Misunderstanding Journalistic Objectivity

Prof. David Bernstein questions whether the BBC is objective, complaining about a story he heard on BBC radio "a few years ago". His complaint, frankly, suggests that the only way he would find news coverage to be "objective" is if he agreed with everything it aired.

Specifically, Bernstein claims that with "perhaps slight (but only slight) exaggeration, the report" involved a Chinese national asserting that market reform of the healthcare system had everything coming up roses and daffodils, and the reporter asking a series of questions about the possible downside of reform. The Chinese national kept coming back to "Nope, not a problem, sunshine and daffodils." Bernstein's reaction, "Outside the BBC and the Shining Path, who pines for the days of Chinese Maoism". Because, you know, the only possible choices are a market system where "if you can borrow the money, you can save a sick child" and Chinese Maoism.

Let's start with the question of "What is objectivity?" In Britain, much of the mainstream media has a known bias. You want your politics covered with, on the whole, a left-wing slant? Read The Guardian. You want a right-wing slant? Read The Telegraph. You want balance? Read both. It's much more a U.S. phenomenon where every media network that doesn't proudly identify itself as right-wing scrambles to claim "objectivity" while those aligned with the political right sneer that everybody else is biased toward the left.

Bernstein also displays confusion about the British style of reporting. "Oh my goodness", he announces, "The reporter asked follow-up questions that are skeptical of the initial answer! That must mean that the reporter is biased." Because, you know, you always get the full story the first time around. Especially when you're interviewing somebody in a totalitarian state about government policy.

It's easy to imagine a different context in which a lack of skeptical follow-up would have had Bersntein screaming at the radio. Let's say it's the early 1980's, Russian Jews are scrambling to get out of that country, and Bernstein hears an interview of a Jewish Russian who says that things are actually very good in Russia, and he has no idea why anybody else is complaining let alone trying to leave. "How could they take such a statement at face value? Why aren't they at least asking him why so many other people have complaints, or about the known problems in Russia that are inspiring people to leave? Why would they even think that somebody in a country like Russia would go on the radio and risk retaliation from the government by telling the truth?"

But more than that, it's not at all uncommon in my experience for British reporters to use a "But what about..." series of questions to challenge the initial answer they're given, whether they're speaking to a politician, business leader, or random guy on the street. It may not be the approach to which Bernstein is accustomed, but it's actually not a bad way to tease out some extra details about a story that may run contrary to an initial statement. Sure, it sounds skeptical, but it is journalism - and it sure beats the credulity Bernstein seems to expect a reporter to display when confronted with a statement consistent with Bernstein's politics and assumptions, facts be damned.

Man, every couple of years a reporter does her job and makes Prof. Bernstein's head explode? "Get them off the air!"

Even the CEO Has Privacy Rights

Businessweek informs us,

Apple Inc. may already have told investors all it needs to about Steve Jobs’s health problems in its statement yesterday that he was granted a leave of absence, according to three securities law experts.

“They don’t have to say any more than the fact that he’s taking a leave, it’s indefinite, if that’s what it is,” James Cox, a Duke University law professor, said yesterday. “Then they can express lots of generalized optimism which is not going to get them into trouble because that’s the kind of expected puffery for which there’s no actionable claims to speak of.”

Don't get me wrong - I understand why investors want to know all the dirty details of Jobs' health, and why they were annoyed by past secrecy and statements that understated the severity of his medical condition. But obligations to the SEC aside, what makes Businessweek believe that Apple could disclose more about Jobs' medical condition without violating his privacy rights?

Where's Limbaugh's Impassioned Defense of Limbaugh?

Or his scathing criticism of Clear Channel?

I understand why Clear Channel or the radio station would want to pull down the "straight shooter" sign for Limbaugh, given recent events, just to avoid the possibility of controversy. But the very act of doing so lends credence to the argument that the rhetoric of certain right-wing rhetoric political and opinion leaders has been over-the-top. Further, the sign doesn't, in my opinion, constitute the type of speech that's under discussion:

It isn't a call for violence, an expression against democratic traditions, or really, anything more than a pretty obvious visual representation of the "straight shooter" slogan.

Rush, you keep arguing there's nothing wrong with the use of violent rhetoric and imagery, so start living up to your own words. Stop trying to flush imagery that you purport to be defensible, let alone imagery that most people would agree is defensible, down the memory hole. And certainly, don't sit silent while people scrub the record on your behalf.

Getting Those Republican Tax Hikes Back on Track?

The Washington Post brings us an amazing insight into President Obama. You may not have suspected this from his campaign promise not to raise taxes on the middle class, or from his insistence that ten-year tax cut passed under G.W. Bush should not expire for middle class workers, but... believe it or not, he doesn't want to raise taxes on the middle class. Shocking, I know. But in case you haven't grasped the obvious,

Administration officials said no one should be surprised to learn that Obama is unwilling to backtrack on one of the central tenets of his administration - protecting middle-class Americans from higher taxes - particularly after last month's tax battle with Congress.

The reporter switches from telling us what we already know to displays of remarkable credulity,

President Obama's refusal to raise taxes for the vast majority of Americans will prevent him from pursuing a broad overhaul of the tax code and is making it difficult for him to achieve his goals for reducing the budget deficit, according to administration and congressional sources.

* * *

The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because the budget is still being drafted.

So a bunch of anonymous people say that, but for President Obama, the Republican majority in Congress would pass a tax bill that will hike middle class taxes and balance the budget? Really? The Republicans are that beholden to President Obama?

Heck, even if you could get a consensus that it would be economically wise to raise taxes on the middle class at this time... and you won't... and you assume that every member of the Democratic minority were willing to raise taxes on the middle class... which, of course, they're not... how many Republicans would sign onto such a bill? Would I need more than one hand to count them? More than one finger? Perhaps not even that? (I could phrase the rhetorical question differently - if President Obama were to propose that the Republicans join him in raising taxes on the middle class, which finger would they display in response? For some reason I'm not thinking "thumbs up".)

The point of this article, it would appear, is to berate the President for not breaking his campaign promise and strongly advocating middle class tax hikes that he knows have no chance of passing because... um... Oh, here it is: otherwise he's "missing an opportunity to build on the momentum established by his fiscal commission" which... had no momentum. Given that the commission failed to establish enough internal consensus to trigger a Congressional vote, and how balancing the budget is given relatively low priority by voters, its difficult for me to identify the "momentum" or to see where it has been "established". But it's reasonable to conclude that it doesn't even have a fingernail hold in the Republican Party.

If the point of the article is that in order to balance the budget Congress will have to pass tax increases along with any spending cuts, I'm not sure that there's anybody left who isn't aware of that fact. But the President did propose tax increases, at least in the form of letting the Bush tax cut bill expire for high wage earners and allowing that Republican-scheduled tax increase to take partial effect, but remind me again... how much support did that idea get from the Republican Party? Other than weakening himself and his ability to advocate effectively on economic issues, unless the author truly does believe that the only thing that keeps the Republican majority in the House from passing a middle class tax hike is fear of a veto, what does the author imagine that President Obama could accomplish by saying, "Okay, enough about the rich - let's raise taxes on everybody else!"

It's interesting to note that Google News suggests that the original title of the article was "Extension of tax cuts chokes Obama's deficit plans", but that the title was changed to "Tax pledge hinders Obama's plans to overhaul tax code, reduce deficit". Not exactly a subtle change....

Update: Ramesh Ponnuru offers his thoughts on how the Republicans might balance the budget... or, more accurately, not balance it. The column is entitled "How the G.O.P. Can Cut and Survive" but perhaps would be better titled "Why the G.O.P. Should Cut and Run".

And Then Along Comes The Ever-Predictable Charles Krauthammer....

There's not much point in reading a Charles Krauthammer column. He's as repetitive as Richard Cohen and 99% of the time you know what he's going to say by the time you finish reading the headline. Today, of course, is no different. His column is entitled "Massacre, followed by libel" - which is, apparently, the closest he can come to echoing the theme presently being pushed by people like Sarah Palin that anybody who draws a connection between violent rhetoric and violent action is committing "blood libel". (I wonder if Krauthammer will write a column decrying that irresponsible, inflammatory use of language... Sorry, I'm kidding - it's a Republican speaking, so I actually don't.) And that's before you consider that Rep. Giffords is Jewish. Do these people think?

Which brings us back to Krauthammer who, for a smart person, does remarkably little thinking. Which is probably why he so frequently resorts to dishonest, logically flawed arguments. For example, he starts out with the accusation,

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

Except that's not the charge. You'll find few examples of anybody with any prominent making anything that resembles the charge. The closest actual example I've seen produced is a blog post to the Huffington Post by Gary Hart, somebody who long ago faded from the popular consciousness. And the criticism is not that people can't engage in free speech, but something that the vast majority of politicians and commentators on both sides of the aisle demonstrate through their conduct - that when you're a prominent leader of an American political party, you should choose your words carefully. You won't find Mitch McConnell bandying about phrases like "blood libel" or using campaign slogans such as "don't retreat, reload", because he knows it's beneath him, that it's bad for the party and that it's bad for the political culture. The debate is about a handful of people who presently are the unofficial opinion leaders or potential political leaders of the Republican Party who think it's really cool to use violent rhetoric, and to give unqualified support to candidates who echo or expand upon their rhetoric.

Let's keep in mind also that the criticism of Palin's rhetoric is anything but new. The angry response of people like Krauthammer and Pat Buchanan didn't emerge when, for example, Rep. Giffords was discussing the break-in at her office, the crosshairs imagery used by Palin, and violent rhetoric.

Where was Krauthammer's over-the-top anger at Giffords for daring to say "...for example we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list. But the thing is, the way she has it depicted has the cross-hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there are consequences to that action." If he truly believes that criticism of violent rhetoric merits his present umbrage and the hysterical "blood libel" accusation he appears to echo in more sanitized form, why not then?

Let's imagine that a political leader depicts a set of targeted political seats by depicting them on a map overlaid by rifle crosshairs and setting forth below the specific candidates who are targeted for defeat, accompanied by a "Don't Retreat, Reload!" campaign theme. Now let's imagine that a psychopath, whatever his motivation, goes to a campaign event featuring a politician and starts shooting people including that politician and, when he runs out of bullets he... attempts to reload. And now let's imagine that somebody says, "You know what? Whatever was going through that guy's mind, this is 100% consistent with the violent rhetoric the political leader was using." What part of that is inaccurate?

There are many honest responses to that observation - after all, correlation is not the same thing as causation. Throwing a temper tantrum because somebody made the observation? That not only isn't an honest response, it invokes "The lady doth protest too much."

It's not surprising that Krauthammer chooses to recharacterize the accusation, creating a hollow man that he can more easily refute. He accuses "Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans" of drawing a direct causal link between the rhetoric of people like Palin and the shooting. Krugman?

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.

So Krugman believes that we need to look at the actions of Loughner in the context of our society, and consider the huge increase in violent threats against Members of Congress as perhaps the result of violent rhetoric? Krauthammer is free to disagree, but he did not make the accusation that Krauthammer is trying to put into his mouth. Olbermann? He said nothing about causation. The New York Times?

It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.

No claim of causation - in fact, the opposite. If Krauthammer wants to defend the described rhetoric of right-wing political leaders on its merits he has the column space to do it - but I'm not expecting he'll try. Hollow men are so much easier to fight. The Sheriff?

"I think it's time as a country that we need to do a little soul searching." Dupnik said. "Because I think it's the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business, and what we see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised. This has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in."

So the Sheriff makes a curmudgeonly statement about how the country has changed since he was a kid, and that the current culture plays a role in incidents of violence like the one at issue, and Krauthammer thinks it's fair to edit out everything but his statement about vitriolic rhetoric? Ah yes, it's Krauthammer. Of course he does.

Predictably, Krauthammer next digresses into the personal history of Loughner and, for a psychiatrist, does a remarkably poor job of discussing mental illness. Krauthammer knows that somebody who is the grips of paranoid psychosis is indiscriminate about where he picks up the elements that feed his beliefs. Assuming Krauthammer's armchair diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia to be correct, you don't have to try to find some form of correlation between Loughner's pre-psychosis political beliefs and his latching onto such notions as the gold standard or violent rhetoric from other sources, because they were consistent with his delusions.

Perhaps also, Krauthammer spends too much time in an echo chamber. Too much time tuning out anybody who dares to disagree with him and listening only to sources that reinforce his pre-existing beliefs. Humans, after all, have that tendency. Perhaps Krauthammer's columns are so banal because he's not trying to do anything but preach to the choir. I admit that I find some amusement in the notion being advanced by a range of right-wing commentators that Loughner could not possibly have been affected by right-wing political statements because he wasn't a right-winger. Believe it or not, if you take the time to listen to the arguments made by well-intentioned people on the other side you'll find that some of them not only have merit, but are persuasive. Yes, sometimes your reflexes kick in and your mind slams shut, but if you can make the effort to prise your mind back open just a little bit you may be surprised.

What's up next? What a surprise, the tu quoque. Take it, Scott Aiken. For all of the effort that Krauthammer and other right-wingers have invested in trying to find examples of left-wing violent rhetoric, they've come up with next to nothing. Nobody but Keith Olbermann has argued that the mention of guns should be drummed out of political discourse. Nobody has disputed that military or martial allegories are commonplace in politics. But as I previously mentioned, there is a line that about 99% of politicians won't cross. If we're honest about it, Palin's rhetoric would quickly exclude her as a potential leader of the Democratic Party. If we're honest about it, so would her lack of qualification. Yet despite some prominent Republicans who have expressed concern in the past about both her qualification and her public manner, she's raking in millions of dollars, is embraced by the Republican party, and is viewed as its possible if not probable presidential nominee. Ouch.

So no, a line about not bringing a knife to a gun fight, or using barely discernible crosshairs in a TV ad about how your opponent has been "targeted" by the Department of Justice for investigation - an ad few in the nation saw from a different election cycle? Not even in the same ballpark as the rhetoric of Palin, or her choice to stand behind Sharon Angle and her suggestion of "Second Amendment solutions" to losses at the ballot box, or the more colorful examples from this election. Shooting a legislative bill - a stack of paper - after talking about "targeting it"? I think it's quite a stretch to suggest that the bill was a stand-in for a person, particularly given that such an interpretation would have the candidate shooting at an allegorical member of his own party. But let's call it equal. Why isn't the left up in arms¹ about the accusation? Why is the right so defensive of rhetoric so over-the-top that 99% of its political leaders won't use it - and, as previously mentioned, why take umbrage now when the criticism has been leveled for many months?

As for Krauthammer's closing line? Ad hominem abusive. A fitting way to end a poorly reasoned article.
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1. Sorry, Keith, if that's too much of an allusion to guns.

No, the Problem Isn't Gun Control....

Save perhaps to the extent that existing gun laws that are supposed to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill were not adequately applied, perhaps because Jared Loughner managed to avoid diagnosis and treatment. Bob Herbert suggests,

If we were serious, if we really wanted to cut down on the killings, we’d have to do two things. We’d have to radically restrict the availability of guns while at the same time beginning the very hard work of trying to change a culture that glorifies and embraces violence as entertainment, and views violence as an appropriate and effective response to the things that bother us.

Richard Cohen focuses, more accurately, on handguns:

But rather than going on a national guilt trip, we should turn our attention to the one element in this tragedy that can be controlled: easy access to guns. After all, enough ought to be enough. Rifles can kill (John F. Kennedy, for instance), but most homicides committed using firearms - more than 70 percent - are the work of handguns (Robert F. Kennedy, for instance). The handgun is wonderfully effective. It's little and it's lethal.

I say "more accurately" because, back when I lived in Canada, about half of the homes in my province contained firearms but, due to gun control laws, primarily long guns. And although frequently the "Murder Capital of Canada", the city I lived in was actually quite safe. I do recall a double homicide involving a handgun, but the honor of being "murder capital" was earned primarily by virtue of having a relatively low population (it doesn't take many murders to skew the "per capita" statistic), and a subculture that all-too-often brought knives to knife fights.

Do I think Loughner would have been deterred from going on his rampage if he had to shorten the barrel of a shotgun, or learn to shoot with a rifle? No, not really. It's a bit like the argument over his extended magazine. Yes, he was disarmed when trying to reload. Yes, it's possible that had his magazine emptied sooner he would have been disarmed sooner with less carnage. It seems to me that such laws are more apt to make somebody like Loughner modify his plans, as opposed to abandoning them. Arguments about handgun control make more sense when directed at opportunistic crime or robbery of retail stores and banks, where the offender is carrying a gun with profit in mind, than they do when directed at somebody like Loughner.

Search Engine Sex?

Paul Krugman writes,

I’m not quite sure what search-engine sex would involve.

Perhaps I should leave this with "Don't Ask"?¹ (Or should I go retro and suggest that you "Ask Jeeves"?)

Wouldn't this question have best been asked in the era of Excite and HotBot?
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1. You want search engine sex from Google? Go to settings and, under SafeSearch Filtering, choose "Do not filter my search results". Your next search result, regardless of topic, may inspire you to say, "Yech."

Originalism vs. Textualism and the Constitution

Jeffrey Rosen's article about Justice Scalia in the New York Times reminded me of some "back of my mind" thoughts on Justice Scalia's all-too-convenient approach to constitutional interpretation. A recent example, his construction of the 14th Amendment, in relevant part,

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Justice Scalia has previously described himself as a "textualist":

“I’m not going to rip all that up; it’s water under the dam,” he said in a 1997 speech. “In other words, I am an originalist. I am a textualist. I am not a nut.”

That should mean that he would look to the text of the Constitution and, to the degree necessary, try to figure out what the language meant at the time it was drafted so as to properly interpret its text. The textualist response to the argument that the legislature picked the wrong word is, "Too bad, so sad" - courts interpret statutes as written and if the legislature wants to change the language that's their job, not the job of the courts.

Except Justice Scalia isn't actually a textualist - at least, not when the text of the Constitution interferes with his political beliefs. For example, more than two centuries after-the-fact, he doesn't mind expanding principles of sovereign immunity based upon... where is the constitutional language recognizing sovereign immunity again? Well, not so much textualism there. But really, the example that pushes this to the forefront is his view on gender equality:

Justice Scalia also insisted that the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment wasn’t intended to apply to discrimination based on sex or sexual orientation, and that the Supreme Court has erred by regulating both. “Nobody ever thought” that the Constitution banned sex discrimination, he said.

There's no ambiguity here: Scalia believes the court has erred in finding that the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment applies to sex discrimination. So is he arguing that at the time the 14th Amendment was drafted, women did not fit under either the concept of "person" or "citizen"? Because the text is pretty clear, isn't it. Nope. He seems to believe that it's proper to decide that the drafters of the 14th Amendment and the various political bodies that passed and ratified that Amendment chose the wrong words, and thus that he has the right to revise the text of the Constitution from the bench. As a self-professed textualist, Scalia should be looking for the meaning of terms such as "person" or "citizen" only if they're not clear from the Constitution as a whole, and even then only in relation to what those words meant at the time the Amendment was drafted. He should only be looking at intent if, after those initial steps, the language remains ambiguous.

Language of Violence and Revolution by Politicians and Opinion Leaders

What mythago said.

I sense that we're going to be overwhelmed with attempts to distance Loughner from the right wing world. "Somebody who knew him in high school says he's a liberal (not that it matters)" kind of stuff. We'll probably also hear "He was crazy, so the fact that politicians and commentators use the rhetoric of violence may not have actually made this shooting more likely." But that misses the larger point, which is that the rhetoric of the likes of Palin, Beck and Coulter legitimizes a mindset that is inherently anti-democratic (small "d" - in a democracy we solve our political disputes at the ballot box, not with guns) and whatever the intention will inevitably be taken literally by some percentage of the population.

It's not acceptable to shrug, "They're speaking metaphorically, so it doesn't count." They only back away from their statements when a price is imposed - and a price is rarely imposed and is even less likely to be significant. "Oh, the crosshairs on targeted Members of Congress were 'crosshairs that you would see on a map'? [Added: the latest 'explanation'.] I don't think I've ever seen that, and it doesn't explain the associated slogan, 'Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!', but... good enough for us."

The more common result appears to be reward - the violent rhetoric or imagery is covered by the media but not criticized (or criticisms are reported from political opponents while the news show depicts the exchange as routine politics), the speaker continues to get "talking head" spots on mainstream media shows... or gets hired to host shows... the sky's the limit. Let's recognize this for what it is in the hands of people like Beck, Palin and Angle: the deliberate use of a known political formula that brings fame, money and political influence.

The political views of Loughner are irrelevant to this issue, as are the political views of the likes of Palin and Beck. Their conduct is the problem, not their political beliefs. If there were a left-wing radio firebrand using equivalent rhetoric, he too would be part of the problem. If he were embraced by the Democratic Party, were an opinion leader for that party, or were considered to be a serious contender for its next presidential nominee, that would highlight a serious problem within the Democratic Party. It's well past time for the mainstream media and the Republican Party to stop embracing the crazy, but if they choose to continue do so they should do as mythago suggests - take credit for legitimizing violence in the political arena and for its bloody consequences.

Payday Loans vs. Loan Sharking

Todd Zywicki is once again crying in his coffee for high interest rate lenders:

Look, I am no fan of payday lending and auto title lending, and I also wished I lived in a world where people could get copious access to low-cost credit which they always repaid diligently and responsibly, and that no one ever had to use payday lending and the like. But taking away other people’s choices based on wishful thinking that somehow we will conjure up something better for them out of thin air, especially those with limited choices already, strikes me as an irresponsible way to think about regulation and unintended consequences. Especially when at the same time regulations supported by so-called consumer activists are making better credit products, such as credit cards, more expensive and less available for responsible low-income consumers and driving them out of the mainstream financial system.

The article to which Zywicki links is entitled "Dodd-Frank and the Return of the Loan Shark", also by Zywicki, complains that new rules could cause holders of credit cards to pay higher rates and have lower credit limits. Despite conflating high risk credit card borrowers with those dependent upon payday loans, Zywicki offers no evidence that we're speaking of the same population. I expect that there is overlap, but my experience with those who go to payday lenders is that they have no credit to begin with - when it comes to cost to the borrower, even before the 2009 Credit CARD Act you were much better off using your credit card and might consider a payday loan only after you had maxed out every other source of credit. All you need to get a payday loan is a checking account, and it doesn't matter if it's empty - in fact, that's the lender's expectation.

Zywicki complains,

Nontraditional financial products serve an important role in the marketplace for the millions of consumers who count on them. Even pawn shops and loan sharks are more palatable and less expensive than the bounced checks and utility shut-offs that would result in their absence.

Zywicki doesn't appear to know much about payday loans, pawn shops or loan sharks. Let's say I have an item of value and I want money. I can take my item of value to a pawn shop and secure a loan against the item, which the pawn shop holds as security. (Some pawn shops might also offer to buy the item outright, for resale.) If I repay the loan with interest I get my item back. The material differences between a pawn shop and a payday loan are that I don't have to own anything of value to obtain a payday loan - I simply hand over a postdated check that everybody knows to be presently worthless - and I have less time to repay the loan at a significantly higher cost than the pawn.

Granted it may still be a better deal as compared to defaulting on the pawn and losing my item of value, but there's no reason to believe I would be cavalier about defaulting on a pawn and scrupulous about repaying my payday loan. Also, I can't deepen my hole by re-pawning my item, but in many states I can make my situation much worse by obtaining payday loans from multiple sources. Many states attempt to limit borrowers in the number of payday loans they can take out at the same time or over a specified period of time, but it's difficult to police if the borrower is going to multiple lenders including out-of-state entities offering payday loans online.

Also, pawnbrokers operate under state law limits for their interest rates. Those rates may still be high, but they don't approach the rates charged by payday lenders. Why not?

A 1978 Supreme Court decision affirmed the concept of rate exportation, by which federally chartered banks can offer financial "products"—read: small (generally under $1,000) loans, via credit cards or check-cashing partners—nationwide, but in accordance with the usury ceilings in their home states. Quick to recognize an opportunity, Delaware, South Dakota, and six other states scrapped their small-loan laws (which is why your MasterCard bill always seems to originate in Sioux Falls). So, a check casher in a tough state can team up with a bank in a loose state to offer a gargantuan APR—500 percent, 1,000 percent, even 5,000 percent—regardless of local usury statutes. Virginia, for example, caps small-loan APRs at 36 percent. But a savvy Virginian lender can partner with a bank based in Delaware and then "import" that state's unregulated banking laws. The store may be in Richmond, but the rates are pure Wilmington.

Loan sharks, of course, remain subject to state and federal laws, including usury laws and RICO.

Federal authorities [in 2001 were] prosecuting Nicodemo Scarfo Jr.—the 36-year-old son of jailed-for-life Philadelphia godfather Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo—for running a loan-sharking and gambling operation in New Jersey. According to a New York Times article, an FBI sweep of Junior's computer hard drive revealed that he was breaking federal usury laws by charging annual interest of 152 percent a year for his very illegal loans.

Yes, it would appear that the most notorious loan sharks in the nation aren't able to demand the interest rates of a payday loan store. What's more,

An April [2001] New York Times survey of the practice in immigrant enclaves—the sharks' current core constituency—included the tale of one bodega owner who receives a 20 percent APR from his shark, a reward for years of dependability. For a cash-only businessman whose murky immigration status or poor credit rating might get him laughed out of Chase Manhattan, that's a solid deal.

But surely they'll break your knees if you don't pay?

Sharks prefer to seize personal property from defaulters, or hold immigration documents hostage, since brutality is likely to attract police attention. "I've always understood that it worked pretty well," Daniel J. Castleman, chief of the Manhattan district attorney's investigations division, told the Times. "We don't get a lot of reports about intimidation."

In other words, loan sharks operate by assessing credit risk and, when they guess wrong, typically by bypassing judicial process (self-help execution against a debtor's assets) or similar non-violent means. Which makes sense not only because of the possibility of law enforcement attention, but because you can't repay a loan if you're injured or dead.

But let's say the loan shark wants to go legit. He has a pool of responsible borrowers, sees the rates charged to similarly situated borrowers by credit card companies and payday lenders, and figures "I can turn a profit while charging a lot less than that." So he sets up a corporation, starts offering loans at 30%, and... Oops. Not in Michigan:

The interest of money shall be at the rate of $5.00 upon $100.00 for a year, and at the same rate for a greater or less sum, and for a longer or shorter time, except that in all cases it shall be lawful for the parties to stipulate in writing for the payment of any rate of interest, not exceeding 7% per annum.

Our ex-loan shark hasn't successfully obtained an exemption from that law, as have banks and credit unions, so he's limited to an interest rate well below what Zywicki argues is fair. In fact, so are you. So am I. And the consequence of violating that law is serious - all payments of interest (as well as penalties, late fees, etc.) are credited to the principal balance, meaning the law transforms the loan into a 0% interest loan. Every year or two I encounter a case where a borrower, fully aware of this law, convinces a friend to loan them money on a promissory note with a higher-than-lawful interest rate, knowing that "They tricked me" won't get the lender anywhere in court if they try to collect. Moreover, if you charge more than a 25% simple interest rate, still a mere fraction of what Zywicki suggests is a fair compound interest rate for those most in need of the money, you're a felon.

Zywicki has previously lectured us,

So social engineers may want to be careful about "saving" the poor from the scourge of subprime lending, because by restricting those choices they are likely just pushing them into even less-favorable credit options.¹

Except the fact that people use pawn shops and loan sharks suggests that, for many, those options are more favorable than payday loans. Certainly being able to enter into a binding promissory note with a friend or family member at 15% APR (or that loan shark who was lending to good borrowers at a 20% APR) is superior to forcing people to go to payday loan shops. So why does Zywicki seem to care only when regulation affects high interest rate lenders who are in business primarily because they've lobbied their way around laws that restrict or criminalize their competition - competition that in many cases would be a better source of money? Isn't he supposed to be a libertarian?
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1. That lecture came in a defense of subprime lending to people with marginal credit, dated March 14, 2005. I'll grant that he's not the only smart person whose insight into the housing market bubble seems retrograde, but why does his pattern seem to be "If regulation hurts major financial institutions, any other facts are irrelevant."

Colleges Are Not Equal

In the Washington Post's latest unsurprising effort to keep taxpayer money rolling into Kaplan (okay... maybe they truly believe it's for the good of the country, not just the company), they offer another defense of the high student loan default rate at private... no, let's use the word "career" colleges.

Although isn't "private" far more accurate, given that they're not including community colleges within that new conceit? And for many of the "careers" at issue, there's no degree requirement for entry to the field? And community college classes to get a certification or to build an equivalent body of knowledge come at a significantly lower price? And many graduates don't in fact find the degree earned helpful when starting a career? But I digress.

Minority students attend career colleges in much higher proportions than do other students, and these are the only schools targeted by the proposal.

I've addressed this before:

[I]f privatizing education is supposed to be a miracle cure for K-12 education, why is "our students are harder to teach" supposed to be an acceptable excuse for the performance of for-profit institutions of higher education? Their students want to go to school and, either with cash or student loan money, are paying for the privilege - you can assume some degree of motivation. Why is it only appropriate to blame schools and teachers for poor outcomes, and insist that the composition of the student body should be irrelevant, when they're part of the public sector?

Also, as previously suggested, the alternative to full-time enrollment at a "career college" that doesn't provide a career - hence the high default rate - is community college. Why is part-time enrollment at a significantly lower cost per credit, or even full-time enrollment if an equivalent community college program is available, a bad thing?

Many career colleges receive their accreditations through the same agencies as the nation's top private and nonprofit universities, which would be spared from the effects of the rule (though 93 percent of historically black colleges would fail the rule's repayment rate test if it were applied to them).

You only need a rudimentary knowledge of the difference between four year colleges and private "career colleges" to understand why you can't compare apples to oranges. And frankly, if a four year college is performing so badly that it can be fairly compared to a "career college" diploma mill, the solution is to apply the new rule to that college as well, not to keep throwing away public money to subsidize private "career colleges" that offer useless degrees.

Career colleges are different only in that they are the schools of choice for many at-risk students, including minorities, parents and full-time workers who believe these schools offer them the best shot at a good job in a field they will enjoy.

If we assume that true, shouldn't the solution be to better educate them such that they recognize that many "career colleges" are a waste of time and money? Believe it or not, if you end up with $40K or more in debt for a "career college" degree that turns out to be worthless in the job market, and you also incur two years of opportunity loss association with your time off of the job market while attending the program or working part-time, you're not better off for the experience. And if you can't make enough money to pay back your government-backed student loans, that's horrible for you - you are stuck with debts that will hound you for decades - and for the taxpayers who pick up the tab. When students default, the only people making out like bandits are the proprietors of the colleges. Talk about moral hazard....

I personally believe we would be better off taking a look at student loans across the board, and putting more responsibility on all colleges to ensure that the loans they convince their students to take are ultimately paid back. Such as by insuring student loans rather than guaranteeing them. That would create a nice, equal playing field for "career colleges" - but I can already hear the squawking.

You Had Best Know the Meaning of Your $5 Words....

Following up on "antithesis", today's object lesson comes in the form of "mendacity".

"As I deliberate and I listen to the gentleman from Tennessee, I have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the leader or another member, there is an opportunity to rise to a point of order, there is an opportunity to make a motion to take the gentleman's words down, however many of the members are off on other endeavors and I would make the point that the leader and the speaker have established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this Congress and I don't believe it can be effectively challenged and those who do so actually cast aspersions on themselves by making wild accusations," [Rep. John] King said.

(Would it have been appropriate for Rep. Joe Wilson to stand up, point at King and yell, "You lie"?)

How "Teach to the Test" Can Become a Trap

Here's an interesting essay describing how cultural factors in China make it extremely difficult for its schools to break away from a "teach to the test" model, even though that model is in many ways out-of-date and counter-productive.

Nearly 100% of Western reporters (NPR’s Luisa Lim being the only exception) ... assume that the “lower class” in China will rebel at any moment. Not true. Poor people in China accept that they are poor because they do not have an education; but if their child has the opportunity to get an education, then all is calm. Therefore, allowing some students to get into college without going through the merit exam is a problem for China because of where they come from in history…the severe social injustices of pre-1949. That is what NPR left out... listeners are left to just assume that all China would have to do is end the gao kao and China could let 100 flowers of creative teaching bloom.

China is working toward more creativity, but teachers teach as they have been taught. They do not know how to ask creative questions because they went through school memorizing for the gao kao. Without models, this is not easy to turn around.

The article expresses concern that the U.S. could similarly trap itself with "a Common Core national test (common 'yardstick') in 2014-15, and another name for that national test is 'gao kao.'" I don't think that the social issues in the U.S. would create the same difficulty in breaking away from a "gao kao" model, but I share the author's (and his host's) concern about the quality of education that is likely to result from taking U.S. education in that direction.

It's also interesting to me that for all the overstatement we hear about China, almost no attention is paid to the fact that China's approach to improving its educational system turns ours on its head. It should be no surprise given China's historic approach to sport, but when it comes to the population at large they appear principally focused on selecting children who display significant talent and giving them opportunities that are not available to society at large. You don't necessarily want to go to an average Chinese university if you can attend one in the west - the graduate of a typical Chinese college doesn't get a very large income boost ("the average college graduate earns just 300 yuan -- roughly $45 -- more than average migrant worker") and faces high rates of unemployment. The rural drop-out rate is very high. If you want to be like China, you don't focus on trying to get rural teenagers "college ready" - you focus on finding the best students and giving them opportunities well beyond what you're willing to offer their peers.

All This and Budget Cuts Too?

Michael Gerson is brimming with advice for the President, this time channeling David Brooks:

The most effective responses are also the most daunting. Crime prevention, in the long run, is youth development. The alternative to cultivating the next generation is fearing it. Children, as one would expect, do better in life when they have not been poisoned by lead paint, abandoned by parents or betrayed by failed schools. There is promise in encouraging preschool attendance, providing mentors for the fatherless, demanding competent teachers, rewarding high school completion and making street gangs less attractive.

The last time a Democratic President attempted to get behind that type of community improvement, the Republican response was to belittle his effort and sneer about "midnight basketball" - in fact, some are still sneering at midnight basketball. I'm sure this time things will be completely different - that the Republican Party Gerson just got through telling us will distort and lie about the consequences of any tax reform bill wouldn't pluck another minor element out of an anti-gang initiative in order to attack the larger effort.

Gerson tells us that we're exhausted, yes, exhausted by the last two years.

The president has exhausted the nation with grand reforms.

Those reforms would be... the modest financial industry reform bill that leaves things pretty much the way they were before the crisis? The Affordable Care Act, health insurance reform that largely follows Republican ideas from the 1980's and the reform passed in Massachusetts by a Republican governor? Going beyond that... the Republicans successfully scuttled the DREAM Act, thanks to the effort of Republican Senators who... used to champion that reform - and its passage would have been very modest as immigration reform measures go. Far less than what Gerson's former boss was pressing for in the early days of his administration. The Republicans, once the champions of "cap and trade", also successfully killed off a bill that would have implemented cap and trade for carbon emissions.

Is Gerson including START and the DADT repeal, two accomplishments from the lame duck session that he just got through telling us prove that Congress isn't broken? START was a no-brainer, supported by pretty much every Republican who knows a whit about foreign policy and military affairs. DADT repeal, while controversial, is irrelevant to the lives of most Americans and I don't recall anything particularly "exhausting" about the debate. Credit card reform is another accomplishment, but the only people I saw become exhausted by its passage were financial industry lobbyists. I will grant that compared to most Presidents in recent history, President Obama has accomplished quite a lot in his first two years in office. But "grand reforms"? Try modest, incremental reforms made controversial primarily by the deliberate spread of misinformation by his political opponents.

Seriously, Gerson needs to spend less time telling the Executive branch what to do and start focusing on his own party. The Republicans control the House of Representatives. If they want to get behind community improvement and anti-gang measures, nothing is stopping them. If they pass a good initiative, odds are the Senate will go along with it and the President will sign it into law. If the issues Gerson calls on the President to address are so important to the nation's future, why isn't he livid that his own party not only sits on its hands but actively obstructs any Democratic effort to give them life?

Disingenuousness on Social Security

Last week, Michael Gerson reliably served up a heaping serving of bad advice for the President, layered upon a number of self-contradictory and disingenuous notions about government.

First, Gerson suggests that Congress wasn't working when the House and Senate were passing difficult, contentious, complex legislation into law, but that the massive buy-off of the Republicans during the lame duck session somehow proves that Congress works just fine, thank you very much:

The American political system, it turns out, was not broken - just poorly used for nearly two years.

Okay, Michael, can you describe for us a few things that Congress needs to fix over the next few years - major issues that need to be addressed?

Only two proposals under discussion would reshape the American economic debate as well as the president's public image: reform of the tax code or reform of entitlements. Both are necessary, difficult and politically deceptive.

Great. Now that we know that Congress works, let's get to work on tax reform!

Overhauling the tax system seems the easier approach. It isn't. Most serious plans, including the options raised by the president's debt commission, would broaden the tax base, consolidate and lower rates, and eliminate most tax deductions and exemptions. But even a revenue-neutral tax overhaul would create a complicated system of winners and losers....

Republicans would have an easy time criticizing a thinly disguised tax increase for millions of Americans. It would seem like another Obama overreach that fundamentally changes the economy in frightening ways - confirming an image that the president desperately needs to change.

Michael, you appear to be saying that tax reform won't work because the Republican Party - your party - will lie and distort any reforms, no matter how necessary or appropriate, in order to harm the President. Eliminate a tax deduction, simplify the tax code, and have the Republicans shriek that "such and such group of people just had its taxes increased"? So we can't take on the issue at all? What astonishing support for your notion that the political system isn't broken.

So now that we know that our healthy political system can't take on tax reform, what about the other major issue you identified: entitlement reform?

Medicare is the main policy challenge here, because rising health costs are the primary cause of unsustainable entitlement commitments. But Medicare reform - the topic of intense, ideological debate - is a political nonstarter.

So let me get this straight, Michael: Having told us that the political system is functional, and having prioritized setting the nation's finances in order, the concept of cutting military spending couldn't squeak past your Republican lips? You've ruled out any meaningful tax reform? And tackling the most critical, most serious, most imminent entitlement issue is a "political nonstarter"? Wow... you have me convinced! It's a political utopia....

So having ruled out doing anything meaningful, Michael, what do you suggest that our functional Congress do? No, wait, don't tell me....

While Social Security is a relatively small contributor to future deficits, reforming it would be a large symbol and a logical place to begin.

Is it logical to start with a reform that will offer no appreciable economic benefit to the nation because that will somehow get things moving on the genuine, serious, pressing issues that Congress is apparently too functional to tackle? No, you don't make that argument. You don't in fact offer any argument as to why this "symbolic" reform would be a logical starting point. Dare I say, that's because the "logic" is derived from the idea that having a Democratic President do harm to a program that the Republicans have opposed since its inception, such that they can run against him by accusing him of slashing Social Security, is a Republican wet dream?

It's accurate to suggest that the same type of reforms that have historically successfully been passed to patch Social Security could again be passed, and that those ideas "could be written 'on the back of a napkin'". But please, Michael, show me the Republican bill that approaches Social Security with such simplicity and clarity. Why, given how easy this is, how functional Congress is, and the importance of this symbolic reform is to... well, you still haven't told us that part. Oh, that's right - if the Republicans propose a reform they won't be able to doom and gloom us about the pending "bankruptcy" of Social Security, nor will they be able to say that it's the Democrats who are taking food away from senior citizens.

Gerson offers up the standard Republican canard about the Social Security trust fund:

Obama's liberal base contends that the Social Security trust fund is not in immediate trouble. But this argument depends on an elaborate accounting trick. The trust fund is not filled with assets - gold bullion and Apple stock. It is filled with debt issued by the government to itself. The surpluses of the trust fund are in fact liabilities for the government as a whole. And these illusory surpluses are regularly used to subsidize the rest of the budget. The scheme begins to collapse in 2037, when promised benefits for Social Security recipients will suddenly drop by about 25 percent - unless the system is reformed.

Really, given how easily you can find accurate information about the Social Security trust fund, it's difficult to characterize the first part of Gerson's claim as anything but an outright lie - deliberately false fear mongering. As for the separate issue of a modest increase to Social Security taxes, modest changes to ages of eligibility, or some combination thereof, as Gerson indicates that's "back of a napkin" stuff. Even if we pretend that seniors receiving 75% of promised benefits more than twenty-five years from now is a looming crisis - something Gerson implicitly admits is ludicrous by declaring reforms to "fix" the problem to be "symbolic", it doesn't seem like much of a crisis.

Further, what's the "fix" supposed to be? To cut future benefits so that the "75%" represents the whole of what you're supposed to receive instead of a fraction? Unless he's holding back on ideas about privatization, that appears to be Gerson's concept of what "reform" would look like. The cure is the same as the disease?

Gerson then lectures the President that the "symbolic" reform of Social Security will help him win over "independents". This based upon... Gerson's word. Trust him, he's a Republican and all he wants to do is help a Democratic President stay in office. Right?

But Obama's urgent political need is to polish his image among i[]ndependents on spending and debt. And this won't happen by being risk averse.

But why should anybody believe that a reform that does not impact spending or debt in any concrete fashion will win a single vote from a bloc that is concerned about spending and debt? That is, if we are to pretend that spending and debt are priorities for voters, which Gerson just got through telling us is not the case - as evidenced by the fact that Congress can't address the two issues Gerson just told us are key to getting spending and debt under control, not to mention the military budget.

Here's another thing: While I understand the political advantage to the Republican Party in constantly yammering about a Social Security crisis, even if you can accept "Starting in 25 years, Social Security will only pay 75% of promised benefits" to be a crisis that demands immediate action, how can you take that type of projection seriously? Budget projections tend to assume that things will pretty much stay the same, and can't realistically anticipate wars and other crises, spikes in commodity pricing (think oil), economic bubbles, or other "unknowns". If a government program has a budget that appears balanced for the next twenty-five years it's ahead of what? Approximately all of the rest of them? Symbolism, nothing. Let's see Congress tackle a real problem.

Michael - the Republicans control the House and can pass whatever bills they want. Any chance that they will pass anything meaningful? Even a bill that they don't anticipate would pass in the Senate, "symbolically" reforming Social Security? Anything? (I notice that Gerson's byline is "Michael Gerson Michael Gerson" - it's as if even the Washington Post's server is tut-tutting his nonsense.)

Update: In order to balance the budget, given the options to raise taxes on the wealthy, cut defense spending, cut Medicare and cut Social Security, it looks like the American Public will support the tax increase by a healthy majority (61% support), will reject military cuts by a significant margin (20% support), and will oppose Medicare cuts (4% support) and Social Security cuts (3% support) by overwhelming margins. Again, trust Michael Gerson - he wants to help the President.

Google vs. the Spammers

In an article entitled "Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google", a professor describes the experiences of his students, trying to get past the "tropical paradise for spammers and marketers" in Google:

Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.

He notes,

The problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results.... This is exactly what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher.... He couldn’t make head or tail of the results. Paul concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews”.

Pretty close. Some websites offer reviews of appliances that are genuine, albeit usually created by customers and thus sometimes unreliable or posted to the wrong make or model. You can sometimes find a decent, free resource such as Greener Sources from Consumer Reports. But most professionally conducted reviews for major appliances are not available for free, or are only available in highlight form as detailed in press releases by the authors or in news stories that discuss the findings. Meanwhile, as the article notes, even the "big boys", one-time ethical players in the "new media" market, are mass producing junk articles:

Content creation is big business, and there are big players involved. For example, Associated Content, which produces 10,000 new articles per month, was purchased by Yahoo! for $100 million, in 2010. Demand Media has 8,000 writers who produce 180,000 new articles each month. It generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2009 and planning an initial public offering valued at about $1.5 billion. This content is what ends up as the landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web. And these are the first links that show up in your Google search results.

But that's not necessarily Google's fault - nor is it necessarily the result of a fault in Google. Let's imagine we're a friendly neighborhood search engine spider looking for reviews of major appliances. We find a site that is known for offering quality reviews. Oops - the content is behind a firewall, for subscribers only, and we can't see it. So we keep looking, and find an "off the top of my head" article from Associated Content that at least offers a few tips on selecting an appliance. And we find a store site that has some consumer reviews for the appliance. And we find some low-quality sites that are primarily designed to push affiliate links. Then, finally, we find some machine-generated sites that either aggregate content from other sites or present garbled but keyword-rich test accompanied by ads. Google actually does a pretty decent job in ranking the pages it can see - the real problem is that for the most part the content the reader most wants, the costly and labor-intensive testing and comparison of major appliances across a number of relevant variables - simply isn't available for free.

The author implicitly recognizes the value and importance of paid content, having secured premium access to LinkedIn for his students. It's interesting to me that it was when the paid service failed -- "some of the [company] founders [students were to contact] didn’t have LinkedIn accounts" - that his students turned to Google. And the complaint is not that the paid service was inadequate, but that the free service didn't quickly and easily turn up the information that was not available for a fee through the paid service.

The author mentions a small search engine, Blekko, that he depicts as overcoming some of the problems faced by Google:

In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges. So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites. Blekko crowdsources the editorial judgment for what should and should not be in a slashtag, as Wikipedia does. One Blekko user created a slashtag for 2100 college websites. So anyone can do a targeted search for all the schools offering courses in molecular biology, for example. Most searches are like this—they can be restricted to a few thousand relevant sites. The results become much more relevant and trustworthy when you can filter out all the garbage.

Except who crowdsources the crowdsourcers? Also, you can presently build a custom search engine with Google that does pretty much the same thing. Blekko really seems to be identifying a way to switch by slashtag between custom search engines. Through its primary interface, Google is attempting to give you the results without the slashtags, and it seems unlikely that a search engine that requires users to learn slashtags in order to get meaningful results will ever be more than a niche player.

If Blekko "hits it big" it will be swamped with spammers, as was one of the co-founder's first projects, the Open Directory Project. Also, while I don't want to diminish the idea of getting rich based upon leveraging the free labor of the crowd, as the Open Directory again suggests, at a certain level depending on free volunteer labor doesn't scale very well. If you've already sold your project and have moved onto your next one, that's no big deal. If you're trying to continue a project that relies upon volunteers to sort through and meaningfully categorize billions of web pages, it's critical.

Further, it's not just the creation of slashtags that creates opportunity for spammers. We're told that while Google tends to attach a date to a page based upon when it first finds the page, an oversimplification but seemingly true in many cases, Blekko determines when content was created by "analyzing other information embedded in its HTML". There's an obvious reason, though, why Google has not chosen that approach - I can easily set up my server to embed in my HTML the message, "This is a fresh, new page". Spammers don't care right now because very few people use Blekko and even fewer of them are top targets for spammers. But if Blekko catches on, that approach to dating content will be quickly exploited and rendered completely useless. As the author said, "unscrupulous companies... know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems" - the same is true for any popular search engine. It's not clear that Blekko would survive any degree of popularity. But then, I expect that Blekko's goal is to find a company willing to buy its technology, not to actually become the next big search engine.

Guess what else? In my non-scientific search for "appliance reviews" on Google and Blekko, I found Google's results to be better. Blekko offered more machine-generated compilations of user reviews, while (amidst similar compilations) Google came up with Good Housekeeping and Consumer Reports. A leading reason both searches included a lot of junk is, as previously mentioned, there's not a whole lot out there for free that's not junk. My suggestion? Find a popular forum with members who are familiar with the products and product lines that interest you, post a question about the products you are interested in buying, and see what the other members have to say.

Update: Speaking of things that make you go 'blekko'....

In Case You're Curious....

And I don't know why you would be...

The most popular pages of this blog over the past year, subject to any number of caveats (e.g., this doesn't accurately assess the reading of items via the RSS feed or if you navigate to the main page or an archive page containing multiple posts), are:

1. Lost Ending (Spoiler): Is it that Lost fans also like Trading Places? The guy who declared me a "stupid idiot" in the comments probably not so much....

2. Movies About Bullying. Apparently people are consistently looking for movies about bullying, and... my off-the-cuff list is one of the better ones?

3. Emergency Room Usage and Healthcare Reform. My response to a superficial take on this serious issue.

4. Decline of America, or Decline of the Middle Class. Given all of the good economic news for the middle class, why do people insist upon dwelling on the negative? (cough)

5. Is "The Breast Cancer Society" a Worthy Charity. Is the sky green?

6. Energy Policy As A Precursor To Withdrawal From Iraq... Is That An 800 Pound Gorilla.... I would like to claim that a three-year-old post generates high traffic due to its brilliant insights, but fact is... for some reason it shows up in Google image searches for pymgy marmosets. I'm not saying it's a fetish thing, but apparently they're almost as popular as pictures of [celebrity name] nude.

7. Unemployment - Cause and Effect. I suspect lots of undergrads were writing research papers on the subject and hoping that this post would form a foundation.

8. Medicare vs. Private Plans. My preference remains that the insurance industry share facts to support its claims about Medicare, but... like that's going to happen.

9. Dennis Prager's Conservative Man's Guide to Sex. Because if you don't know as much about sex and relationships as Dennis Prager....

10. The High Cost of Incarceration. And less than a year later, even the conservative establishment is starting to wake up to the issue. I, of course, claim all credit.

From what my statistics show, forget politics, if I want traffic I need to write things like, "The ending to Lost will involve Vince McMahon bullying a pygmy marmoset."

A "Whoosh" for David Brooks

David Brooks ends the year by telling us what he's been reading lately. C'mon, David - phoning it in on New Year's Eve?

For the past hundred years or so, we have lived in a secular age. That does not mean that people aren’t religious. It means there is no shared set of values we all absorb as preconscious assumptions. In our world, individuals have to find or create their own meaning.

This, Dreyfus and Kelly argue, has led to a pervasive sadness. Individuals are usually not capable of creating their own lives from the ground up. So modern life is marked by frequent feelings of indecision and anxiety. People often lack the foundations upon which to make the most important choices.

Given that most organized religions take for granted that life is a miserable experience, and assure you that if you keep you head down, go to church regularly, and live by the rules you'll find your reward in the afterlife, I can't say that I'm convinced by this argument. Unless it boils down to "People are happier and more fulfilled, even if they are impoverished serfs, if they believe that they will one day go to heaven." But if that's the argument, I'll stick with the "comparatively unsatisfying" present world, thank you very much.

Brooks is somewhat taken with the argument that people get "whooshed up", and that even the "spiritually unmoored" can "experience intense elevation during the magical moments that sport often affords". (Brooks believes that religious people don't like sports? Seriously - what's the distinction.)

The most real things in life, they write, well up and take us over. They call this experience “whooshing up.” We get whooshed up at a sports arena, at a political rally or even at magical moments while woodworking or walking through nature....

We should not expect these experiences to cohere into a single “meaning of life.” Transcendent experiences are plural and incompatible. We should instead cultivate a spirit of gratitude and wonder for the many excellent things the world supplies.

Brooks wants more than periodic whooshes:

I’m not sure this way of living will ever prove satisfying to most readers. Most people have a powerful sense that there is a Supreme Being over us, attached to eternal truths. Though they try, Dreyfus and Kelly don’t give us a satisfying basis upon which to distinguish the whooshing some people felt at civil rights rallies from the whooshing others felt at Nazi rallies.

Brooks has never heard the phrase, "bread and circuses"? Seriously, the reason he can't find a meaningful distiction between the "whooshing up" somebody might feel at a civil rights rally and that somebody else might experience at a Nazi or KKK rally is that... there is no meaningful distinction. Back in the original days of "bread and circuses", the crowd would get "whooshed up" by seeing Christians battle lions in the arena. Now a crowd might get "whooshed up" watching the Saints battle the Lions. (The distinction being perhaps that, these days, a lesser percentage of observers are rooting for the lions?)

For all of Brooks' commentary about human nature, he seems to give the subject remarkably little thought.

Brooks criticises the "whooshing up" theory by suggesting that "whooshes" often come from institutional activities. That, however, is peripheral to the idea that people now create their own meaning in life (of sorts) by seeking out their own set of "whooshes". Nothing in his summary of the "whooshing up" theory suggests that the autonomy comes from the ability to "whoosh up" in the privacy of your own home (sex, drugs and rock & roll?) as opposed to having the liberty to choose those activities and events that most get you "whooshed up" and to center your recreational life (and, if you choose, religious life) around those activities and events.

I have to disagree with Brooks that "Real life is more about serial whooshes than coherent meaning". If you truly can find a reliable source for whooshes, that source is likely to become a consistent part of your life. But "real life" is what comes between the whooshes.

When is an Unlicensed, Inexperienced, Untested Rookie "Highly Qualified"?

When the organization behind that rookie's placement has immense lobbying power.

Last week, an "anomaly amendment" was inserted into Congress's Continuing Resolution (a stop-gap that allows the government to continue functioning in the absence of an official budget.) The amendment in question allows teachers who are in an alternative certification program, regardless of the amount of time they've been teaching or whether or not they've obtained licensure in their respective states, to be considered "highly qualified" under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) regulations. It comes as no surprise that the amendment received a major push from Teach for America, a program whose mission is to place inexperienced teachers, most of whom are fresh out of college, in high needs schools across the country.

Is the goal here actually to staff troubled schools with highly qualified teachers? Or is it to maximize the size and budget of organizations like Teach For America, even if it diminishes overall teacher quality? (Via Schools Matter.)

A Feel Good Story About Teachers....

... That's isn't properly supported by the data. Yes, it's nice to think that a kindergarten teacher can have a profound effect on the future incomes and success of her students, and yes there probably is some truth to it - it makes sense that your future education will build upon the foundation laid in kindergarten. It also makes sense that a more positive kindergarten experience, even if it's simply at an emotional level, will make it more likely that a child will come into future years of schooling with the expectation of further positive experiences. But...

The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?

The Tennessee experiment, known as Project Star, offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.

Yet they didn’t. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)

Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25. Peers also seem to matter. In classes with a somewhat higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better.

But neither of these factors came close to explaining the variation in class performance. So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.

There are two issues here. The first is that the mere fact that the statistical significance of a finding is supposedly "too big to be explained by randomness" doesn't mean that it isn't, in fact, the result of chance. A very interesting New Yorker article recently discussed a number of studies in which statistically significant results, sometimes well beyond what researchers believed could be explained by chance, were followed in subsequent studies by a regression to the mean. That is, the initial findings were outliers or were otherwise flawed. The article doesn't mention this, but sometimes data sets are analyzed by computer for hundreds or thousands of factors - and when you do that, odds are you're going to find some outliers at the p < .01 or even p < ..001 level.

Also, with due respect to Sherlock Holmes, ruling out the obvious does not necessarily mean that you are correct that only one explanation remains, or that the one explanation you identify is the solution to your puzzle. If you come up with a hypothesis that lies outside of your data, you should attempt to replicate your experiment while collecting a more complete set of data.

Even if the answer does lie with the quality of the kindergarten teacher, the questions are raised, what qualities made the difference and were they consistent between teachers? If some teachers were introducing basic math and reading concepts, while others were focusing on play and socialization, that could explain why one group performed better than the other, but that's really a question of priority as opposed to teacher quality.

When it comes to schools we're better off erring on the side of quality, top to bottom, so to the extent that "great kindergarten teachers cause significant increases in lifetime earnings" means that as a society we'll emphasize finding and retaining great kindergarten teachers, I'm all for it. But, perhaps thanks to my kindergarten teacher (although when I started school in the U.K. I didn't attend a kindergarten, as such) I don't accept "We can't figure out what else caused the difference so it must be the teachers" with sound science.