It is not enough to blame parents (who are often deeply disadvantaged) or to call on charities to fill the mentoring gap (since the scale of the need is too large for volunteerism).

Democrats tend to underestimate the complexity of the cultural challenge. This gap of adult commitment and involvement will not be filled simply by extending schooling downward by a year to cover 4-year-olds. Even the best early-childhood education programs seem to have fleeting or marginal effects unless they are followed (and preceded) by complementary efforts. Programs such as the Nurse-Family Partnership — in which nurses visit first-time, low-income mothers to provide information on nutrition and parenting — may be a more focused (and cost-effective) way to increase the school readiness of at-risk kids.

I was not aware that Democrats opposed educational programs for new mothers, or that they opposed nutrition education and programs for new mothers. I was not aware that Democrats thought that quality child care should not be offered, or even subsidized by the state, before the age of four.

At the end of the day, Gerson falls into standard tropes about inner city youth -- they just need to be taught discipline, even if in the form of meaningless symbol:

Education is the cumulative result of such choices. And Ginn provides a vivid expression of the educational task: Iron your shirt and get “right for a miracle.”

Do you think Gerson irons his own shirts, or do you think he uses a service -- and no matter what the answer, do you think it would tell you anything about his character? I'm quite certain that Gerson has worked with a large number of privileged men who have lived their entire life blissfully unaware of how the clothes they strew across the floor get picked up, laundered, and placed back into their drawers and closets... mom, spouse, maid, maybe elves or pixies....

One of the favorite studies of the people behind this form of character education is the marshmallow study -- a study that revealed a strong correlation between whether a child can resist the immediate reward of a single marshmallow in exchange for the promise that if they resist they will receive two, and future success. I've read that at some KIPP schools they even use "Resist the marshmallow" as a slogan. But I have read about a follow-up study by a graduate student, working at a homeless shelter, who found that the biggest predictor of a child's ability to resist the marshmallow was whether the person promising the greater reward was reliable. If that person broke an earlier promise to the child, children were far less likely to delay gratification. My formulation connects reasonably well with Gerson's notion that every child needs somebody "who believes in them utterly" -- in essence a trustworthy caregiver. The reason that character education fails in KIPP schools is that it comes too late, and in the wrong form.

Frankly, the best way to lift a population out of poverty is to make work available at a decent rate of pay. But barring that possibility, if you want to create the type of personality that is primed for success, you have to intervene at the family level long before a child reaches school, and when you identify a vulnerable child you need to do a lot more than have a nurse visit and provide nutritional education or parenting advice. By the time you get around to telling a vulnerable child, pushed into a "prison-like" school, that somebody utterly loves him (and, simultaneously, 24 of his classmates), you're too late.

No Grand, New Federal Programs

Eugene Robinson liked the President's speech on the Trayvon Martin shooting, but comments,

Most important, Obama laid out the challenge of “helping young African American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed.”

This is the crucial, daunting challenge. Millions of at-risk boys and men need education, mentoring, employment. If this won’t come through “some grand, new federal program,” then how? And when?

Putting Friday’s words into action could be Obama’s greatest legacy. I eagerly await his next speech on the unfinished business of race.

The answer is implied by the fact that, decades into asking ourselves "what, how, when"" and experimenting in various fashions to try to end poverty and fully integrate our society, we are still asking, "what, how, when?" Even a "grand, new federal program" isn't an answer unless we know what the program will offer and how it will differ from the programs that came before it.

Our society struggles with the interaction of personal responsibility with issues of physical and mental illness, drug addiction, and apathy. We want people to hold jobs, but don't much care whether that's a realistic prospect for residents of economically depressed areas. We want people to become financially independent, but struggle with admitting that there are many people in our society who, on the best day of their lives, lack the ability to support themselves. We know that when marginal parents raise children, perhaps with one parent absent, or one or both floating in and out of jail or prison, we pay a huge economic price, but for a variety of reasons (including our own sordid history) we not only maintain that procreation is a right, we provide significant subsidies to those families that enable, perhaps encourage, them to have children and to expand their families. If you want to talk about eliminating poverty, you have to tackle some difficult issues head-on, and we as a society do not appear prepared to do that.

Meanwhile, the biggest lesson history has shared with us on the subject of poverty is that the best way to fight poverty and the cultural artifacts of poverty is through economic opportunity. Give people the opportunity to make a decent wage and support a family, and they are likely to do so and to adopt the values of the working class. Take away that opportunity, and you tend to see the same sort of deterioration of family and community, domestically and internationally, without regard to race, color or creed. Yes, you will have to find a way to address the population that is simply incapable of helping itself, but that task is made much easier when you are doing so within the framework of a healthy community.

Race in America and the Beam in Michael Gerson's Eye

Michael Gerson complains that, in his recent speech on the Trayvon Martin shooting, the President didn't offer meaningful solutions to the problems of race and racism in American society. Gerson dismisses the criticism from some of his Republican peers, that the President who "attacked Obama for being 'divisive' and for injecting race into the Trayvon Martin debate", then continues,

The opposite criticism is more serious — that Obama has missed opportunities over the years to talk about race in a compelling and personal way. It is the unavoidable American issue. At one point, a third of all human beings in the South were owned by another human being. For a century beyond slavery, Jim Crow laws enforced a racial caste system. The election of an African American president — born three years before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — is a wonder of national healing and historical compression. Who can argue that we have heard too much from Obama on this topic? For five years, he strategically downplayed the reality of his own miracle.

The "reality of his own miracle"? In another context, Gerson's "miracle" might be that our society has evolved so quickly since the 1960's that the President's race was a marginal factor in his election. In the context of Gerson's column, though, the "miracle" is that the President was twice elected despite the continuing level of racism and racial divisiveness within the United States.

I tried to find out how Gerson responded to the Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and, although I found that Gerson had referred to Chief Justice Roberts as displaying "judicial arrogance", that was over his vote upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), not over his platitudinous statements on race issues such as, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race". It's interesting to me that a tax ruling caused Gerson to sound off like an overheated tea kettle, but Roberts' shrugging off racism as a continuing issue in society didn't seem to inspire him to so much as raise an eyebrow,¹ particularly given his explicit rejection of the notion that we're now living in a racially equal society:

Having finally engaged the issue of race, Obama drew the correct policy implication. Social divisions are deepest when it comes to African American boys and young men: often betrayed by schools, abandoned by fathers, treated with suspicion, unable to find jobs, wandering through dysfunctional neighborhoods, locked in prison in vast numbers and denied basic civil rights (such as voting) for the rest of their lives. Obama has a unique standing to address the challenges of minority youth. As a young man, he was prone to trouble and might have easily gotten enmeshed in an unforgiving legal system. The president can effectively argue that first impressions are not always correct and that second chances are sometimes necessary.

Giving credit where credit is due, at times George W. Bush spoke inclusively. He did not focus on traditional race issues, but was clearly interested in leading his party toward the greater involvement of minorities, made sometimes clumsy statements about Islam that were intended to diminish anti-Muslim sentiments, and at least once spoke inclusively of atheists. Gerson may have authored some of those lines. However, by any measure including word and deed, Obama has done far better.

Gerson complains about the President's policy proposals,

But Obama’s speech deserves this criticism: Its policy proposals — training police, reconsidering “stand your ground” laws, more community dialogue and “soul-searching” — were weak. It was as though the administration’s policy apparatus had never really considered the matter before — that it was somehow ambushed by America’s most obvious policy challenge.

Let me interject that the fact that the President proposes certain measures that might prevent a young black male, armed only with skittles, from arousing the suspicions of an armed self-annointed protector of the neighborhood, does not mean that he might not propose additional measures if he were broadly addressing the issue of race across society. Gerson's complaint is actually that the President spoke about the Trayvon Martin case without turning the speech into a broad narrative on race relations. Perhaps the President should give such a speech, but Gerson offers no challenge to the President's explanation of why he chose a different approach:

There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have. On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there's the possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.

Frankly, Gerson need only look at the racial demagoguery of his Republican peers to know that the President is correct.

Gerson's suggestions for policy proposals that the President should have included in the speech, I think, betray the fundamental weakness of his position:

The problem of African American boys and young men is a complex mix of lingering racial prejudice, urban economic dislocation, collapsing family structure, failing schools and sick, atomized communities. But is there really nothing practical that can be done? How about providing family supports — mentoring, fatherhood initiatives, teen pregnancy prevention and removing the Earned Income Tax Credit penalty for married couples? How about strong accountability measures to close the educational achievement gap instead of granting waivers that lower standards? How about support for faith-based institutions that reclaim lives from gangs? How about prison reform, so that mandatory minimum sentences are at least reduced? How about expanding substance abuse prevention and treatment, which seem to have fallen off the national agenda?

First, let's be honest, there was nothing particularly "African American" about Trayvon Martin's story, beyond that noted by the likes of Richard Cohen and Geraldo Rivera, which I will unfairly - but not all that unfairly - paraphrase as "He was a black kid in a hoodie, so who wouldn't have wanted to shoot him?" A seventeen year old with divorced parents, acting out at school, smoking pot on occasion, perhaps involved in a petty theft, sent to live with his father because his mother thought he could use a stronger male presence in his life... that's much more an "American story" than an "African American" story. The President's speech addressed the key issues - public perceptions and community attitudes that contribute to the perceptions that caused a guy with a gun to see a kid coming home from a store with a package of Skittles and make a cognitive leap to "F--king punks... These a--holes... They always get away".

Second, had the President followed Gerson's after-the-fact suggestion, Gerson's Republican peers would have merely expanded their list of complaints from "race-baiting" and "divisiveness" to "And now he's trying to get more handouts, more goodies, for his 'base'." Gerson has to know that, and has to know that his peers play a huge role in how, when initiated by a politician - and more so when that politician is Barack Obama - these discussions "end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have."

Third, alas, Gerson's policy proposals range from weak tea to platitudinous. Had the President make such proposals and pretended that they were significant, Gerson would be entirely justified in his complaint. The fact that this, after Gerson's years working with G.W. Bush, years in sinecures with so-called think tanks, and years of writing for the Washington Post, is the best Gerson has highlights how difficult these issues are to actually address in a meaningful manner, let alone solve.

1. "How about providing family supports — mentoring, fatherhood initiatives, teen pregnancy prevention and removing the Earned Income Tax Credit penalty for married couples?" - There is nothing wrong with advocating for "family supports", but Gerson's ideas are neither novel nor helpful. Is Gerson unaware of existing mentoring programs? Is he unaware that live births to teen mothers³ are on the decline? What does he imainge a "fatherhood initiative" to be, and why does he imagine it will have any impact on poverty? What in the world does "removing the Earned Income Tax Credit penalty for married couples" have to do with questions of race, and how does Gerson imagine that it will have a material impact on poverty?

2. "How about strong accountability measures to close the educational achievement gap instead of granting waivers that lower standards?" - Gerson was part of an administration led by a President who touted fraudulent educational statistics as something of a miracle, that he could replicate across the nation. That Administration foisted "No Child Left Behind" on the nation, a program built on the supposed principles that led to Houston's fabricated "miracle", and a decade later the program was a complete failure. The obvious, inherent flaws of NCLB led to a situation in which, but for waivers, very good schools would be classified as "failing" due to their "lack of improvement". Contrary to Gerson's suggestion the Obama Administration has been pushing school reforms that it hopes will be superior to NCLB, but it's not clear that a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to reform will do anything but repeat NCLB's biggest mistakes, effectively diminishing the quality of better schools by focusing on standardized test results, enriching vendors of those standardized tests at the expense of overall school funding, and causing more dedicaated teachers to leave the profession. With Gerson's exposure to the debate, and the failures of NCLB, it's astonishing that he believes that a call for "strong accountability measures to close the educational achievement gap" is an actual policy proposal and not an exhausted platitude from his early tenure with the Bush Administration.

3. "How about support for faith-based institutions that reclaim lives from gangs?" - Say what?

4. "How about prison reform, so that mandatory minimum sentences are at least reduced?" - While acknowledging the high rates of incarceration and contact with the criminal justice system for our society as a whole, and how much worse the numbers are for minority populations, I would like to see Gerson flesh out this idea: What crimes should have shorter sentences, how much shorter should those sentences be, and how will that have a material impact on race or poverty? For example, I've seen kids who are repeatedly caught selling drugs get ridiculous sentences as habitual offenders, and those sentences seem to me to be an absurd use of tax dollars and counter-productive to integrating those young men back into productive society, but shortening those sentences to something more reasonable isn't going to have any material impact on the economic plight of their communities. The fact that long sentences don't meaningfully deter drug trafficking, particularly street dealing, suggests that the underlying problem is economic.

5. "How about expanding substance abuse prevention and treatment, which seem to have fallen off the national agenda?" - No objection from me, but why is Gerson of the belief that drug abuse is primarily a problem of race or of the inner cities?

Also what, in any of Gerson's ideas, would have influenced the type of thought process that automatically translates "black teenager in a hoodie" into "danger to the community"?

I am going to assume that Gerson means well, that he's not just concern trolling, but that of itself raises questions. If it's so easy for a President to stand before a microphone and heal racial and ethnic divides, why is it that those divisions seemed to expand under the tenure of his former boss? Surely that was not what Gerson and his fellow speechwriters intended when penning speeches for G.W. - if it's as easy as Gerson suggests to "drive and shape a policy debate" through grand Presidential speeches, why did we at best tread water on these issues, even as Bush called for tolerance, pushed NCLB and faith-based initiatives, and the like?

My suggestion to Gerson is this: As you're a partisan Republican, you should spend less time worrying about what the President is not saying in his speech, and spend more time thinking about what the politicians of your party are or are not saying in theirs. Seriously - as much as I would like to believe that the President has a magical power to give a few speeches and move the country toward a post-racial ideal, I think it would actually be much more powerful and much more constructive if we instead heard those speeches come from the mouths of prominent, right-wing Republicans and their party leaders.⁴
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1. Although there is a possibility that his employer's website has a flawed search engine, an "advanced search" on the Washington Post website starting with Jan. 1, 1987, turned up no articles by Michael Gerson that even mention "affirmative action".

2. November 3, 2004, "I will be your president regardless of your faith... And if they choose not to worship, they're just as patriotic as your neighbor."

3. Given that Gerson apparently believes that teen parenthood has a dramatic, negative impact on the welfare of children and communities, one wonders if he's willing to reconsider his opposition to reproductive freedom - provision of contraception to teenagers, the morning after pill, access to safe, affordable abortion, and the like. Does he continue to hold that allowing access to abortion "seems like addressing poverty by doing away with the poor; like fighting disease by getting rid of those with diseases" - and if so, how does he reconcile that with his own argument that we need to reduce or eliminate pregnancies among poor teenagers?

4. Even better, House Republicans can pass legislation moving those ideas from concept to reality. [And then I woke up.]

Believe it or Not, People Eat More Than Once Per Year

Charles Lane proposes abolishing "the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps", and transferring the funds to other programs,

If the working poor’s current share of food stamps went instead to increase the earned-income tax credit and expand eligibility for it, Republicans and Democrats would have less to argue about. The tax credit is a wage supplement, delivered through the income tax system, widely considered one of the most successful federal programs at encouraging work and eliminating poverty. It has also enjoyed consistent bipartisan backing.

The problem with this, and I'm a bit surprised that it even needs to be said, is that an additional amount added to your tax refund (if you qualify), many months into the future, doesn't fill the refrigerator.

Lane asserts that he would effectively prevent people hit by an economic downturn from receiving food assistance, but fancies that by compelling "Congress [] to distribute the SNAP budget among other programs for the poor, for which many SNAP recipients also qualify", part of that money "would go to an expanded and more generous unemployment insurance program". Except that nothing in his proposed distribution to "other programs for the poor" compels that result, and unemployment insurance programs are state-based. Frankly, if the law abolishing food stamps gets down to the level of specifying how the money is to be "redistributed", mandating a certain level of federal funding for state unemployment insurance programs, mandating that states actually apply that money to increased befits sufficient to make up for the loss of food assistance, his cure sounds like a regulatory nightmare. And that's before we get to the fact that while SNAP is means tested, programs like unemployment insurance and Social Security retirement are not. When Lane asserts, "For example, a third of the seniors living on food stamps also get Supplemental Security Income (SSI)", which is a means tested program, the question arises, what about the other two thirds?

The fundamental objection to SNAP is not that it doesn't help the categories of people, "low-income people who are either working, jobless through no fault of their own, elderly or disabled", whom Lane sees as the "deserving poor" - although of itself, that assertion makes it appear that part of Lane's goal in this proposal is to reduce benefits to people he sees as "jobless through [some] fault of their own" - it's the notion that "they" are taking from "us". That can be a nebulous population of "undeserving poor", the apparent actual target's of Lane's proposal, but let's not understate the degree to which the opposition is driven by demagoguery involving confabulated "Cadillac-driving welfare queens" and "Young bucks buying T-bone steaks". You can easily find opponents of any number of means-tested government programs who object that other people don't deserve the same benefits, with no thought given to the fact that most critics of the same programs would place them squarely in the "undeserving" category.

If Lane wants to propose that aid to the poor be simplified, and transitioned into more of a cash-based system, I can get on board with that. We certainly have the technology to distribute cash aid efficiently, and could consolidate what are presently monthly payments of cash through a variety of social welfare programs into weekly or even daily transfers - no more waiting until the next month rolls around to buy the groceries, you'll have money in the morning. We could add to that a "tough lesssons" provision - that the government can vendor rent and utility payments on behalf of somebody who receives public assistance but if they choose instead to take the cash and then fail to pay their bills they're "on their own". Of course, as a society we're generally too paternalistic to do the former, which is why we have programs like SNAP in the first place - so people can't spend money on the "wrong things" - and are generally not willing to do the latter because we don't like the specter of people on public assistance, and even less households full of children, living without heat or water, or evicted for nonpayment of rent. Frankly, most recipients of public assistance can handle the responsibility, and while we do have to be cautious about the fallout on families when, say, dad spends the household budget on crack, we don't do much to inculcate responsibility in the rest of the recipients when we insulate the adults in a household from the consequences of their bad financial choices.

Lane seems to be proposing an odd, circuitous path to take money from a population he sees as the undeserving poor, and transferring that money to the more deserving poor. The biggest problem with his proposal is that both groups need to eat, and starving one group to give the other a larger annual tax credit won't help either of them.

Who Attends KIPP's Schools, and Why

Elliott Witney, a former leader of a KIPP charter school, claims,

Finally, I want to address your question of whether or not KIPP leaders send their children to KIPP. The answer is yes, absolutely, they do. But KIPP's mission is not educating the children of their leaders, but educating the children of their communities. KIPP's #1 Essential Question is, Are we serving the students that need us? With hundreds of families on waiting lists at KIPP schools across the country, the focus is on making progress toward that goal.

I have a few problems with that statement. First, KIPP uses the term "leader" pretty loosely, and it's not clear if the statement relates to categories of worker who would normally be regarded as teachers, school principals and school administrators. I would like to see Witney give his statement some meaning - break down "leaders" into meaningful categories, and tell us what percentage of them have children and, of those, what percentage of the children actually attend KIPP schools. Please note, I have no problem with KIPP teachers taking the position that I would expect most middle class parents to take - that KIPP schools follow a model and offer an experience that is inferior to that available to their children in their own, local schools - but to the extent that Witney is suggesting that KIPP teachers and administrators believe KIPP to be an appropriate or superior choice for their own children I would like him to substantiate his claim.

Second, doesn't KIPP take the position that children are children? That it's not a question of community or home environment, but what the school can offer any child from any background? If so, why cavil with a statement like, "KIPP's mission is not educating the children of their leaders"? What is different about the children of KIPP leaders? If there are significant differences between the children served by KIPP and the children of KIPP leaders, what are those differences and how do they play out in an educational environment? If there are no significant differences, why make the statement?

Similarly, when Witney speaks of KIPP Schools "educating the children of their communities", how is that relevant? Is he stating that the KIPP model is tailored to a certain type of community, and would be unnecessary or perhaps even harmful in other communities? If so, what are the elements of a community that make the KIPP approach appropriate or desirable, and what are the elements of a community in which KIPP would not bring anything to the table or would be inferior to the presently existing options?

What are the factors that, for a given child or community, translate into what Witney describes as a "need" for KIPP? The thing is, we know the answers, or at least what KIPP and its backers implicitly believe to be the answers , so why is it so difficult for them to state those answers out loud?

Mitt Romney, Champion of the Working Class

Once you wade past the right-wing talking points and demagoguery, which means roughly the first 2/3 of his column, Michael Gerson has some interesting (and terrible) advice for Mitt Romney: To admit that our nation has rigid social classes and terrible class mobility, and to paint himself as the person to bring about change. Gerson draws our attention "across the pond" to Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrat Party and Deputy Prime Minister under a coalition deal with the ruling Conservative Party.

Gerson appears to know little about the U.K., its class structure or its politics. British culture is full of class markers, from accents and dialects that give away your region of birth, and quite possibly also your social class, to a literal House of Lords, as distinguished from the House of Commons, a bloated entity filled with life-tenured appointees, resistant to reform. Yes, "The topic of class comes more naturally to British than to American politicians" because, when you talk about class in the U.K., nobody pretends that everybody in the nation is part of a vast "middle class" or reflexively accuses you of engaging in "class warfare".

Before teaming with the Conservative Party, Clegg was better positioned to claim to be the child of great fortune who wanted to help his fellow man by leading a party that claims to speak up for the common man. Since that time, to put it mildly, Clegg has struggled with issues of credibility. Gerson clearly believes that adopting Clegg's rhetoric would serve Romney better than it has served Clegg, but let's that Clegg presently has an 16% approval rating and a 75% disapproval rating. Clegg's speech isn't working for him because he burned up his credibility on these issues. Romney has none to begin with.

Gerson found Clegg's speech to be substantive; I did not. The most substantive proposal I saw was for spending additional money on educational initiatives, principally for preschool education. Having cheap or free, high quality preschool is a valid policy position, which Clegg endorses, but "We'll spend more and get better results" is not.

Gerson explains his theory of how discussion of class mobility could help Romney,

As a governing matter, encouraging social mobility could eventually be a unifying, bipartisan goal. As a political matter, it would provide Romney a particular advantage. Obama’s message is now in full Labor Party mode: Soak the rich. But the smartest Republican response is not to defend the rich. It is to defend a fluid society in which everyone has the possibility of becoming richer.

Sure, Romney can talk about "promoting early-childhood education, high school completion, college attendance and graduation, parenting skills and wealth-building among the disadvantaged", but while Clegg was willing to put a $19 billion price tag on his initiatives, is Romney going to make a similarly sized proposal to back up his own? Adjusted for population, roughly $114 billion? I didn't think so.

Gerson complains that Labor's response to Clegg amounts to the position that "that leveling equality is more important than opportunity", sneering, "Along the way, Miliband delivered this trans-Atlantic taunt: 'If you want the American Dream — go to Finland.'" Except that statement is explicitly about income mobility - he was pointing out that nations such as Finland, which have less wealth inequality, also have more class mobility.

YouTube is already dripping with Romney quotes that would undermine the argument that he either understands or cares about social mobility. You want an alternative to college? Borrow $20 grand from your parents and start a business. You're unemployed? "I'm also unemployed." Also, as Gerson knows, Romney's tax plan slashes taxes for the rich, cuts benefits for the poor and middle class, and increases the deficit. Gerson wants Romney to become the new John Edwards, spokesmodel for those on the losing side of the "Two Americas"? And he thinks that would work?

The Divine Right of Boys in the Information Age

It occurs to me that in talking about a David Brooks column I had not originally intended to talk about, I failed to mention the passage that most caught my attention:

Some of the decline in male performance may be genetic.¹ The information age rewards people who mature early, who are verbally and socially sophisticated, who can control their impulses. Girls may, on average, do better at these things. After all, boys are falling behind not just in the U.S., but in all 35 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

That is to say, by being pretty much the same as they ever were, schools around the world are suddenly failing to sufficiently engage boys and, while girls (being sugar, spice and everything nice, and predisposed to resist the temptation of a marshmallow) are "verbally and socially sophisticated" in a manner that is allowing them to succeed in college and to reap the rewards of the information age.

My first response is, where were the concern trolls when women, frail, wilting flowers that they are, were excluded from higher education? Brooks' allusion to genetics evokes the notion of past eras that women were biologically unsuited to higher education or to a competitive workplace. And let's not pretend that those biology/genetics arguments have vanished. Also, if the problem is genetic, why does Brooks believe school teachers will be able to "fix" it?

At least when it comes to math, Brooks appears intent on proving himself correct and folks like Larry Summers wrong:

Even so, men make up just over 40 percent of college students. Two million fewer men graduated from college over the past decade than women. The performance gap in graduate school is even higher.

I'm not seeing good numbers on college graduation rates (lots on enrollment, not so much on graduation), and I don't want to spend more time at the moment looking. So I'll use a ballpark figure I saw tossed out, that 1.5 million students graduate from undergraduate programs each year. 15 million over ten years. Using the 60:40 Brooks shared, based on enrollment you should see 9 million women graduate and only 6 million men. Brooks is telling us that the number is 2 million and that this means colleges aren't engaging male students? He didn't share a source for his data, but I'm having a difficult time seeing that as a problem for men. I would like him to elaborate on his data and conclusions.

Also, no offense David, but guys like you are well-suited for college. Even if K-12 schools reinvent themselves so that the most rambunctious young men are engaged in ways that don't involve reading books, what do you believe is going to happen when they reach college and are handed a two-inch-thick text book or parked at a Bunsen burner in a chemistry lab?

Meanwhile, we have more than a few years of the information age to look at. Let's compare how women are faring to how men are faring. If I were to look at a list of the founders of the most successful companies of the information age, or a broader list of their executives, what ratio of men to women should I expect to find? That is, once we move past the world of K-12 education, where can I find Brooks' hand-wringing translated into a real-world environment in which women have the advantage?

I suspect that Brooks isn't actually talking about "boys" here - he's talking about boys being raised in low-SES households. Were his own son to struggle in school, I am skeptical that Brooks would be criticizing his son's teacher for requiring him to write book reports about "exquisitely sensitive Newbery award-winning novellas" (perhaps The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman). Brooks seems like the sort who would read the book with his son, try to engage his son in the literature and instill a love of reading and, if all else failed, hire a tutor to make sure that his son didn't fall behind the rest of the class. (He might even consider private school, assuming that wasn't his child's starting point.)

If Brooks were really talking about Henry V, he would be taking note that the new Henry IV benefits from the modern equivalent of the "divine right of kings" - a system that is set up to favor, privilege, preserve and expand his family's wealth, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Brooks can't argue that it's a zero sum game given his acknowledgment of the associated loss of middle class jobs and diminished opportunity for the non-wealthy Henry IV's. A modern Henry V doesn't need no education - he can and will fall back on daddy's name, money and connections, and a well-rigged tax code.

So let's not pretend that boy-centered K-12 education, whatever that would involve, would be a panacea. Let's not pretend that the modern Henry V's would be stifled in a traditional school while he would flourish in a rigid military academy. And most of all, let's not act as if the fact that the opening of doors, historically closed to women, is a bad thing, even if some men find that women outperform them in the ways that matter to the modern job market.²
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1. There is a sense in which men are genetically "inferior" to women - women get a full set of DNA building blocks, whereas men have lost a chunk of chromosomal material - hence XY instead of XX. That does translate into a set of Y-linked genetic traits, vulnerabilities, abnormalities and eccentricities, some of which can be beneficial and others of which can be catastrophic, with most falling somewhere in the middle. By way of example, see David Brooks' hairline - "male pattern baldness".

2. Brooks likes to talk about "human capital", and the optimization of its value. Brooks may well be able to fashion a K-12 program for kids who aren't college-oriented, and whose parents lack the wealth and resources to prevent that from mattering, such that their "human capital" is maximized. But who says that should be, could be, or is best accomplished through pushing them through college, whether or not they have academic focus, interest or aptitude? If Brooks accepts that his impoverished Henry and Henrietta V's aren't college material, why the lament about men struggling in college?

The Working Poor Have Bigger Problems Than Single Parenthood

I was tempted to dissent David Brooks' recent piece on how boys are faring in school, his comparison of an unruly boy, chained down by "culturally homogenous schools", to Henry V as depicted by Shakespeare - first as a wild child in Henry IV, later as an accomplished leader in Henry V. According to Brooks, it seems schools would prefer to be teaching "a reflective Hamlet".

By about the third week of nursery school, Henry’s teacher would be sending notes home saying that Henry “had another hard day today.” He was disruptive during circle time. By midyear, there’d be sly little hints dropped that maybe Henry’s parents should think about medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Many of the other boys are on it, and they find school much easier.

What say you, Charles Pierce?

At which point, Henry IV, in all of his parts, and being pissed off with that whole Percy family squabble, would have the nursery school teacher drawn and quartered, her head hung on Traitor's Gate for a month, and I probably shouldn't give our country's school "reformers" any ideas.

But as tempting as it was to respond to Brooks' editorial with full-bore sarcasm, what I found problematic was less his dubious resort to Shakespeare and more the fact that he has difficulty maintaining a consistent thesis. Instead, by the end he becomes somewhat incoherent:

Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.

Seriously - the way we're going to engage a young Henry V in school, keep him out of trouble, keep him from rebelling, is by sending him to a school that embraces "military virtues" and resembles a "boot camp"? Is this a half-hearted defense of KIPP-type schools with their extensive behavior codes? Brooks seriously believes his young Henry V's will go unmedicated and be educationally successful in such schools?

But the incoherence runs deeper. This is the same David Brooks who has lectured us that a small child's ability to resist marshmallows is a harbinger of his future. In the past he proposed that schools focus on teaching children "to master the sort of self-control that leads to success". That's consistent with the military model he appears to be half-endorsing, but again that's not going to work with a Henry V.

The rich, privileged, self-indulgent Henry V can grab as many marshmallows as he wants, as his future is assured - he doesn't have to care about the rules. The less intellectually gifted, less economically fortunate Henry V is not going to take well to "marshmallow resistance training." Either way, while doing an admirable job of criticizing the current educational system for not catering to a Henry V (while nonetheless doing very well by way of boys like David Brooks and Hamlet), Brooks doesn't actually explain how we could create schools that can simultaneously inspire Henry V to resist marshmallows while also inspiring a young David Brooks to strive for the day he can take an AP literature class focused on the works of Shakespeare.

Brooks has also told us what he, himself, thinks of kids like Henry V:

Similarly, in every high school there are jocks, cheerleaders and regular kids who vaguely sense that their natural enemies are the brooding poets who go off to become English majors. These prom kings and queens may leave their adolescent godhood and go off to work as underpaid sales reps despite their coldly gracious spouses and effortlessly slender kids, but they will still remember their adolescent opposites and become conservatives. They will experience surges of orgiastic triumphalism when Sean Hannity eviscerates the scuffed-shoed intellectuals who have as much personal courage as a French chipmunk in retreat.

French chipmunks in retreat... Funny, right?

Brooks' subsequent column inspired me to revisit the subject. You won't believe this but, according to Brooks, over the past thirty years rich people have come to have a lot of discretionary income, and poor people have not. Seriously!

Affluent parents also invest more money in their children. Over the last 40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their kids’ enrichment activities, like tutoring and extra curriculars, by $5,300 a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been able to increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation.

The explanation for this is, once again, Brooks' theory that poor people have bad morals.

A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to create this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were abandoned, meaning more children are born out of wedlock.

Wait a minute - aren't we supposed to support Henry V's sowing of his wild oats? Or is the "traditional value" at issue the notion that Henry will do so at the whorehouse while "good girls" remain chaste? "Guard your marshmallows, girls, Henry V is on the prowl."

Their single parents simply have less time and resources to prepare them for a more competitive world.

So the only children struggling are those from single parent homes? There are no "poorer kids" from two family homes? Fascinating stuff.

Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many parents are too stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to their children.

What Brooks apparently means is that working class jobs that support a middle class lifestyle have been decimated, even if that's not quite what he says. How did that happen? Who knows? Perhaps it has something to do with single parenthood?

Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic, intelligent people.

Unlike past eras during which intelligent, affluent people sought out unintelligent, indigent spouses?

They raise energetic, intelligent kids in self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.

The rich now live in ghettoes? Oh, life is so cruel. Remember, back in the day, when the rich and poor lived near each other, sharing land and crops, or on different floors of the same opulent building? Ah... memories.

The political system directs more money to health care for the elderly while spending on child welfare slides.

So... the solution here is to spend less money on sick old people? To increase spending on programs for poor children - and if so, what programs?

Brooks insists that to change the unfortunate status quo, people will "have to make some pretty uncomfortable decisions":

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it.

Yes, because once liberals get serious about teen pregnancy, like red state conservatives, we'll see... huge increases in teen pregnancy? But wait, David, I thought that was a big part of the problem. (I know, I know - when you get you facts wrong it's a joke. You're kidding the liberals.)

Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.

If we're talking Republicans, let's see... what will they choose. Oh yeah, benefit cuts.¹ That bit about "spending more on the poor" is apt to get lost in the wash.

Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class divisions and more time trying to remedy them — less time calling their opponents out of touch elitists, and more time coming up with agendas that comprehensively address the problem.

You mean, by identifying a social problem and deciding it can be cured by throwing money at it? Yeah, there's no chance that Brooks' proposal for spending more "on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class" will be demagogued....

Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class divisions and more time trying to remedy them....

So at the end of a dissertation on the poor morals of the poor, and how we nonetheless need to spend more money trying to help poor children, Brooks believes that we can propose taxing wealthier people or cutting their benefits to pay for those new programs without anybody raising the specter of class warfare? No concerns about giving money to undeserving bleah people?

...less time calling their opponents out of touch elitists, and more time coming up with agendas that comprehensively address the problem.

Why not both? Seriously, Brooks wants to clean up some of the over-the-top rhetoric in modern politics. Fair enough. But it's not like that's either new or the real problem. The problem is that one party is doing a middling job at creating the policies necessary to help our nation avoid significant future problems, and the other party is actively obstructing the little that might otherwise be accomplished.

There is absolutely no reason why Brooks cannot call on politicians from both parties to start addressing the issues, and take them to task if they offer rhetoric or demagoguery instead of actual policy proposals. It wouldn't hurt if Brooks offered some policy proposals of his own as a starting point but, I guess, that would be above his pay grade?
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1. I'm reminded of the old Far Side cartoon... "Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept blah blah blah benefit cuts blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah."

All You Need to be Rich....

Is to be poor. A bit simplistic, perhaps?

Economists have long known about “Dutch disease,” which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills....

Or as my Indian-American friend K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”

That’s why the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore — none of which can live off natural resources.

Wouldn't it be interesting if poor nations, instead of being poor, were... rich? And yet for some reason they're not.

It's pretty amazing to me that Friedman can hear somebody explain that countries like "Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part... because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them", and have that be his takeaway. If you look at nations hit by the resource curse, how often do you find a nation where everybody has a pretty good standard of living? How often do you find, on the other hand, a country with weak institutions of government, kleptocratic leadership, and a population that for the most part lives in conditions somewhere between dismal and squalid?

As is his wont, Friedman also disregards the inequality of opportunity in nations like India and China, the extent to which large numbers of people in those countries have been treated, in effect, as natural resources - cheap labor for international companies. He seems to have retreated into his fantasy world in which any population, no matter how poorly governed, impoverished, downtrodden and oppressed, could transform itself into another Singapore within the space of a few years.

What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills.

Say what? Let's turn to the list of nations Friedman singles out as being resource-rich but faring badly on PISA: Qatar, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria. Exactly when was it that those nations had the emphasis on education - the "instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills" - that Friedman would have us believe that they "lost" when they discovered their natural resources? Perhaps this reflects the fantasy thinking that led Friedman to believe that Iraq could be turned into a progressive democracy within a few years of a military invasion - the extent to which a nation's culture, history, governance, and the population's present education level factor into its chances of flourishing and producing a population of highly educated, innovative citizens.

Sugar, Food and the Nanny State

That seems to be the gist of this argument in support of regulating sugar:

When Ronda Storms, a Republican state senator in Florida, is accused of nanny-state-ism for her efforts on behalf of a sane diet, it’s worth noting. When she introduced a bill to prevent people in Florida from spending food stamps on unhealthy items like candy, chips and soda, she broke ranks: few of her party have taken on Big Food....

To some, dictating what recipients of benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program can eat seems unfair. But when the program began in 1939 it aimed both to feed the unemployed and to aid farm recovery. Participants received $1.50 in stamps for every cash dollar spent, 50 cents of which was designated for purchase of agricultural surplus. That’s already a directive on spending, but perhaps more important is that nearly three-quarters of a century ago almost the only thing you could buy — with or without regulation — was real food. Since then Big Food has moved our diet in the wrong direction, and now we have a surplus of empty calories.

The argument for limiting the use of food stamps to actual food is consistent with established policy. They’re already disallowed for tobacco, alcohol,vitamins, pet foods, household supplies and (with some exceptions) food meant to be eaten on premises. Payments have been based on the cost of a “nutritionally adequate diet.”

First, most products include sugar. How do you create a meaningful regulation? Sugar is okay as long as the food isn't "too sweet" by some arbitrary measure? Raisins are okay, but not chocolate-covered raisins - even if the chocolate is less sweet than the raisins? No "craisins" or other dried fruits that have sugar added? What about sugar substitutes, some of which may be no more healthy than sugar and some of which may pose other health consequences? Also, if we're trying to ban "unhealthy foods", aren't we opening the door to a non-fallacious slippery slope argument: what about foods that are too fatty? What about foods that contain tropical oils? Salt? Nitrates?

The author cites a study that is particularly critical of fructose:

The authors specifically target “any sweetener containing the molecule fructose (which makes sugar sweet) that is added to food in processing” as the key problem in our current diet, and correlate the rise in consumption of sugar with a rise in disease, listing the many ways in which sugar’s effects on the body are similar to those of alcohol.

The authors also distinguish naturally occurring fructose from the addition of processed fructose to food products - a distinction that appears t be supported by science but again complicates the issue of regulation. You can't buy product X because it's sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, but you can buy product Y because it's sweetened with white grape juice?

Also, isn't it a bit simplistic to say that fructose "makes sugar sweet" when we also sweeten with glucose (high fructose corn syrup is about 55% fructose and about 42% glucose) or sucrose (in which the fructose is bound to glucose at a molecular level, rather than being free)? If the problem is an excess of fructose, and fructose is markedly worse for the health than other sugars, why not work on reducing the food industry's reliance on high fructose corn syrup instead of targeting sugars that are, well, less unhealthy?

Fundamentally, though, I think the idea of trying to regulate poor people in this fashion is ill-considered. It's fairly described as nanny-statism becuase tht's exactly what it is. If I had my druthers, although an initial lump sum would be included on a newly issued card, we would charge EBT cards by an equal increment each day (so nobody could completely run out of food money for more than a day) but otherwise let individual recipients decide how to use that money. I don't see much point to creating a context in which some recipients trade their EBT card for a cash payment of half of its value, or buy groceries that they intend to trade for what they really want. Let people make mistakes, let people learn from those mistakes. (I would extend this to other aid for which the recipient doesn't want bills to be vendored - if you want a cash allotment to pay your heating bill and you choose to spend it on something else, you should face the consequences of that choice and can subsequently either manage the money properly, have the bill vendored, or again deal with the consequences of a possible shutoff when you don't pay your bill).

I find it interesting that the author makes no argument that sugar poses a special or unique risk to the poor, or that the poor eat a disproportionate number of desserts or candy bars as compared to other groups. Just that poor people don't need sweet foods and we should feel free to try to regulate the poor into eating healthier diets. We also overestimate the effects of the interference - money is fungible, after all, and if you provide two sources of cash aid, one with strings and one without, you don't stop somebody from purchasing cigarettes or alcohol even as you pat yourself on the back for not letting them buy it with their EBT money. There are better ways to approach this issue, and ways that should be far more effective than trying to impede the poor from buying sweetened foods. I know the poor are easy targets, easily vilified, easily treated as some form of the "undeserving other", but you would think that present times would teach us that we "responsible folk" aren't necessarily as far removed from being on food assistance as we would like to believe.

Why Support an Argument With Facts

Michael Gerson, reverting to his role as a "compassionate conservative" claims to feel for the growing population of impoverished Americans. His critique of conservatives is a bit nebulous,

Conservatives naturally focus on equal opportunity rather than on equal outcomes. But equality of opportunity is a more radical concept than we generally concede. It is not a natural state; it is a social and political achievement. It depends on healthy families and cohesive communities. But opportunity also depends on effective government — on public safety, public education and public health. Governmental overreach can undermine other important social institutions. Yet the retreat of government does not automatically restore them to health.

The first question is whether it's fair to say that "Conservatives naturally focus on equal opportunity" because they believe in equal opportunity, or because it's a means of avoiding the discussion of entrenched inequality. Implicitly, it was in comparison to the proponents of "All we need is equal opportunity" and their implicit, "So all we need to do is nothing", that Matthew Yglesias found conservative proponents of "absolute mobility" to be the "smartest conservatives". At least they're looking at economic reality. "If you're poor, on the whole you have the opportunity to earn a little bit more than your parents earned."

Gerson acknowledges that if you truly want equal opportunity you need to have - and pay for - government programs that support opportunity, including safety, education and health. He complains, with no attempt at specificity, that "government overreach" undermines "social institutions", but without any attempt to explain which ones, how they're undermined more by government action than by other factors, and a cost-benefit analysis, that observation is worthless. Without examining the context and alternatives, you can easily end up presenting imbecilic arguments about how government intervention ruined the "good old days" when racial covenants and discrimination left wealthier and more successful African Americans living in or near poor neighborhoods where they ostensibly served as role models.

For a more direct example, since Gerson mentions "healthy families", it's possible to argue that social welfare programs have contributed to the breakdown of the nuclear family in poor communities, but it's also possible to observe that many other families are helped by the very same supports, that many other factors contribute to the breakdown of the "traditional" family unit, that some family units are not healthy (Gerson later acknowledges "permissive cultural norms" as well as "downward pressure on wages and... stagnant labor markets" as part of the bigger picture), and that you risk confusing cause and effect - is it the availability of government supports that break down families, or are you seeing instead how dubious choices (leaving aside questions of the degree to which they're forced by circumstance) lead people to seek and remain dependent upon government benefits? Public assistance programs were not created in a vacuum - they were created to serve an already-existing population of poor people, many of whom were already part of a measurable cycle of poverty.

Gerson next takes a page out of George Will's style guide, resorting to a "hollow man" argument:

Liberals often fail to recognize that income redistribution, while preventing penury, is not identical to social equality.

Is there a single "liberal" in the world who believes that income redistribution is identical to social equality? Gerson's suggestion that his fabrication is a mistake "often" made by "liberals" should be acknowledged for what it is - nonsense. But that's the entire point of the hollow man - you can easily critique nonsense that you stick into a fictionalized opponent's mouth, but it's a lot harder to deal with arguments in an honest, substantive manner. When columnists habitually resort to the hollow man, you have to wonder if they're implicitly acknowledging that they're simply not up to the task of addressing the actual issues.

The main challenge of poverty is not a lack of consumption but a lack of social capital — measured in skills and values — and of opportunity. Addressing these problems is more complex than increasing marginal tax rates, particularly when revenue is used to cover the increasing costs of non-means-tested entitlement programs.

Addressing a problem that has nothing to do with "marginal tax rates" is more complicated than "increasing marginal tax rates", he tells us? No kidding - it's a non-sequitur. One has very little to do with the other. Who is arguing otherwise? Perhaps Gerson means to allude to the research documenting that societies with less income equality have more economic mobility, particularly at the bottom, but even that's not necessarily either related to or correlated with "marginal tax rates". Who does Gerson imagine is making this argument - or is he deliberately hollow manning in order to cover the weakness of his argument?

The structure of the modern welfare state is not focused on empowering the poor. Instead, it has increased the percentage of government transfer payments that go to middle- and upper-income seniors.

Egad. So his hollow man liberal has constructed a "welfare state" that redistributes wealth from the middle and upper classes to... the middle and upper classes? And that would be wealth redistribution in the sense of... what?

Gerson is, of course, attempting a clumsy sleight of hand. A change of topic from public assistance programs, a/k/a welfare, to Social Security and Medicare. One might look at those programs, and the before-and-after picture of senior citizens' wealth, and say, "Wow, they were effective." One might look at the present picture and say, "Yes, some benefits are received by seniors who don't need them, but those seniors paid for these insurance benefits over the course of their careers, and other seniors are most certainly kept or lifted out of poverty through their receipt of Social Security and health insurance. If one were concerned about the longer-term picture, one might argue that due to some flaws in the funding model too much of the present cost of those programs is falling upon working adults, and that we need to take steps to make those programs sustainable. But within this context, to attempt a silent change of subject from programs like WIC and SNAP (food stamps) to Medicare and Social Security is dishonest.

When speaking of true public assistance, Gerson seems to be positive:

Welfare reform decreased caseloads and child poverty while increasing employment and income for low-income families. Community policing and zero-tolerance policies reduced crime. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — which used to be called food stamps — has been reformed to better fight hunger. The earned-income tax credit has encouraged work and reduced poverty.

I'm wondering, unless the societal breakdown he complains about is occurring among "middle- and upper-income seniors", what social welfare programs does he perceive as actually "undermin[ing] other important social institutions"?

At the end, Gerson suggests that what we need is for "reform-oriented" politicians from the "center-right and the center-left" to impose market-driven reforms. I'm not sure how any of the reforms Gerson praises reflect market forces in action, but I guess that's a discussion for another day. Gerson places himself among those who pretend that a magical bipartisanship at the center can solve all of the nation's problems - as if it's always the moderates and compromisers who have the answers, and that partisans are always wrong - but predictably resorts to false-equivalence, "Our politics has a surplus of ideology and a shortage of wonkery". If I look, for example, at the Republican primaries or, for that matter, at Gerson's past columns, am I apt to see more of the solution or more of the problem?

Class and Income Rigidity in the United States

I don't want to pick on Megan McArdle, as I think her heart's in the right place on this one, but.... In an effort to explore inequality, some time back, Megan McArdle argued,

The old aristocracy was, I think, at least dimly aware that it wasn't quite fair for them to have what they had by mere virtue of being born to the right parents. But in the new aristocracy, it is rarely enough to just get born to the right parents; you also have to work very hard. (Higher earning men are now more likely to work more than 50 hours a week than are men in lower earnings quintiles.)

Has McArdle ever worked at a job that paid by the hour?

When Eric Erickson made a fool of himself by arguing that he worked three jobs, it wasn't just his white T-shirt that was intended to send the message, "I'm just a working guy". It's typically those who work in hourly jobs who can legitimately claim to be working multiple jobs. Why? Because their employers have only so many hours of work to offer, and when the schedule fills up you can only get more hours by changing jobs or moonlighting. If your a non-exempt employee, such that you're entitled to overtime, your employer also has a strong incentive to cap your work week at 40 hours, leaving you with more time to find and work a second job - not that you would find that to be an ideal use of your time, were you in that position, but if you need the income that's how you'll get it.

When the economy is booming, a lot of the workers that McArdle suggests aren't "work[ing] very hard" in fact put in ridiculous hours. I know some people in the construction trades who were working seventy or more hours per week during the boom. Some now have difficulty finding full-time employment, and an even harder time finding employers who are willing to pay overtime. They didn't get lazy - the economy changed.

As for those hard-working white collar types, one of the big reasons why they work more than forty hours is that they are exempt and thus their employers can require them to work more hours without paying them any additional money. Yes, some people who are chained to their desks do work very hard. Others put in a lot of face time. Others do work that's pretty mundane and could easily be distributed to other workers, but for the fact that hiring additional help would increase the employer's costs. (Perhaps McArdle has forgotten the Bush Administrations expansion of jobs that could be classified as exempt, and has overlooked the frequency with which employers are accused of cheating workers out of overtime pay - it's a big deal.)

In speaking of poverty and income inequality, McArdle argues,

I don't care about income inequality. I care about the absolute condition of the poor -- whether they are hungry, cold, and sick. But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett's incomes to mine. And I'm not sure why anyone should.

McArdle's examples seem a bit odd. I can't recall hearing anybody argue that either Gates and Buffett are undeserving of their wealth. On the one hand, McArdle seems to recognize that the two issues are unrelated - and in fact that inequality of income and wealth is what allows some entrepreneurs and investors to come out on top. But on the other she appears to be suggesting that if you're concerned about anything beyond absolute poverty, you're engaging in some form of class resentment whereby you want to strip wealth away from people like Gates and Buffett. The disconnect is highlighted by the fact that McArdle wants people to have equal economic opportunity, independent of their economic status. If McArdle's statement is meant to be, "As long as there's a reasonable path from poverty to wealth, I don't care about income inequality," fair enough. But if her statement is taken literally, surely she is aware that there is a tipping point at which income inequality will pretty much lock the class structure in place.

Despite her implication that professionals work harder than hourly workers, McArdle does recognize that there's a lot more to the picture than that. She suggests, in my opinion quite rightly, that higher wage earners are apt to give their children better education and better opportunities, and in many cases "the actual skills required to earn more money than everyone else". I read a comment a while back, I believe from one of Donald Trump's children, describing how he had proposed attending a college that would have allowed him more time to pursue sports or hobbies. He was told to go to the best college he could get into. Did he necessarily get a better education there? Perhaps, but probably not. But "The Donald" has a very clear understanding of the value of branding. Trump provides an example of how somebody can benefit not just from family money, but from entering the same business as their parent. Trump's father was a successful real estate developer in New York City, so it's far from a surprise that Trump became a real estate developer in New York City. And with some hard work, luck, no small amount of ego and force of personality, along with dad's money and connections, Trump succeeded (and failed) on a much larger scale than his father. The lesson to be inferred is less that Trump received an unfair advantage, and more that children will often follow a career path consistent with that modeled for them by their parents. And yes, if you learn the ins and outs of any job from somebody who already holds it, you're more apt to succeed in that job.

Children of the wealthy are also more likely to get a level of support unavailable to the rest of us - a job at their parent's firm to help establish them in their parent's profession. Yes, about forty percent of sons at some point work for one of their father's past employers, but it should go without saying that at the bottom end of the labor pool that is more likely to establish you as a lower-end wage earner than to help propel you to the top 1% (where the number of sons working at dad's current or old employer approaches 70%).¹

Also, it's not like the top 1% through the remaining 32% of their children to the wolves. A couple of "sons of bankers" come to mind, one of whom was sharp as a tack but uninterested in banking. His father put him through law school and funded his founding of a law firm. Another was not very bright or motivated. His father bought him a commercial janitorial services company. It's much easier to enter into a profession, or to succeed as an entrepreneur, when your path to success is greased with family money.

The benefits of having wealthy parents can't be avoided and, even if you believe it should be, it's difficult to impinge a cure that would not be worse than the disease. But let's recognize that if Donald Trump's dad were a shift manager at a restaurant, Trump would be a success if he became a general manager. He would be a phenomenal success if he became a successful restauranteur - but probably still somebody we wouldn't have heard of. Trump moved from third base to home plate - but unlike most of the rest of us, he started on third.

While McArdle professes some level of surprise that although "Ivy League colleges threw open their doors to the bourgeois masses, and cut back on the Saint Grottlesex crowd," inequality persists, perhaps she should consider both that the Ivy Leagues have not eliminated preferences for the children of alumni, and that the number of people who can attend Ivy League schools remains insignificant - even though the signal drawn from attendance is massive. Using McArdle's own anecdote from another piece, quoting Bryan Caplan's finding that "Super-elite credentials matter much more than your academic record",

You see this in Washington all the time -- a friend who went to a lesser-known state school said he could always tell the people he wasn't going to like when he met them at cocktail parties, because the minute he told them where he'd gone to school, they became extremely interested in going to get another drink or find the cheese dip. This is one of the smartest, most consistently interesting and original, most talented writers I know. Having actually attended one of those elite schools that apparently make you fascinating, I can attest firsthand that statistically, the elitists were vanishingly unlikely to be as interesting as the person they abandoned because he'd gone to a state college.

The first question that comes to mind: Why do McArdle and her friend keep going to those parties? (The answer, of course, is obvious: They're hobnobbing with rich, powerful people and it benefits them to "see and be seen".) The second question is, why does her friend keep dropping the name of his undergraduate institution into discussions? It's truly difficult for me to believe that, as a matter of course, the people at these parties are changing the subject from his scintillating conversation and saying, "This is a nice conversation and all, but unless you went to Harvard or Yale I have to move on to more important people or, if you went to a state college, the cheese dip."²

When McArdle observes that middle class parents would be horrified if their children, like those of the bottom quintile, had only a 17% chance of achieving a household income of $90,000 or more, she's correct. But that also highlights how she misses the boat on income inequality. The more education your parents have, the more wealth they have, the more business and political connections they have, the more they can do for you - even if simply by example³ - to land you among the nation's highest wage earners. If you truly don't care about income inequality, and truly don't care if the bottom drops out on the middle class, you cannot credibly claim to be concerned about the associated collapse of opportunity to rise.
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1. Admittedly the figures are from Canada, but I expect that the experience is about the same in the U.S. and U.K.

2. Unless, perhaps, these conversations involved his lobbying various political insiders for a nomination to the Supreme Court, but that's another story.

3. Most will do much more than act as role models.

Some Things, You Shouldn't Have to Explain

Following up on the much-maligned essay by Gene Marks, Megan McArdle offers what I think is a reasonable interpretation of Marks' thesis: it's much harder than most people think to transition from being poor to being middle class. McArdle tends to oversimplify, but at the same time she acknowledges the general reality of the situation:

[Poor people] could be middle class if they made a series of hard choices. But those choices are really hard - much harder than they are for the people who are already there. Chances are, you would also have a hard time making those choices.

Some people find it very easy to point to a child in poverty and say, "If you acted like a middle class kid you would escape poverty," never mind your parents, peers, schools, support system.... Marks simply reveals that when those who have enjoyed lives of comparable privilege speak of "acting middle class" they are describing taking a level of action and initiative at least an order of magnitude greater than what a typical middle class child must do to stay in the middle class - in simple terms, struggling against the odds vs. coasting.

I had a client many years ago, abandoned to his elderly grandmother's care by his drug addict parents, caught at the age of seventeen selling crack, and in court as an adult (at 17 you're an adult in Michigan for criminal prosecution). The image that sticks with me is when, at his sentencing, I described to the court why I believed probation was appropriate and referred to him as intelligent. His reaction telegraphed that nobody had ever used that word to describe him. Out of control, troublemaker, and the like, sure. But intelligent? Nobody noticed. Nobody was looking.

Computers Can't Eliminate Poverty

I recently read a particularly cynical take on the effort to distribute computers to children in impoverished areas of the world:

What a child needs is to be sequestered from human contact with the latest technology. A third world educational initiative should be conducted in the manner of an experiment in developing the cognitive power of chimpanzees. Feel the techno-idiocy: it burns.

I remember this idea getting serious momentum years ago until it was pointed out to some of the philanthropists that the places they were planning to distribuite computing to didn't have electricity. Now they've figured out how to put solar panels in the things, so its let them eat laptops: the sequel.

In fairness to the cynic, the actual proposal literally involved "tak[ing] tablets and drop[ping] them out of helicopters", unaccompanied by "any adults or teaching resources" to "see if the tablets could be used to teach them to read without additional instruction", with allusions to the Coke bottle in "The Gods Must Be Crazy", an approach that does seem rather absurd.

Thomas Friedman's recent column on an initiative to distribute inexpensive tablet computers to children in India brought it to mind, sharing a second-hand account of a maid's reaction to learning of the program:

"'What can you do on it?’ she asked me. I said, ‘If your daughter goes to school, she can use it to download videos of class lessons,’ just like she had seen my son download physics lectures every week from M.I.T.’s [OpenCourseWare]. I said, ‘You have seen our son sitting at the computer listening to a teacher who is speaking. That teacher is actually in America.’ She just kept getting wider- and wider-eyed. Then she asked me will her kids be able to learn English on it. I said, ‘Yes, they will definitely be able to learn English,’ which is the passport for upward mobility here. I said, ‘It will be so cheap you will be able to buy one for your son and one for your daughter!'"

I think that a decent computer, along with an adequate source of power and access to content, can be a powerful learning tool. But let's be honest here. Even if we assume that they have access to quality instruction, most kids aren't going to spend hours staring at the screen of a notebook computer trying to learn math or English. We may be dealing with a particularly motivated population of students and parents, but even within that context there is going to be a lot of frustration and failure. Hardware is the easy part - creating and distributing quality, up-to-date, accessible software and content is costly and difficult. Even if you create it, absent strong motivation it's likely to be underutilized.

If a school district were to propose to Friedman that it was going to totally eliminate classroom instruction in favor of having kids buy notebooks, no verification of Internet access, lessons and content to be developed at some point in the future, I would hope he would be skeptical and critical. This type of technology distribution is much more of an "every little bit helps" approach than a magic bullet.

I would like to see India push forward and invest the necessary money in content, software and infrastructure to make distance learning a reality for every one of the nation's children. Even if we assume only 5% of kids will actually see a significant benefit, advancing academically at or above 'grade level' despite a lack of access to schools and teachers, or using the computer to push beyond what they can learn in class, that's a lot of kids. Although I agree that you can't eat computers, it is not likely that the kids who most need this type of program will have reasonable, equivalent access to educational opportunity.

The Limits of Yelling "Hypocrite!"

One of the easiest accusations to throw at a political figure is that of hypocrisy, because... they so often are hypocritical. But our acceptance of hypocrisy in the context of politics also makes it easy to make unfair accusations of hypocrisy, for example, "Back in the 80's the liberals in Congress did this, now they say they oppose the same thing." Never mind that the term "liberal" is subjective, we're talking about two completely different groups of people, and even if the issue truly is the same it's possible for somebody over the space of thirty years to find cause to change his mind. Sometimes the accusations are absurd, such as "Ayn Rand collected Social Security even though she opposed it," or "President Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich even though he isn't voluntarily paying taxes beyond the present tax rate." Its not hypocrisy to advance change while following the present laws, or accepting the quid pro quo benefit of paying your Social Security taxes even if you believe its implementation was a mistake.

One of the forms of hypocrisy that a politician's political opponents tend to see as a particular point of vulnerability, or find particularly annoying, is when a candidate lives his life in a manner that seems partially, largely, or completely at odds with the political positions he holds (or, in some cases, pretends to hold). So when Newt Gingrich argues that gay marriage will harm the traditional institution of marriage, it's pointed out that he has a long personal history of infidelity and is presently in his third marriage. And when Al Gore argues that strong action is needed to limit the effects of climate change, it's pointed out that he lives an incredibly wasteful lifestyle.

These accusations are not entirely unfair. Gingrich has no explanation for how gay marriage will supposedly undermine traditional marriage, and it's reasonable to point out that he has no personal problem with weakening the institution of marriage or ignoring his vows to his spouse, and yet the institution of marriage survives. The wasteful, self-indulgent lifestyles of people like Thomas Friedman and Al Gore arguably represent the tragedy of the commons - it's true that individual action, even at the scale of an individual whose carbon footprint approaches that of a typical neighborhood or small town, is not going to have any measurable impact on climate change. But that doesn't make it any more pleasant to hear such a person lecture you, Friedman-style, that if only gas were more expensive and ordinary people (like you) could not afford to drive as much, we would all be better off. It may be true, but why is it that the proposed changes seem to affect only the lifestyles of others? It's also reasonable to point out that you can build yourself a lavish mansion and live in the highest of styles while taking steps to minimize your carbon footprint, perhaps you should do so before lecturing others about waste.

Walter Russell Mead has attempted to explain the differences between acceptable hypocrisy and unacceptable hypocrisy. First he distinguishes character flaws from hypocrisy:

Not all character flaws are inconsistent with positions of great dignity. General Grant’s fondness for whiskey did not make him unfit for command. Other statesmen have combined great public achievement with failure in their personal lives. Franklin Roosevelt was neither a good father nor a good husband; Edward VII was a better monarch than man.

Given that everybody has character flaws, it should go without saying that it's possible to be a great leader in one field while being deeply flawed in another. Shifting back to the topic of actual hypocrisy, Mead tells us,

A television preacher ... cannot indulge in drug fueled trysts with male prostitutes while preaching conservative Christian doctrine. The head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving cannot be convicted of driving while under the influence. The head of the IRS cannot be a tax cheat. The most visible leader of the world’s green movement cannot live a life of conspicuous consumption, spewing far more carbon into the atmosphere than almost all of those he castigates for their wasteful ways. Mr. Top Green can’t also be a carbon pig.

I should first point out, "Yes, they can." The television minister will do just fine until his actions become public. The head of MADD could come back with some appropriate mea culpas and perhaps even improve the message of her organization. (I know Mead has a specific case in mind, but he's arguing a general rule - one anecdote does not prove a rule.) And yes, though it's annoying, it is very possible for somebody to be the biggest "carbon pig" in the world and still argue forcefully and accurately about the need for collective action on climate change.

Mead carries on about how you can have any range of character flaws as an environmental activist (which, again, have nothing to do with hypocrisy), but that you can't have big houses, a personal jet, or even invest in firms that could turn a profit if their green energy technologies are adopted on a wide scale. Perhaps Mead is correct to a point, because obviously you will annoy somme listeners - even sympathetic listeners - by living a lifestyle that's so at odds with your message. And obviously people like Mead will come out of the woodwork with a tu quoque argument. And Mead's demands on Gore are plainly absurd:

Surely, skeptics reason, if the peril were as great as he says and he cares about it as much as he claims, Gore’s sense of civic duty would call him to set an example of conspicuous non-consumption. This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents.

Bad example. Exactly when in history was it that generals didn't sleep in mansions while lecturing their troops to make do with far less? I don't recall G.W. pitching a pup tent in the Rose Garden, or even so much as ordering that the White House air conditioning be set to a higher temperature, when he ordered the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. A more apt expression might be that it's not possible to be rich and advocate for the poor - but that serves only to highlight how ridiculous Mead's argument is. If you're wealthy, have access to the media and have political influence, you can advocate very effectively for change. You won't have a bigger impact on the public debate by giving away your wealth and living in a homeless shelter.

Although the tu quoque argument is inherently about hypocrisy, Mead states that he doesn't believe Gore is a hypocrite:

I am not one of those who thinks him a hypocrite; I think rather that he shares an illusion common amongst the narcissistic glitterati of our time: that politically fashionable virtue cancels private vice. The drug addled Hollywood celeb whose personal life is a long record of broken promises and failed relationships and whose serial bouts with drug and alcohol abuse and revolving door rehab adventures are notorious can redeem all by “standing up” for some exotic, stylish cause. These moral poseurs and dilettantes of virtue are modern versions of those guilt-plagued medieval nobles who built churches and monasteries to ‘atone’ for their careers of bloodshed, oppression and scandal.

Mr. Gore is sincere, as the fur-fighting actresses are sincere, as so many ’causey’ plutocrats and moguls are sincere. It is perhaps also true that the fundraisers who absolve them of their guilt in exchange for the donations and the publicity are at least as sincere as the indulgence sellers in Martin Luther’s Germany.

I don’t judge, dear reader, and neither should you.

He doesn't judge, "dear reader" but my goodness does he patronize.

The average citizen is all too likely to conclude that if Mr. Gore can keep his lifestyle, the average American family can keep its SUV and incandescent bulbs. If Gore can take a charter flight, I don’t have to take the bus. If Gore can have many mansions, I can use the old fashioned kind of shower heads that actually clean and toilets that actually flush. Al Gore looks to the average American the way American greens look to poor people in the third world: hypocritically demanding that others accept permanently lower standards of living than those the activists propose for themselves.

In Mead's eyes the average citizen (that's you), it appears, is quite stupid. I suspect that many average people would find it annoying to be lectured by Gore that they should made lifestyle changes, when Gore himself has done so little to minimize his own sizable carbon footprint. But contrary to what Mead implies I also suspect that, if asked, the average voter would recognize the difference between an individual and a collective effect, and that it is physically impossible for the world to support close to seven billion people if the average person lived like Gore.

Is Mead attempting to argue to the contrary? That we can all live like Gore? That, on the whole, people in the developing world do not have to accept lower standards of living than are enjoyed in the developed world? (Is that even Gore's message - or is it more that if corrective action is not taken the situation in much of the developing world will grow worse?) If Mead accepts that the world's resources are limited and that it's impossible to lift the average lifestyle of every inhabitant of this planet to that of the American middle class, and if he truly believes that people in the developing world need somebody to tell them that fact, who is it that he believes would be an appropriate spokesperson? Bill Gates?

Does Mead imagine that it would be easier to hear the message from a wealthy, privileged westerner who makes no argument that he, or anybody he knows, should live a less profligate and wasteful lifestyle? Also, why does it matter how the average person in the developing world perceives Al Gore? Most don't even have the capacity to "unfriend" him on Facebook, let alone influence the policy of their governments. That may not be fair, but it's reality. (If it makes you feel better, even with our entrenched democracy and comparative wealth, the average American voter has only slightly more influence on government and policy.)

The short version of Mead's argument is that Al Gore shouldn't be taken seriously on environmental issues because he lives a lifestyle that is wasteful, and is too narcissistic to even see the conflict between what he says and what he does. What's missing? Any substantive argument. Any indication that Al Gore is wrong. That says to me that the problem is with Mead - as I stated up front, it's easy to accuse politicians of hypocrisy. But what matters is whether they're right or wrong. If Mead believes that Gore is wrong, he should make his case. If not, he should stop rambling about why Gore should not be taken seriously and start explaining why any inconsistency between Gore's lifestyle and his environmental advocacy is irrelevant - a distraction from the truth.