Robert Saumuelson's ObamaCare Journamalism

If you read Samuelson's column, you know that he's not particularly interested in analyzing the issues of the day, so much as he is interested in advancing a specific, right-wing economic agenda. But he could at least make an effort, couldn't he?

To get some answers, I recently talked with the heads of four “professional employer organizations” (PEOs) — these are companies that act as “human resources” departments for small companies. They provide payroll services and advise on fringe benefits and government regulations. Their customers include construction companies, restaurants, small manufacturers and professional firms. Many of these firms are only now coming to grips with the ACA, because they’d assumed that the Supreme Court would invalidate it or that a Republican White House would repeal it.

That's the first place I would look for answers about the PPACA - a bunch of consultants who were apparently happy to reassure their clients, "Don't worry about ObamaCare because it will be repealed or overturned," or who knew better but were not sufficiently competent to convince their clients to prepare for the possibility that they might actually have to follow the law.

To encourage candor, we talked on a not-for-attribution basis.

As if they would own up to that level of incompetence and then speak with Samuelson on anything but a "not-for-attribution basis".

First, some companies now providing insurance are being hit with huge premium increases. Before Obamacare, said one PEO adviser, his clients typically received annual increases of 6 percent to 12 percent. “This year we’re seeing 30 percent rate hikes,” he said. The surge is blamed, rightly or wrongly, on the ACA’s requirement for more comprehensive coverage and on its formula for calculating premiums (aka “community rating”).

Seriously? Is it that the incompetence of the consultants who spoke with Samuelson reached beyond their failure to advise their clients to prepare to comply with the law, and extended into not even knowing the basic economics of health insurance and premium costs? Or is it that Samuelson didn't ask the obvious follow-up question, "Which is it - rightly or wrongly?" To be fair to Samuelson, I think he knows the answer, but if he said it out loud ("wrongly") his three-point list would as a consequence have only two points.

Second, most companies haven’t made final decisions. Those who have go both ways. Another adviser described a 250-worker car dealership with good wages but no health insurance; it will provide coverage and cut wages to help pay costs. Another example involved a 60-worker manufacturing firm with wages of $12 to $15 an hour. It offered bare-bones policies with steep deductibles. Confronting higher premiums for expanded coverage, the owner will drop insurance. He found the ACA “too complex,” said this adviser.

Should we assume at this point that we're talking about a cause of higher premiums other than those that employers rightly or wrongly attribute to ObamaCare? If so, it's pretty much a given that some employers will choose to drop insurance, pay the penalty, and let its workers seek coverage through the exchanges. They're probably better off than with the "bare-bones policies with steep deductibles" (i.e., "crap") policies Samuelson says their employer previously offered - I think it's safe to assume that Samuelson has a gold-plated Medicap plan on top of his own, government-paid, comprehensive Medicare benefits - the workers who need adequate insurance may be better served by their employer's choice. But seriously? The consultant who is paid to make the process as simple as possible for a client employer can't get his client past, "It's too complex"? And that would be the fault of... somebody other than the consultant?

Third, many firms are revising their business models to minimize insurance costs. One favorite idea: Hold workers below the 30-hour weekly threshold requiring insurance. Many part-time employees who work more (say, 35 hours a week) will lose hours.

I've heard about this little scheme, as well. The fixes are so obvious (e.g., setting the penalty based upon total employee hours) that the only reason that it's worth discussing is that people like Samuelson anticipate that Republicans will filibuster any effort to implement a fix. But you know what? It may not amount to much. When an employee is given a choice between working two jobs because his employer won't give him more than thirty hours, and working one job with decent health benefits, guess which job anybody worth hiring is going to choose?

If Samuelson had any experience working in an environment where employees earn at or near minimum wage, he would have some appreciation for how little it takes to convince an employee to change jobs. Samuelson wouldn't notice fifty cents an hour. Were he making $7.25 per hour, it would become a big deal. If you want to run the business with employees who don't mess up orders, don't waste food, are less likely to steal, are easier to train and supervise, etc., as a general rule you have to pay a bit more than the guy down the street. If my competitor in food service were intent on keeping his employees below thirty hours a week, I would be happily skimming the cream off of his workforce.

Another adviser mentioned a client, an engineering firm with 48 workers, that had deliberately restrained expansion.

This is where I make a coughing noise that sounds a lot like I'm actually saying "bull****". If this engineering firm truly is constraining its size to avoid giving its employees decent health insurance, it's not going to have much luck retaining engineers. They have even better options than the movie theater worker and hotel workers whose anticipated plight was, mere moments ago, giving Samuelson such... is the word, delight?

I would suggest that Samuelson stop "concern trolling" ObamaCare and propose some meaningful solutions, but... as I suggested up front, I see no evidence that he's interested in solving the problems ObamaCare is attempting to address.

When it Comes to Tablets, Microsoft is Overplaying its Hand

Perhaps inspired by a burning desire to do a "gotcha" over the historic "Mac vs. PC" ads, where a guy who needed a shave pokes fun at a pudgy guy in a suit, or perhaps inspired by the increasingly tiresome, "You have an iPhone? Let me show you this cool feature in my Samsung" ads, Microsoft is taking a potshot at the iPad:

The ad makes three basic criticisms of the iPad:

1. 1. It has a relatively bland, traditional desktop whereas Windows 8 uses "smart tiles" that continuously update;

2. 2. It does not multi-task; and

3. 3. Microsoft has dropped the ball when it comes to writing software for iOS.

It then presents an intentionally misleading price comparison between the iPad and an entry level Windows tablet (with a much lower resolution screen¹ and plastic case).

The first two issues are in no small part about power management. I can't tell you the degree to which Apple may incorporate multi-tasking or updating in the next version of iOS, which will include a significant revision of much of the user interface, but history suggests that Apple will continue to favor long battery life over power-draining features that have limited utility. Don't get me wrong - I would like Apple to allow users to have greater choice, even if it means that they will need to recharge their iPads more often. But it's highly misleading to suggest, "Our new mobile OS is really cool" without addressing how that coolness affects battery life and performance.

In terms of iOS not offering Microsoft Excel, well, yeah... Microsoft has delayed producing a version of Office for iOS to the degree that it's difficult to infer any motive but Microsoft's traditional, "Delay upgrading and offer inferior versions of Office for Apple products." Perhaps their next commercial will show some sort of Zune software running on the Windows tablet, with iTunes running on the iPad? My, how turnabout can sting.

Right now I'll admit to having more computers in my house than occupants. One is OS-X, two are Windows 7. And we also have a couple of tablets. The people who claim that tablets are mere toys, or are about to go the way of the Dodo, either haven't used one or aren't paying attention to how they're used. Games aside, a tablet is an incredibly useful tool for consuming online content - checking email, browsing the web, watching streamed or stored video, video conferencing and the like. Responding, "I can do all of that on my desktop or notebook" misses the point - the convenience and portability factor. A few years ago if you went to an airport you would see a lot of people working on notebook computers, trying to scrounge an outlet. These days you see an even larger number of people using tablets to read or otherwise entertain themselves, and notebook users have a lot less competition for those outlets.

But if I'm trying to type or edit a document, work on a spreadsheet, or do any sort of complex or multi-window task, I want to be at my desktop computer with a large monitor and keyboard. It may well be that I would be impressed with the touchscreen UI for Excel. I doubt it, given how unimpressed I am with the touchscreen UI for Windows 8, but Microsoft could surprise me. But what would I do if I actually needed to work on a spreadsheet? I would set down the tablet and use either one of our portable computers or my desktop computer - because they're better designed for that kind of work.

The Samsung ads, in my opinion, have devolved from being cute and funny to, more or less, showing Samsung owners wearing out their own arms by patting themselves on the back.² Oddly enough, Microsoft seems to understand this, even if they don't actually present a reason to buy a Windows phone other than "It's not an Apple or a Samsung".

The difference is this: If I weigh the pros and cons of the various smartphones available today, I can come up with valid reasons why I might prefer a Samsung over an Apple, or vice versa. If I put the two phones next to each other and run various tasks, I am going to see why I might prefer one over the other.

But if I were to recreate the comparison from Microsoft's commercial at an electronics store, putting the Asus tablet next to an iPad and running various apps, I would not have the experience depicted in the commercial. I would immediately see that the Samsung had an inferior build and display. And from the reviews I've read, I would see the Asus tablet slow down or become momentarily non-responsive when multi-tasking. I might notice that the battery has a significantly lower capacity than that of the iPad, and while crediting advances in CPU technology for its reasonably long battery life nonetheless recognize that the battery life is extended by the use of the much lower-resolution screen. Reviews indicate that I would find the cameras in the ASUS to be of good quality, but that I would likely be displeased by the camera software. And while the tablet might perform better if it weren't running a full version of Windows 8, without that you would have to drop the "And look how well it runs Microsoft software" part of the ad.

I'm reminded of the highly effective commercials Microsoft ran, touting the sub-$1,000 entry price for Windows notebook computers. I'm also reminded of how that series of commercials fizzled out when Apple started offering sub-$1,000 notebooks and Microsoft started touting lower price points - instead of comparing computers of reasonably comparable build and performance, getting into a quality of build and performance that no reasonable consumer would find to be a compelling point of comparison to the Apple product.

If Microsoft's goal is to get buzz, the victory goes to Microsoft - here I am talking about their products. But if its goal is to convince consumers to buy Windows tablets, the commercial seems to oversell the product, creating the potential for customer dissatisfaction at a time when Microsoft needs to build a significant user base for its tablets and risks increasing consumer skepticism of its marketing pitches.
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1. The Asus screen offers 1,366 x 768 pixels, for a pixel density of 155 ppi. The iPad offers 2048 x 1536-pixels, for a pixel density of 264 ppi.

2. Commercials I would like to see:

"Why are you and that other guy bumping your phones together?"
"My phone has this awesome feature that allows me to exchange data by bumping it into somebody else's phone, does your phone do that?"
"Um... my phone has email."

"Hey, you're using an iPhone. Wanna see this really cool feature my phone has that yours doesn't have yet? No? You said 'No?' What do you mean, you wouldn't use that feature? What do you mean, 'pro's and con's to every phone'?"

"You waited in line to buy your phone? I got a phone that nobody waits in line for. Wait, that didn't come out the way I wanted."

Tax Idiocy on Capitol Hill

Why it only seems like yesterday that a Republican presidential nominee was lecturing us that it would be inappropriate to pay even a penny more in taxes than the government requires him to pay - that doing so would demonstrate that he was unqualified for the job of President. (And a little bit more recently, after he deliberately overpaid his taxes to avoid contradicting a prior claim about the percentage of his income he pays in federal income tax, that the electorate seemingly agreed with him.)

Now, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is concerned that Apple is paying only the taxes it's legally required to pay, and is taking full advantage of the massive loopholes that... yes... Congress wrote into the tax code, or at best has deliberately failed to close, to benefit companies like Apple (and individuals like Mitt Romney).

You know what Congress should do if it's concerned that corporations aren't paying enough tax? I'll give you a hint: It's not "Hold hearings to hear CEOs explain why their companies are not voluntarily paying more tax than the law requires....

Mickey Mouse, He Isn't....

I think it's reasonable to infer that the baby isn't actually crying because of the Tusken Raider, but....

Trends in Mass Shootings

Right-wing ideologue S.E. Cupp recently challenged left-wing ideologue Michael Moore,

Mass shootings are also down... yes they are! It is true! Mass shootings are... It is fact! They are down, as is gun crime. That's a fact.... Look it up, I'm not the first person who said it.

Well, facts are important, but they're not something I find to strongly correlate with Cupp's arguments. So let's take a look. If you apply a narrow definition that excludes "things like armed robbery or gang violence", as did Mother Jones, you find an increase in casualties and that "24 of the last 62 worst mass shootings have taken place in the past seven years alone". If you apply a broad definition, Fox News found that mass shootings are holding steady.

Why the difference? Fox is looking at all mass shootings involving four or more victims — that’s the standard FBI definition. Mother Jones, by contrast, had a much more restrictive definition, excluding things like armed robbery or gang violence. They were trying to focus on spree killings that were similar in style to Virginia Tech or Aurora or Newtown. The definitions make a big difference: On Fox’s criteria, there’s no uptick. On Mother Jones’, there’s a clear increase.

Meanwhile, by either criteria, there does seem to be a surge in mass shootings in 2012. But it’s unclear whether that’s a one-year blip or not.

I would wonder what Cupp was looking at, but she seems like the type who believes that anything she says magically becomes true if she argues forcefully or claims "It's a fact!"

When Moore challenged her, specifically in relation to school shootings, Cupp added to (or is it amended) her claim,

There have been fewer mass shootings over the past thirty years. That's just a fact.

It's certainly not a fact in relation to school shootings. I have not yet found data predating 1976, but it's also not true in relation to homicides with multiple victims going back to 1976. Perhaps she's alluding to lynchings and prohibition-era violence associated with organized crime? One can only guess - but when you're addressing a relatively rare type of crime (homicide with multiple victims) such factors can easily skew the trend.

At this point, I'm comfortable concluding that Cupp was either making stuff up or was cherry-picking a source in order to present what she knows to be a distorted, fundamentally untrue statement of "fact". I'm prepared to be proved wrong. Anybody?

Fools, Frauds and the Budget Deficit

It's probably not worth paying attention to Robert Samuelson on the budget deficit as he has little to no regard for consistency between his columns, and either has little to no interest in how government spending works or has little to know interest in presenting an honest argument. Nonetheless....

Samuelson is in a tizzy because the 2013 budget deficit is projected to be $642 billion, down from an earlier projection of $845 billion and well below "2012’s deficit of $1.1 trillion". Samuelson imagines that the government has now been overtaken by Dick "deficits don't matter" Cheney-types, and that the government is going to now stop focusing on deficit reduction and budgeting. Samuelson, it would seem, isn't spending much time following events in Washington. He's also continuing his mantra of, "We need to cut 'entitlement spending' so we can afford unlimited war spending", but has little to no regard for whether today's budget policies depress the economy and thus slow economic growth for years and decades to come.

You would think that Samuelson would look at the numbers and think, "We didn't anticipate a 24% drop in the deficit until almost half-way through the year, we're really bad at these projections." Even if you assume he hasn't looked at how projections of healthcare inflation have been incorrect. Or has forgotten his history, such as Alan "the genius" Greenspan fretting that if we didn't cut taxes for the rich, we would pay down the national debt too quickly. Funny, I don't recall the Robert Samuelson of that era criticizing Greenspan, "We can't pay down the nation's debt quickly enough." Did I miss something?) Samuelson then carries on for a while about stimulus spending, conflating any deficit spending with stimulus spending. Seriously?

The funny thing is, I'm prepared to agree with Samuelson. Our nation should have a responsible discussion of deficits and debt, albeit preferably with a significantly stronger factual context than one finds in a typical Samuelson column. We should be discussing priorities and, rather than engaging in demagoguery or attempting to gut Medicare without telling the public what we're doing, attempt to set actual priorities.

It seems to me that people like Samuelson don't like that idea, though, because the nation's priorities may turn out to be different from their own. Let's recall Samuelson's own words when his own priorities for government spending might end up on the chopping block:

But I am certain -- now as then -- that budget consequences should occupy a minor spot in our debates. It's not that the costs are unimportant; it's simply that they're overshadowed by other considerations that are so much more important. We can pay for whatever's necessary.

If a $2 trillion war of choice isn't even worthy of discussion, then the size of any particular budget deficit is even less worthy of discussion. What should matter are future costs and revenues, and the accuracy of our projections. By the same token that Samuelson can shrug,

Nothing of consequence has changed. A few numbers have shifted slightly. That’s all. They moved in a favorable direction. Next time, they might go the other way.

he should be prepared to concede that his emphasis of "We need to cut Social Security and Medicare this second or we'll face catastrophe in a quarter century" is misguided. After all, if being off by roughly 25% within a single year represents an inconsequential shift in the numbers that should be shrugged off, how can you justify setting policy based upon one or two percentage points of projected over twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred years?

Given the reality that our projections tend to be flawed - the future is full of surprises - and the present Congress cannot dictate spending priorities for future sessions of Congress, the proper focus for any given session of Congress is their actual, current, spending. By that measure, the present projections are good news, and the focus needs to be less on "what might happen twenty years from now" and more, "That's a good start, now let's talk about next year". In terms of long-term spending and spending priorities, we should be having the discussion that Samuelson seems intent on avoiding - if we can't afford everything, what do we cut first?

If You Want to Reduce Suicide, Focus on the Economy

Ross Douthat is concerned that "loneliness" may be behind an increase in the suicide rate among middle aged men... a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. You would think this part would clue Douthat in:

This trend is striking without necessarily being surprising. As the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

But you can see he's already on the wrong track by the end of the paragraph. That is, the problem is not about a retreat from family, community and work. It's about the carpet being pulled out from under you.

You would think it was a state secret that the group at highest risk of suicide was middle class men (particularly white men), and that risk of suicide is strongly associated with three stressors: job loss, loss of family and poor health. Contrary to Douthat's assumption, there's not a higher suicide risk if you're single versus married - but divorce is a risk factor.

In our culture, our identity is wrapped up in the work we do. One of the first questions you're likely to be asked when you meet somebody is "Where do you work" or "What kind of work do you do". The factors also tend to go hand-in-hand. Poor health can lead to the loss of employment, financial stress resulting from loss of employment (or from poor health) can lead to divorce. When somebody's self image is built around job and family and he feels that he's irretrievably lost his economic future and his family, that's a huge psychological blow.

Douthat builds his argument in part on a fiction, that we're dealing with "structural unemployment". I've taken some issue with those who argue that there's nothing structural about our unemployment situation, but the type of thing they're talking about (the ability to return to full employment) and the type of thing I'm talking about (the ability of somebody who has lost employment to get back onto a similar income and career path) are two different things. If Douthat believes that there's something new about the problems men have if they're displaced from the workplace during or after their late forties, he hasn't been paying attention. Not even to the content of the newspaper for which he writes:

Unemployment is almost always a traumatic event, especially for older workers. A paper by the economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed. This higher mortality rate implies that a male worker displaced in midcareer can expect to live about one and a half years less than a worker who keeps his job.

There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8 percent) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47 percent. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States. The picture for the long-term unemployed is especially disturbing. The duration of unemployment is the dominant force in the relationship between joblessness and the risk of suicide.

Joblessness is also associated with some serious illnesses, although the causal links are poorly understood.

More academically,

Suicide rates among both men and women aged 35–64 years increased substantially from 1999 and 2010. This finding is consistent with a previous study that showed a notable increase in the overall suicide rate among middle-aged adults relative to a small increase in suicide rates among younger persons and a small decline in older persons during a similar period. The increases were geographically widespread and occurred in states with high, as well as average and low suicide rates. By race/ethnicity, the increases were highest and statistically significant only among whites and American Indian/Alaska Natives, widening the racial/ethnic gap in suicide rates....

Possible contributing factors for the rise in suicide rates among middle-aged adults include the recent economic downturn (historically, suicide rates tend to correlate with business cycles, with higher rates observed during times of economic hardship); a cohort effect, based on evidence that the "baby boomer" generation had unusually high suicide rates during their adolescent years; and a rise in intentional overdoses associated with the increase in availability of prescription opioids.

In a loosey-goosey sort of sense, one court argue that Douthat has a point. That if people who were suicidal could break out of their mindset, reconnect with their communities, and find peace and joy in their lives, they would no longer be suicidal. But that would be to assume that depression and suicide are the results of a rational thought process rather than cognitive distortion, and that somebody who is suicidally depressed is well-positioned to make significant life changes. Sometimes in response to a suicide you hear, "I don't understand, he seemed so happy that day" - the result of a confusion of the immense relief that can come from the decision to commit suicide with an emergence from depression. When severely depressed individuals receive treatment, you have to be very careful during their early recovery because in some cases the only thing holding them back from suicide is lacking the cognitive energy to carry out their plan. This cartoon series, I think, does a pretty good job of illustrating depression - but that freedom depicted at the end can be (and in the author's case, was) dangerous.

Douthat shares a non-suicidal author's account of how he reconnected with his small hometown due to his sister's terminal illness, and extrapolates,

Too often, and probably increasingly, not enough Americans will have what the Lemings had — a place that knew them intimately, a community to lean on, a strong network in a time of trial.

And absent such blessings, it’s all too understandable that some people enduring suffering and loneliness would end up looking not for help or support, but for a way to end it all.

It seems that Douthat is looking for a simple solution to the issue of suicide that ties into his conceit that a simple, small town lifestyle is somehow superior to... the way he lives his own life. As if anybody can find peace, contentment and community simply by moving to small town, rural America. As if small town, rural America would be unchanged if we all moved there. As if that's even possible. As if you can't find community in a city. As if suicide rates weren't higher in the less urbanized parts of the nation.

If you care about reducing suicide, you should be calling for government policies to help restore full employment. You should be advocating programs to help people deal with job loss and regain decent employment. You should be concerned about the quality and availability of mental health care. Pretending that all will be well if people return to the type of community seen in states with above-average suicide rates? Probably not helpful.

Lines are for the Little People

Leave it to the wealthy of Manhattan....

Lawyers, Don't Hire Spammers to Promote Your Law Firms

I understand that some lawyers, probably many or most, simply don't know any better - somebody calls them up promising to generate more traffic to their website. The well-practiced sales pitch makes it sound like a good deal, and then... stuff like this starts getting posted around the Internet under the name of the lawyer or the law firm:

John_P****s_law

It sounds as if you could possibly have a case but it may be a close one. I think it would be worth your time to go and talk to a professional lawyer in Washington State. Be sure to bring all important documents including your medical papers and perhaps an over view from your current doctor that did find the tumor explaining the situation. Hope this helped and good luck.
_________________
Do you think you have a case? The Law Offices of John P****s may be able to help you!

That wasn't the worst example I've seen - just the latest to hit one of my forums. The trick that particular spammer used was to try to paraphrase prior comments (which may be from non-lawyers) in order to try to create something that sounds reasonable.

Usually, the company you hired is either based in or subcontracts with another company in the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, or elsewhere in the developing world and pays somebody in that nation with middling English skills to push your link out to forums and blogs. (That particular spammer was working out of the United States, so the lawyer probably paid a premium for the website promotion services.) I'm sure they will subsequently hand you a nice list, perhaps with pretty charts, showing how many links they generated for your site. What they won't tell you is that most of those links will have little to no value for your website and, in some cases, the rapid volume of new, similar links on sites that allow user-generated conduct will trigger a penalty for your site.

But it's worse than that. You're a lawyer. You have ethical duties that govern your advertising - and make no mistake about it, this is advertising. No, you weren't told that a worker in an overseas phone bank would be posting messages that appear to be from you or from your law firm, but that doesn't mean you're not responsible for their actions. You didn't exercise due diligence when hiring your website promotion firm, you didn't adequately supervise their work, and they could be out there posting wildly incorrect information or giving wildly incorrect advice under your name.

Recall also, you probably have a duty to maintain a copy of all of those posts in your records for a specific period of time in order to comply with the advertising rules for your state.

Wealth is Not Proof of Better Genes and Values

In response to an essay about rich kids doing well in school, McArdle questions whether the answer truly lies in enriched environments,

But is that really the right explanation? The rich pulling away from the middle class is also exactly what we would see if test-taking ability has a substantial inherited component, and the American economy is increasingly selecting for people who are very, very good at taking tests. The latter is undoubtedly true, and there's some fairly strong evidence for the former, in the form of studies of adopted kids. Such studies tend to show that adopted kids bear a much stronger resemblance to their biological parents in terms of lots of things, from weight to income to test scores, than they do to their adoptive parents. Once you've hit a fairly basic parenting threshhold--food, health care, touching and talking to your kid, and not physically or sexually abusing them--the incremental benefits of more intensive parenting seem at best small, at worst unclear.

McArdle appears to be confused on a number of fronts. First, the manner in which people in our society meet, form family units and reproduce is not scientific. If this were scientific, not only would we be looking at and testing for specific criteria before approving reproduction, we would see weaker stock that we would need to exclude from contributing its genes to the next generation. We would see a marked difference between the children of the power couple, where both parents had high education and high income, versus couples where only one partner had the "power job", versus couples where one partner stayed at home, versus couples who were wealthy simply by virtue of inheritance.

McArdle presents the example of the marriage of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House on the Prairie), who she sees as intelligent and bookish, and Almanzo Wilder, who sees as being significantly less intelligent - intelligence apparently defined by academic interest and achievement. McArdle suggests that in the modern era, the couple would have had nothing in common and thus would likely not have met and married.

Laura Ingalls would quite likely have gone to an elite school, and probably graduate school, then moved to a coastal city, and eventually married another bookworm. Almanzo Wilder would be married to someone like him, a hard worker who nonetheless found school tedious and left as quickly as possible. And when their two sets of children showed up at school, their test scores would be very different.

Instead they had one child, Rose Wilder Lane, who became a very talented short-story writer (her collection, Old Home Town, is a very fine and somewhat brutal study of the Missouri town where she grew up.) They could just as easily have had a child like Almanzo, whose talents lay in other directions.

It apparently did not occur to McArdle that the outcome is not binary - that genetics are far more complex than the "Brown Eyes vs. Blue Eyes" diagrams she made in fifth grade. She could as easily argue that her example proves that bookishness is a dominant trait, and that if we pair off intelligent, bookish people with those who are not "nearly as smart as" as them, we'll have a nation full of smart people within a generation.

Second, you cannot effect significant genetic change across a culture over the course of two or three generations. If the argument is that tests became important in the mid-20th century, and that good test-takers have subsequently congregated, married, and as a result have produced a population of exceptionally good test-takers, it's fair to ask, what are the genetic components behind test-taking, and how do we measure them? When an individual takes a test prep course and sees a 10% increase in his score, is that because his genes have changed? Also, if test-taking prowess is hereditable and leads to wealth, why does the U.S. have a long history of economically outperforming nations that consistently outperform the U.S. on tests such as PISA?

Third, the fact that some aspects of personality are hereditable does not render environment irrelevant. As a group, children raised in an unsafe, tumultuous home predictably suffer long-term effects from their childhood experiences that are less prevalent in children raised in safe, stable households. When you see significant changes in a population across a generation (e.g., the rise in IQ in Irish children since 1970, or disparity in IQ between children of East and West Germany with the differences dissipating after reunification, it's not only inadequate to say, "What can we do - it's genes" - its obviously wrong and it's a cop-out. People tend to marry within their social class, and they tend to follow a career path modeled for them within their social class and family, with a potentially profound impact on their future earnings.

Fourth, the wealthy remain at an advantage even when you control for personality and intellect. When the economic outcomes for the lowest-performing children of the wealthy meet or exceed the economic outcomes for the highest-performing children of the poor, you can't deny the role of wealth. Winning the lottery doesn't change your genome, but it sure can open up opportunities that were not previously available.

I don't disagree so much with McArdle's conclusion as I do with how she reaches it,

Maybe the answer is not a quixotic attempt to somehow replicate the experience of being raised by two professionals with advanced degrees. Maybe it's to question the great educational sorting, and the barriers it has erected. Of course, I am not suggesting that we should give up on educating our kids, or that education is irrelevant to preparing people for the workforce. But we should ask whether incremental requirements are actually adding value. Because every additional year of schooling we require makes it harder and harder for those who don't enjoy school to compete in the wider world.

McArdle's argument does not support either the notion that the wealthy perform better academically because the typical wealthy child enjoys "the experience of being raised by two professionals with advanced degrees", as there are plenty of wealthy people where one or both partners lack advanced degrees, and plenty of middle class families where both parents have advanced degrees. Few impoverished families with two advanced-degree holding parents, and fewer still when you recognize that their transitory period in student family housing or at the very start of their careers isn't representative? Certainly. But none of that directly supports the genetic argument.

It would be helpful, I think, if McArdle explained what she means by "incremental articles". If I interpret that as, "Adding another round of standardized testing," or "Trying to concoct some sort of formula for rating teachers and trying to purge the lowest-performing teachers", then she's right. That sort of reform can make it "look like we're doing something", and may also be very expensive, but is not likely to materially affect outcomes - and we should examine the data, costs and benefits before expending hundreds of millions or billions on experimentation. Similarly she's correct that insisting that people get additional years of education, without any associated effort to ensure that they're getting something of value in exchange for their additional investment of time and money, is not likely to produce meaningful results. But if you look at the German or Irish experiences (or Polish, or certain American immigrant communities, etc.), you can see why its inappropriate to point to an impoverished community and say, "It's their genes" - and can find many examples of that argument being used to deny equal treatment to a population on grounds that, in retrospect, seem absurd.

Rich Kids are Doing Fine... And its News?

A few days ago, Sean Reardon shared an observation which he suggested may not surprise you, "the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families."

So let me see... kids who on the whole have the most educated parents, the most affluent homes and best home environments, safe neighborhoods, good schools, and ready access to additional resources if they start to flounder, do better on the whole than the kids who do not have those advantages? Let me guess - the next thing that may not surprise me is that kids who have the least educated parents, the poorest homes and home environments, unsafe neighborhoods, schools that struggle to maintain order and perhaps even to maintain their basic facilities, and who have trouble accessing additional resources even if their parents attempt to find and utilize those resources, bring up the bottom?

The author notes that this is a phenomenon associated with wealth, not gaps in racial achievement or a decline in school performance. He argues that school quality is a small part of the difference.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich....

The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

The author paints an idyllic picture of a typical wealthy family,

Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

I doubt, however, that the phenomenon is explained by the small percentage of wealthy families who employ tutors to prepare their children for kindergarten admission tests. Also, let's note, being tutored for a test can make you perform better on that test, and that can be particularly true of aptitude tests, but what you end up with is not evidence that one group is outperforming another by any measure other than the test. Instead, you end up with an invalid measure. We can talk of, "support[ing] working families so that they can read to their children more often", but in some of those wealthy families the reading is done by the nanny, and I suspect that modeling remains a significant factor - if the only books (real or virtual) you have in your home are the ones you read to your kids, that may indicate both motivation and the possibility that your kids will engage with books in a way you do not; if you have a home full of books and spend a lot of time reading, the odds go way up that your kids will follow your lead.

That said, we already know that giving children an enriched preschool environment can significantly improve a child's performance as they enter school. Despite the anti-Head Start demagoguery (that after the child starts school and you end the enrichment, you see a reversion to the mean over the next few years), we know how to boost a child's academic performance. As various experiments have shown, both in public school and charter school settings, kids from impoverished community perform better in school when they spend more hours in the classroom and receive tutoring. Shocking, isn't it?

Rich people care about education, they can vote with their feet if they don't like the performance of their child's preschool or public school, and they can and largely will avail themselves of resources when their kids struggle. They are also positioned to help their kids pursue their interests, whether academic, artistic or athletic. Basically, if you're wealthy you're much more likely to care about education. "But middle class families value education," you protest? Sure, but our society largely cares about education in the abstract. Education matters, but teachers get paid too much, kids don't really need art or music, and a B is good enough - particularly if you're good at sports.

Although anybody's best laid plans can gang aft agley, there's a difference between hoping your child goes to college and gets a degree, and expecting that your child to attend a top university and proceed to graduate school. It's easy to find public schools that bring kids in several weeks in advance of the start of school for sports, and put significant resources into sports equipment, facilities and coaching. It's easy to find schools where past sports victories are trumpeted, and sports trophies and banners prominently displayed. You rarely find the same sort of priority being placed on academics. Its not an either or - you can push both sports and academics - but our society's choices reflect its actual values.

Let's remember also, the lowest performing children of the wealthy tend to earn more money than the highest performing children from poor families. Wealth has advantages, and those advantages affect motivation and outcome.

A Tablet as a Replacement for, Not Addition to, a Car Display

Apparently Apple is in talks to do... something in along that line. It has had some niche successes with having auto makers use tablets instead of a proprietary in-car entertainment system. In past years the profit margins for entertainment and navigation systems would have made it difficult to convince auto makers to fully integrate with a third party device, but now... if you pay $2500 for in-car entertainment or navigation, or even $1,500, even if you don't feel like a chump it's difficult to imagine that you've viewed in any other manner by the car dealership.

So why not become, in essence, a large tablet retailer? Have the device fully integrate into the vehicle, seamlessly controlling navigation, entertainment, climate control, and the like? Sure, you have to somehow control for people watching movies while they drive....

A "Bush v. Gore" What If....

Courtesy of Sandra Day O'Connor, Scott Lemiuex shares his memories of a horrible series of Supreme Court decisions.

And, again, it’s not just that justices notably unsympathetic to broad equal protection claims claimed to accept an innovative equal protection argument. Where Bush v. Gore immediately falls apart and becomes a historic disgrace is that the completely lawless remedy left an election count with all of the alleged equal protection defects of the court-ordered recount (and the “mess up” job of the Florida authorities) in place.

Here's a thought experiment: What if, rather than tampering in a poorly conducted state election the Supreme Court had let the result stand. Even in the worst of circumstances the Constitution provides a remedy, specifically that the House of Representatives would elect the President.

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.

Had the election come down to that, we might as a nation have taken a hard look at how elections are conducted, inconsistent approaches to taking and tallying votes, and similar flaws and set about fixing them. Instead the Supreme Court allowed the nation to bypass that type of difficult work, and subsequent concerns about election technology, fairness and potential for actual fraud have largely been either ignored or have gained attention based not on the genuine flaws reveled by Florida, but based upon demagoguery about largely imaginary allegations of voter fraud. Rather than having remedies directed at improving elections, legislatures have largely focused on making it difficult for certain classes of voter to reach the polls and vote.

Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. But....

The Logic Behind Control Freaky iPhones

I have sympathy for the argument that Apple has a history of being something of a control freak with its hardware, and that its tendency to want to control what users do is manifest in its iOS devices, the iPhone and iPad. If you're the sort who likes to customize your experience within the OS, you have very few options. If you're the sort who likes to dig deeper into the device to change appearance or function, Apple works hard to prevent that. If your intentions are good, than can be frustrating.

That's not to say that it's not frustrating, also, when your intentions are bad. Although some people jailbreak their iOS devices in order to use them on a network that does not yet support the iPhone, or because they enjoy hacking the device, let's be honest: Most people looking to jailbreak an iPhone or iPod, or complaining bitterly about how Apple restricts their freedom as compared to Android, are primarily interested in installing bootleg apps or making "free" in-app purchases.

As it stands, iOS looks its age. There are pro's and con's to that, the most obvious pro's being that it's easy to use and remains compatible with most older iOS devices. On the other hand... it's somewhat inefficient, the constraints on file organization make it somewhat clumsy, it screams out for new features, some of its functionality is clumsy (adding an event to the calendar, for example), and its quaint adherence to skeuomorphs (e.g., making a calendar look like an old, on-paper desktop calendar) needs to go. (Rumor is that skeuomorphs are on their way out in the next iOS update.)

When you look at the latest version of Android, or when you look at Android's present market share, the question I heard a while back, "Why do developers still tend to develop an iOS app first, instead of starting with Androd," seems fair. I think the answer is this: Because Apple is enough of a control freak to ensure that a majority of iOS device holders will buy their apps, instead of installing "free" bootleg versions. That's an issue I expect to only become more pronounced as Android starts to saturate the market for lower-cost smartphones.

Although I'm not sure that they expected it to happen so quickly, Apple has known for many years (really, all along) that it's only a matter of time before any computer technology becomes commoditized. You can create a premium product and sell it at a premium price, but if the run-of-the-mill product is almost as good as yours that is likely to result in your rapid loss of market share. People seem to forget that while Apple is competing with Samsung (and, indirectly, Google) for the lion's share of the smartphone market, it's competing with Amazon (and Google) to be a dominant vendor of electronic books and media. Google doesn't give away Android in order to give its competitors an advantage in the marketplace - it does so to give its own software product an advantage, and to better position itself to compete in the mobile space for ads, apps and media.

To the extent that Apple can make itself the device maker that is most likely to provide royalties to developers and content owners, and Android doesn't find a way to rein in bootlegging, that aspect of Apple's control freaky nature is likely going to provide it with a significant advantage when negotiating with content providers.

David Stockman, Government Subsidies and the Minimum Wage

As David Stockman makes the rounds to promote his new book, I caught a few of his bon mots on government intervention in the economy. He takes the position that the technological advances we attribute to government programs would have emerged from the private sector, or that their rough equivalent would have emerged, and that the government should not be investing in private companies. I'm not entirely sold on his former point - yes, private industry might have come up with some of the technological advances resulting from projects spearheaded by the government, but there's no guarantee that it would have happened, that the process would have been more efficient, or the outcome better. At a minimum, we can say that those advancements would have taken considerably longer to develop - otherwise there would have been no need for the government-funded research. But sure, there's a cost-benefit equation to apply, reasonable minds can disagree on how much weight to assign to those costs and benefits, and we aren't able to test alternate time lines to see how the world would have turned out had the government not funded the space race, Manhattan project, military and defense R&D....

What I found more interesting... in a facepalm sort of way... was Stockman's position on the minimum wage. Stockman takes the position that the minimum wage is an incredible burden on business, and that there should be no minimum wage. Okay, standard libertarian home-brew thinking. Nothing to see there, right? He's the sort that would happily see somebody work two, three jobs and still not make enough money to support himself (let alone a family) because markets are groovy. And if Stockman left it there I would be willing to quip, "My reasonable mind can disagree with your unreasonable mind."

But Stockman's not that much of a libertarian. Not even close. He proposed that the government subsidize workers who cannot earn enough money to support themselves. I've not tried to delve into Stockman's reasoning - but if he's not going to eliminate much of the remaining 'safety net', it's difficult to imagine workers opting to work for 5 cents per hour (or whatever "the market" dictates) unless the subsidy provided by the taxpayer results in significantly higher remuneration than public assistance. If the subsidy is tied to hours worked, "the market" may well find five cents per hour to be reasonable - the worker will want more hours to get a greater subsidy, and the employer will not have to worry about paying a competitive wage because the government is picking up the bulk of the worker's compensation. And if you don't tie the subsidy to the number of hours worked, or cap the number of hours that will be subsidized, you introduce even more distortion. What such an approach might mean for the work environment or employee motivation, your guess is as good as mind... but my guess is that things would turn pretty ugly.

But more than that, if this is about "the markets", how is increasing the cost of minimum wage-level labor more of a distortion than passing along the bulk of an employee's compensation to the taxpayer? A great deal of the automation that has made lower-wage industries more efficient was created to reduce labor cost. Nations with the lowest labor costs are associated with slums and sweatshops, not innovation. Within the context of our society, why is it better to allow business to pay wages that require their employees to be subsidized by the taxpayer to maintain even a basic standard of living? Is it at all unfair to respond, "If a business cannot survive if it has to pay its employees enough money to support themselves, it's time for that business to innovate or die"?

Stockman would find it appalling if a business required copper to be available at $100 cents per ton in order to compete, with the government responding by picking up the difference between that and market price. So what is it that he sees as different about the cost of labor - which in this context is simply another line on the balance sheet. Why does the company that says, "Materials cost us $100,000 per week and we can't compete unless the taxpayer picks up 80% of our materials cost" undeserving of help, with any government intervention being an unacceptable manipulation of the markets, but when the same company says, "Labor costs us $100,000 per week and we can't compete unless the taxpayer picks up 80% of our labor cost"?

Also, frankly, Stockman's insistence that the minimum wage is harming the economy is not particularly consistent with the facts. The argument reminds me a bit of the person who rails against strong unions, then laments in the next breath that fewer and fewer blue collar jobs no longer pay a middle class salary. Might there be a connection between lower wages and the decline of labor unions? You would think that if the minimum wage destroys jobs, we would see some evidence of that destruction - of a minimum wage hike followed by a rash of business closures and bankruptcies. It's possible to imagine a minimum wage hike so high that it would make labor truly unaffordable for businesses that rely on minimum wage labor, but that's neither something that is going to happen in this country nor the basis of Stockman's argument. Why should we believe Stockman instead of our own lying eyes?

All that said, eliminating the minimum wage remains one of Stockman's better ideas....

With Bipartisanship Like This, Health Care Doesn't Need Enemies

When you hear about an organization that calls itself the "Bipartisan Policy Center", what's the first question that comes to mind? If I spot you this essay, might it be, "I wonder how they bankroll themselves, whose policy positions they're pushing under the guise of 'bipartisanship'"? No real surprise - when you are willing to offer a big enough paycheck, you can get people from both sides of the aisle to sign on to your clients' positions.

So, then, what's the basic premise of this special interest front group?

What we learned is that, until better care is prioritized over more care, our nation will continue to face a problem with health-care costs. The good news is that, through thoughtful policy, health-care practitioners can be encouraged through rewards to focus far more on what is best for their patients and less on the number of tests and procedures they can order. The even better news is that such a health-care vision can not only produce better care but also cost less.

So... Bill Frist has given up his habit of diagnosing medical conditions from the Senate floor, then insisting that their lives be prolonged indefinitely no matter what the financial cost to the country or emotional cost to their family? Was it the "bipartisanship" that brought him around, or the paycheck, because... You'll please excuse my skepticism that Tom Daschle and Bill Frist couldn't see eye-to-eye on what was good for the nation when they were being paid by the taxpayer to do so, but fell into a warm mutual embrace of their employer's policy position the second they entered the private sector.

Well, they claim that we can pay less and get better healthcare. So how do they, the admitted beneficiaries of the best health care our nation has to offer, far better than the average American can presently hope to obtain, propose to give us this "higher quality and greater efficiency" at a lower cost?

To address these, we seek to promote coordinated and accountable systems of health-care delivery and payment, building on what has proved successful in the private and public sectors. Organized systems of care emphasize the value of care delivered over the volume of care. These systems are often better able to meet patients’ needs and desires and are able to effectively reimburse providers and practitioners for delivering high-quality care.

That sounds like... obfuscation. It would be helpful if they would start by identifying the systems that have "proved successful in the private and public sectors", but... I know, far too much to ask. Besides, if they were to approach that issue honestly they would have to praise the efficiency and popularity of Medicare and the single-payer V.A. system, as well as the fact that every other industrialized nation has managed to offer an overall quality of care comparable to that of the U.S. at a considerably lower cost.

So, if they cannot identify even one of the "coordinated and accountable systems of health-care delivery and payment" they used as their model, perhaps they can help us by giving us examples of that coordination and accountability. You know, of the sort of measures that will result in better care for less money.

• They propose to "Preserve the promise of traditional Medicare while adding more choices and protections for beneficiaries, including accountable systems of care and a stronger, more competitive Medicare Advantage program." So "keep Medicare but with added buzzwords" - and then magically create a "stronger, more competitive Medicare Advantage program"... does that mean, one that won't require massive subsidies to attract even a single consumer to migrate from standard Medicare? Just asking.

• They propose to "Strengthen and modernize the traditional Medicare benefit, including adding a catastrophic cap, rationalizing cost-sharing and premiums and expanding access to assistance programs for those with low incomes" - in case you're not paying attention, what they're saying here is that they want to cost-shift from the Medicare program to its beneficiaries. So... their two leading ideas have nothing to do with improved systems or providing better care. Should we hold our breath and expect things to get better?

• They want to "Reform the tax treatment of health insurance to limit the taxfavored [sic] treatment of overly expensive insurance products" - In other words, if you have really great coverage (like the kind they, personally enjoy) they want to increase the tax burden on your employer so that your employer will offer you lesser coverage. Once again the entire focus is on shifting the cost of care from insurance to the consumer, and has absolutely nothing to do with improving care or efficiency.

• They propose to "Empower patients by promoting transparency that is meaningful to consumers, families and businesses, and streamline quality reporting" - which, if they have actually studied the issue, they know translates into meaningless twaddle. But heck, it sounds like it came right out of a mission statement generator, so odds are you never thought it was anything but meaningless twaddle. The most charitable reading is that they propose to give consumers more information so that they can make their own decisions about their healthcare instead of deferring to their doctors. Oh, you thought you were going to hear about things that work, things that improve care and lower costs, rather than the usual tired nonsense about how consumers can learn to manage the intricacies of their own medical care? Well, guess again!

• They're going to "Advance the nation’s understanding of potential cost savings from prevention programs, through support for research and innovation on effective strategies to address costly chronic conditions" - because, you know, telling people, "If you don't smoke, lose weight, eat better, and exercise more, you'll be healthier", has been such a successful strategy to date. Because so many people have yet to hear that sort of hectoring.

• Back to twaddle, "Offer incentives to states to promote policies that will support a more organized, value-driven health-care delivery and payment system, such as supporting medical liability reform and strengthening their primary-care workforce." In the real world, "medical liability reform" - that is to say, denying victims of malpractice effective redress through the courts" - has not resulted in cost savings. But clearly it's something that their employer's clients want, so there it is! And what does "strengthening the[] primary-care workforce" mean? Clearly it doesn't mean "hiring more primary care physicians", as so far this proposal is about anything but encouraging people to see their doctors when they're sick.

They pat themselves on the back,

All of these policies are designed to improve the quality and value of our nation’s health care. That is where every health-reform effort should start.

Sure, if we pretend that "improve the quality and value of our nation’s health care" is synonymous with "improve the bottom line of the industry groups that fund our organization". Given that none of the proposals as stated has any realistic chance of either improving the quality of care or improving the efficiency of the provision of care, but can be guaranteed to raise both cost and risk for the consumer, it's difficult for me to believe that they're fooling anybody with this other than the guy on the Washington Post's editorial board who approved the essay. I joke - the editorial board and its members push this sort of editorial with some regularity, knowing full well that they're at best pushing a half-truth and at worst pushing something that's good for the bottom line of the insurance, pharmaceutical or hospital industry even if harmful to consumers.

By presenting this report to federal, state and private-sector leaders, we hope to promote a collaborative dialogue and a shared understanding of strategies to put our nation’s health system, as well as its economic outlook, on a sounder, healthier and more sustainable path.

No, really, they don't. All four of the authors had the opportunity to do what was right for the nation when they held elected office, or when they worked in the public sector. Their unified front comes not from a realization of how obtuse and destructive they were when they couldn't agree, but from the fact that they won't keep their jobs if they don't push their employer's agenda. How about a little bit of honesty?

The Top Three Reasons Why Lists Are.... Oh, Forget It

Paul Waldman asks an interesting question - a lot of online content comes in the form of lists as a form of link baiting, but lists are also prominently featured in traditional magazines, especially the type that want to inspire an impulse sale at the newsstand or checkout lane. The length of the list seems to be relatively unimportant - people respond to lists, and tend to click links or buy magazines that promise lists:

So what's the lesson here? Lists are magic. Buzzfeed has built its spectacular success on that principle (just look), there are other web sites who have similar success, (see, for example, Cracked, which on the web is something very different and more successful than its print roots as a Mad magazine rip-off), and it's something every magazine and website editor knows. The next time you're at a newsstand, look at the magazine covers, and see how many are using lists to grab your attention. "9 Moves That'll Drive Him Wild." "8 Exercises to Burn Fat And Rip Those Abs." "12 Strategies For Achieving Financial Security." "14 Celebrity Bikini Nightmares." But the question is, why?

Waldman offers a couple of theories:

1. "Maybe it has to do with the promise of something both finite and complete, distilling the world down to something you can manage and then be done with."

2. "It could also be the attraction of something easy to read—because it's broken into small pieces, you know it won't require too much work to read, you'll be able to skim it easily, and if you want to read part of it and then stop, you'll be able to."

Waldman questions his theories as being too rational, as he sees the attraction of lists as being more visceral, "making us click on things whose topics we don't even otherwise care about". And Waldman's onto something with the argument that our clicking isn't purely rational. For actual informational content, I can't recall the last link I found that promised a list that lived up to its promise.

But here's the thing: Even when we click on a list out of idle curiosity, something we might not click but for the promise of it's offering the "top three reasons," or "four most important factors", on one thing or another, the clicking is fundamentally rational. We have questions or we have curiosity, and the list promises that somebody else has engaged in curation, separated the wheat from the chaff, and will give us the answers in a quick, easily digested form. You don't click on what might be a long form article or even a short essay about something of marginal interest to you, but if you can get that information by glancing at a list the cost-benefit analysis (time vs. interest) shifts. And if the topic interests you or is important to you, the implied promises of curation and relevance have appeal.

Supermarket magazine stands have been filled with lists for as long as I can remember, and they've presumably failed to live up to that promise for at least as long, given that the same essential lists are offered month after month, year after year. The top three ways to lose weight, the top five ways to find your soul mate, the top three tricks to drive your significant other wild in the sack... The goal is to get you to click or buy without thinking, or if you must think, "It's only $1.99," or "If the article at the other end of the link is junk I've only lost a few seconds of time."

Will it continue to work? The evidence at the newsstand says "yes", and so far the evidence from the content mills suggests that the technique isn't losing its effectiveness online. Alas, the actual cost is that the most meaningful, relevant information is likely to be headlined with a misleading title in order to draw more "eyeballs", and may fail to be noticed in favor of lists that, unfortunately, are often junk.

Actually, It's Not So Easy to Teach Yourself New Tricks....

An afterthought on Thomas Friedman's column,

But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.)

Well, quite clearly, college isn't cheaper than ever before. Quite the opposite. Even if, recognizing that your skills have become a bit rusty, you're inclined to go back.

I expect that Friedman is referencing the growing availability of online courses, free and paid, on a wide range of subjects. If you can put together an appropriate collection of such courses, you can approximate what you might learn in certain more expensive, formal educational programs. The first problem with that is curation - you generally won't know if a course is any good or how much you'll learn until you complete the course. The same is true to a degree with college courses, but the college has an incentive to curate the content and to try to ensure that courses are of reasonable quality. Similarly, colleges put together curricula to help students pick "majors" and "minors" and, ideally, take an appropriate set of courses to obtain an appropriate level of knowledge to justify being granted a degree. When you're putting together your own set of courses on the Internet, it can be difficult to know where that process begins and ends. If you are acting out of mere personal interest, sure, it's cheap and easy. If you're trying to teach yourself cutting edge job skills in your spare time, it's not easy and (assuming the material is available online) isn't necessarily cheap.

I have seen interesting programs that promise, somewhat convincingly, to take people from the beginner level to "competent and employable" in a block of time comparable to a college semester. For example, this program to teach Ruby on Rails. I think colleges should do a lot more to create and implement that type of program. But such a program is neither cheap nor easy. Sure, you can quit your job and with some decent guidance and luck in finding good resources, as well as a lot of motivation and sufficient aptitude, achieve reasonable mastery of Ruby on Rails in, say, twelve weeks. But... that's a luxury few people have.

Perhaps Friedman is thinking back to the days when he typed his columns and learned to use a word processor, but if we're serious about "inventing" jobs through a demonstration of skill sets and achievements not broadly shared by a larger pool of job applicants, for most workers I think things are getting harder. Not only are skills of that type increasingly complex, they become obsolete much more quickly than the important skills of the past. Picking the right skills to master, finding the time, finding the resources, and keeping current or moving on to the next thing? Easy? Come on.

U.S. Schools Have Always Kinda... Sucked

Thomas Friedman has noticed that, based upon international tests, U.S. students lag behind their international peers. I don't want to diminish the importance of education, improved schools, improved pedagogy, universal education and the like. I don't want to assume that the factors that have helped the U.S. succeed in the past, despite problems with public education, will continue into the future. But....

The bad news is that U.S. middle-class students are badly lagging their peers globally. "Many assume that poverty in America is pulling down the overall U.S. scores," the report said, "but when you divide each nation into socioeconomic quarters, you can see that even America’s middle-class students are falling behind not only students of comparable advantage, but also more disadvantaged students in several other countries."

That's not new. That's "same as it ever was".

Part of the problem, at least to me, is obvious: On the whole, our nation does not value education. We give it a great deal of lip service, but at the end of the day we're not willing to open our pocketbooks to better fund public schools, we're more interested in cutting teacher pay, autonomy and benefits than in creating an environment that will attract the best candidates to teaching as a profession, and we get much more excited when Johnny makes it onto a varsity sports team than when he enters the science fair - and while the football team gets equipment, coaches, dedicated facilities, the science fair gets one day with the gym filled with folding tables. We have a range of taunts and epithets to direct at kids who excel academically. If you control for parental focus on academics, as opposed to parental income, you'll find a lot of academic achievers in this country.

Part of the problem, though, may be that there's not actually a problem. At least insofar as the middle class is concerned. We, as a nation, are presently obsessed over early childhood education - how much academic material can we cram into kindergarten and first grade. But kids who go to schools that follow the Waldorf method don't get much exposure to academics before the age of seven, and they do fine. It is reasonable to infer that when kids come from families that value education, that read, they catch up. And while I think it would be better to offer a more rigorous high school education than what we see in a lot of U.S. schools, to allow kids to push themselves without taking A.P. courses or taking classes at the local community college, the kids who aren't pushed into getting top PISA scores go on to college and catch up.

The focus on PISA reminds me of the talk about how not enough students are pursuing STEM degrees, even though the evidence suggests a significant surplus of STEM graduates as compared to job openings. By way of example, my brothers both went out of their way to avoid math in high school, and again in college. Their PISA scores would have been pretty awful. One is now a lawyer (a profession in which it is easy to avoid even the most basic math), and the other is doing very well working for a Fortune 50 company. That should come as no big surprise to Friedman - I doubt that the math requirements of his job often exceed having his word processor tabulate the word count of a draft column.

Something else that's interesting about PISA, particularly given Friedman's emphasis on China, is Professor Yong Zhao's observation that nations with the highest PISA scores tend to have low scores on measures of "perceived entrepreneurial capabilities". That is to say, if you put too much emphasis on having students score well on PISA mathematics, you may do so at the expense of giving them the opportunity to learn the real world skills necessary to drive business success. I'm not advocating that we choose - I would like to find a way to do both - but there's a price to chasing the highest test scores, while the reward may turn out not to be improved business competitiveness. Professor Zhao is also not enamored with the notion of chasing after China's test-driven model of education, a system from which he graduated.

There's another cost to high stakes testing, one that was revealed in the D.C. schools under the Leadership of Michelle Rhee: If you put enough emphasis on testing, you create a huge incentive to cheat. I once followed a link to a Chinese website that sold aids for cheating on exams - and some of the stuff would inspire jealousy even in the James Bond character, Q. Chinese students are reported to have a relatively cavalier attitude toward cheating. Everybody does it, right? But hey - it does inspire a certain form of entrepreneurship....

So what’s the secret of the best-performing schools? It’s that there is no secret. The best schools, the study found, have strong fundamentals and cultures that believe anything is possible with any student: They "work hard to choose strong teachers with good content knowledge and dedication to continuous improvement." They are "data-driven and transparent, not only around learning outcomes, but also around soft skills like completing work on time, resilience, perseverance — and punctuality." And they promote "the active engagement of our parents and families."

Another trip to the mission statement generator? Oddly, no mention of start times, but then the mission statement says nothing about choosing the correct data.

So yes, let's take Friedman's suggestion and "raise the bar". I expect Friedman will be telling us where we will get the money for the type of teachers and schools he envisions in... well, probably not his next column, but we can hope it won't take more than a Friedman Unit or two. While we wait we should consider which bars we should be raising - as we don't want an effort to improve the nation's schools to turn into a trip hazard.

Jobs Will Exist in the Future, But Résumés Might Not....

When I read Friedman's piece on "inventing jobs", I had hoped that he would be speaking to a future in which workers were more entrepreneurial - whether in terms of finding ways to work for themselves, or to position themselves to be more secure or more competitive when seeking or holding jobs. The forces that inspired Friedman's column, essentially the decline of the middle class crossed with the reduced possibility of completing your education before embarking on what we once might have called a career, are real.

But have you actually looked at the job market lately? Have you tried to get a job?

First, for a lot of employers the traditional résumé is something to be scanned and algorithmically processed. If you don't have the right keywords, it's possible that the only person who knows you've applied for the job will be the person who opens your job application and feeds it into the scanner. And if you're submitting your application electronically, you don't even have that.

Second, it's easier than ever for employers to investigate the applicants that they are considering interviewing. People put an alarming amount of personal information on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and most neglect to limit access to at least some of their more embarrassing information. And while that information may disqualify you from a job, we're reaching a point at which your qualification for a job may be even more tightly related to your online profile.

Frankly, employers don't trust résumés. It's easy for employees to exaggerate, even fabricate qualifications. Some people are very good about bluffing their way through interviews. The employer ends up with a suboptimal employee, and a choice between terminating the worker and engaging in another job search or hoping the employee grows into the position. The gamble often works for the dishonest employee - and if it doesn't, they suffer no real harm.

How is that changing? I suspect that over the next ten years, the traditional job posting is going to go the way of the dinosaur. Connections will be more important than ever. But the connections of growing importance aren't going to be the traditional "who you know". Instead, prospective employers will look for prospective employees on sites like LinkedIn, examining their credentials, and then reaching out to their own networks to verify the prospective employee's claims and professed skills. Historically, finding a common connection between yourself and a prospective employee was difficult, at best hit-or-miss. Now an employer can cultivate a select set of references, people who are trusted to give honest recommendations and referrals, and rely upon those people to suggest or verify the qualifications of prospective employees.

Ten, fifteen years from now, I think the typical opening for a "good job" will involve an employer identifying prospects, verifying their credentials, and narrowing their list down to a small number of prospects before the prospective employee even knows that the opportunity exists. Headhunting on steroids.

My advice to anybody in college: Build your professional network on Google Plus and LinkedIn, stop tweeting about your social life and latest snack, and start documenting your actual accomplishments. (If you don't have any yet, start accomplishing - what can you do, right now, that might impress a future employer in your field?) And keep it honest. The more technology-oriented your field, the more you need to get started... yesterday.

You Won't Save Middle Class Jobs with Talk About Teaching Motivation

A few days ago, Thomas Friedman took a kernel of truth and attempted to run much too far with it. At this point there is immense downward pressure on middle class incomes and job security, and in many fields - particularly those likely to offer the best wages - it is more important than ever to maintain an up-to-date skill set if you want to remain employed. I'm all for teaching students at all levels to be more entrepreneurial and about the expectations they are likely to face in a future job market. I question the conceit,

Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever.

Specifically, what middle class jobs are being pulled up? Also, frankly, the correlation between wages and "skill" is far less precise than Friedman assumes. If you have unusual skills that happen to be in demand, you are much more likely to get a job and a decent wage than you are if you have far more developed skills that happen to be in low demand or aren't materially different from the skill set held by the larger applicant pool. Part of the problem with telling workers, "You're responsible for your own career development" is that it's much easier to evolve skills that ultimately become commonplace or obsolete than it is to identify and master new skills on your own time and your own dime that your employer may not presently value but will ultimately prove to have significant value in the marketplace.

Friedman seems excited by the notion that knowledge is becoming unimportant,

I tracked ["education specialist Tony] Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.

Frankly, hearing a statement like that from a self-described "education specialist" would leave me looking for a new expert. Let's use a simple example from early elementary school - math facts. It is very difficult to progress in mathematical knowledge and skills without a mastery of basic math facts, because if you can't do simple math problems quickly in your head you will not develop the speed necessary to keep up with the rest of the class as lessons become more complex. Sorry, no, "You can use a calculator instead", is not an answer. First, if you need a calculator for basic math facts it's still going to slow you down. Second, it's a highly unusual person who succeeds in math-dependent fields who cannot do basic math problems in her head, and quickly solve problems that would confound most of the rest of us (we might not even know what information to punch into a calculator or how to order the operations) with pen and paper.

Friedman might object, "But math is different." But it's really not. You're not going to be a good lawyer unless you have a decent understanding of the legal principles you encounter. You're not going to be a good doctor unless you quickly recognize medical conditions and symptoms within your field of practice, and know how to perform a physical examination. Friedman's perspective is probably colored by his profession - few pundits have any meaningful subject matter expertise, so they spend much of their time aggregating information and whittling it down to column length. To some degree you might be able to get away with that as an "education expert" - you're not likely to be called upon for instant answers, and to the extent that your primary focus is on research and publication you're going to be drawing upon a broad variety of sources to produce your next paper. But even in that latter context, you need enough knowledge of your subject matter to know what has come before, as you're not going to successfully publish papers that betray a fundamental ignorance of the research that has been done in the past - and you can't trust Wikipedia to bring you up to speed.

But more than that, if you want to become good at grappling with a particular set of ideas or concepts, you need to actually wrestle with the facts. You can't learn or be taught how to be a good thinker without a framework. There's a reason that traditional education typically begins with a survey course - to provide students with the necessary foundation to understand more complex concepts and ideas. As much fun as it might be to pretend otherwise, "They can look it up on the Internet" isn't a substitute. If you don't learn the basics, you're going to end up in over your head.

There's something of a tension in Friedman's assertion,

My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job.

As evidenced by his continued statement,

Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it.

First of all, there's no evidence that jobs are going away. No major employer is casting off its employees in favor of an all-independent contractor workforce. Nor is outsourcing key functions all it's cracked up to be - when Boeing attempted to minimize its in-house expertise and rely on contractors... disaster followed. One of Yahoo!'s recent steps to re-invigorate its corporate culture was to stop employees from working at home. If there's evidence that employers are moving away from the concept of "jobs" and "employees", it's well-hidden.

Second, Friedman's expansion upon his comment reveals what I previously suggested. The issue is much less, "There won't be jobs in the future," and much more, "If employers realize that your skills aren't special your earning capacity will flatten or decline, and if your employer decides that your skills are obsolete you'll probably be shown the door." More than that, while corporations might historically have helped employees update their skills or develop new skills, Friedman sees that cost and burden as being shifted to the employee. I think he's correct, but as with professionally managed pension funds vs. individual retirement accounts I think he's missing something important: the professionals have access to information and resources that allow them, on the whole, to better predict market trends and by scaling up their operations they can take advantage of efficiencies that should allow for better training at a lower cost. When you transform that into, "Every man for himself", no matter how well you try to prepare employees for their "self-managed" future you will see a great number of them flounder or drown.

Friedman continues by speaking of the importance of motivation, more specifically of "intrinsic motivation":

Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously.

That observation is, for lack of a better word platitudinous. Of course people who are intrinsically motivated to learn and expand their skills will do so. They always have and they always will. The problem is that the forces Friedman describes are extrinsic - they come from outside the worker. Fear of job loss can be a powerful motivator, but it's extrinsic. The statement only has significance if we can teach intrinsic motivation, but unfortunately that seems to be much more a component of personality than a product of a particular pedagogy.

Which is probably why, when asked how to produce more intrinsically motivated students, Friedman's expert may as well be clicking on a "mission statement generator":

“Teachers,” he said, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to innovate. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need ‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary. Selective use of high-quality tests, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment, is important. Finally, teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May. We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the new normal throughout the system.”

To me, that sounds a lot like doubling down on the status quo (although if student work is assessed through the year rather than through high-stakes standardized testing, that would be a positive step)... but with badges. (Pieces of flair?) What's missing? Anything concrete. If I were the type of boss Friedman predicts for our collective futures, and somebody handed that statement to me as a meaningful reform proposal, he would quickly find himself testing his ability to invent his own job.