The Question Was Not, "Is He Going to Prison...."

The question was instead, "For how long".

Nicholas Kristof makes a cogent argument against mandatory minimum sentences - particularly the really big ones that don't allow for much (if any) judicial discretion - but his depiction of the case casts an unfortunate shadow over his argument. Under investigation for burglary, a man was found to have seven shotgun shells and, even though burglary charges were dropped, is looking at a fifteen year minimum sentence in federal prison.

Then a neighbor died, and his widow, Neva Mumpower, asked Young to help sell her husband’s belongings. He later found, mixed in among them, seven shotgun shells, and he put them aside so that his children wouldn’t find them.

“He was trying to help me out,” Mumpower told me. “My husband was a pack rat, and I was trying to clear things out.”

Kristof links to one of his sources,

But in late September 2011, he went off track. He stole tools, tires and weightlifting equipment from vehicles and a business warehouse. He even had his son with him on one trip, which added a separate charge.

A video camera recorded the burglaries.

Kristof may be correct that for most of his marriage, on the whole the man was a good father, but when you take your child along on a burglary you take yourself out of the running for father of the year.

The state charges appear to have been dismissed not because the state couldn't prove them, but because it's a waste of resources to prosecute somebody for burglary when his state court sentence won't be as long as the federal sentence he's already received. But for the federal conviction, given the strength of the described prosecution case, it's a safe bet that the man would have spent a number of years in state prison. Having taken a quick look at that state's statutes, his sentence in state court appears likely to have been significantly less than his federal sentence, but (without any argument in favor of the laws) it's also fair to note that under other states' burglary laws and habitual offender laws he would have been looking at a sentence at least as long, and potentially longer.

Kristof is correct to point out that long sentences resulting from "mandatory minimums" and habitual offender laws often do represent a very poor use of money and resources, it's difficult to believe he couldn't find a better case to illustrate his point. This is important, because criminal law is one of the fields in which the saying, "Bad facts make bad law" tends to hold particularly true. When you omit important facts to make a defendant seem more sympathetic, you don't just risk a negative reaction when people learn the full facts, you risk worsening an already hostile climate for reform efforts. As Kristof notes, mass incarceration has correlated with a reduction in crime - and while I don't want to read too much into that correlation, as I think the causative element is weak, it is fair to say that a small number of criminals are responsible for a disproportionately large portion of the crime in any given community, and some of them only stop committing crime while they are incapacitated by incarceration.

I don't like this argument, either:

Conservatives often argue that there is a link between family breakdown and cycles of poverty. They’re right: Boys are more likely to get into trouble without a dad at home, and we have a major problem with the irresponsibility of young men who conceive babies but don’t raise them.

Juvenile crime is associated with factors such as domestic violence, alcoholism and drug use in the household, antisocial behavior by a parent, and marital discord. In some households, removing the father will significantly reduce the risk of the children's following in his footsteps. The case Kristof cites involves a father who was not only committing burglaries, but who took one of his children along when committing one of his crimes. The particular argument Kristof makes, that putting fathers in prison leads to their kids being more likely to engage in crime, misses the very important influence that fathers have through their actions. Sometimes it's the father's presence, limited though it may have been, that put the child on the wrong path. As for the men who aren't in prison "who conceive babies but don’t raise them", that's an editorial for another day.

The classic caricature of justice run amok is Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Misérables,” pursuing Jean Valjean for stealing bread for hungry children. In that case, Valjean knew that he was breaking the law; Edward Young had no idea.

For the shotgun shells, I can accept that argument. For the burglaries that led to the discovery of the shells, not so much.

I do hope that the man's sentence is shortened, because I don't think that there's much to gain in terms of rehabilitation, just retribution or deterrence in a 15-year sentence. Might the long sentence prevent him from committing more crimes? Certainly, and the man has a record that makes the possibility of additional burglaries a valid concern, but you have to look at costs and benefits, and the law of diminishing returns. This case is not unique - we've been hearing about the results of "three strikes"-type laws since they were first enacted, and some states have rolled back a number of mandatory minimums (sometimes not enough, but it's a start) or revisited the way habitual offenders are sentenced.

Nicholas Kristof on Public Schools and Teachers' Unions

Kristof is one of those guys about whom you can often say, "His heart is in the right place." (And you know what word comes next.)

Kristof attempts to compare today's inner city schools to the era of "separate but equal", premising that argument on the fact that the inner cities (and thus their schools) are dominated by minorities. There are only a few differences... such as the fact that the schools are not actually segregated, there's no parallel set of schools for non-minority children, and for all of their faults many inner city school districts are now generously funded, but why let the facts get in the way of perfectly good hyperbole. In fact, why not kick it up a notch?

America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

Really? Well, no, not really.

In fairness, it’s true that the main reason inner-city schools do poorly isn’t teachers’ unions, but poverty. Southern states without strong teachers’ unions have schools at least as lousy as those in union states. The single most important step we could take has nothing to do with unions and everything to do with providing early-childhood education to at-risk kids.

So Kristof understands that schools are not "a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next", but are an inadequate tool for consistently breaking children out of a cycle of poverty. (Nor is "providing early-childhood education to at-risk kids" the solution it has at times been hyped to be, at least not as implemented to date, but it sounds good.)

Kristof complains,

I’d be sympathetic if the union focused solely on higher compensation. Teachers need to be much better paid to attract the best college graduates to the nation’s worst schools. But, instead, the Chicago union seems to be using its political capital primarily to protect weak performers....

Unfortunately, the union in Chicago is insisting that teachers who are laid off — often for being ineffective — should get priority in new hiring.

That would be a concern if it were true. Except when I follow either of Kristof's links I find that the union's actual concern relates to rehiring teachers who are laid off for reasons outside of their control ("because of school closings, consolidations and turnarounds"). The union's position is not about protecting "weak performers". If Kristof wants to make the case that most or all teachers who are laid off are "weak performers", he is free to try - but it seems reasonable to infer that if he could substantiate his claim he would provide a relevant link.

At the heart of his argument, it appears that Kristof is fundamentally disturbed by the idea that unions would negotiate contracts that benefit workers not only in terms of wages, but also in terms of their working conditions. He wants to get rid of the weakest teachers, spinning glorious outcomes that might be achieved if inner city schools got rid of the bottom 1% or bottom 5% of teachers. I don't think that anybody would deny that job protections negotiated by unions do help some number of people stay in jobs that they're not fit to perform. Within the context of public schools, if administrators are disinterested or are incompetent, teachers who should be terminated instead end up getting tenure and, at that point, it becomes difficult to fire them for their job performance.

Alas, a purge of the type Kristof proposes is not likely to have a significant impact on the performance of schools or students. Even if we get past what Kristof describes as the challenge of figuring out "who is a weak teacher", avoid administrators gaming the system to get rid of teachers they don't like, and overlook the fact that Kristof just told us that ""the main" problem is "poverty", the numbers are too small to have a significant impact.

Fire one teacher in 100 and most kids will proceed through school with the same set of teachers to whom they would have been assigned without the "purge". Eliminate 5%, and you're still having little to no impact on the overall school experience of most children. In early elementary, K-6, most kids have seven teachers. In middle school and high school they may have an aggregate 50 or so teachers. So they're not going to see a huge change in personnel, even if we assume that a teacher at the 94th or 98th percentile of effectiveness is materially superior to the ones who are purged.

Further, if you fire a teacher you need to replace that teacher. While it may be that if you correctly identify the worst teachers, somebody fresh out of a teacher's college who is willing to work in the inner city will be no worse, some will be no better - teachers learn a lot during their first few years on the job, and you're all-but-guaranteeing that you'll have an increased number of new teachers in the system.

It's fair to note also that purging teachers will have no impact on the racial composition of inner city schools. Although Kristof actually repeats the "separate but equal" hyperbole in his conclusion, he does so to be emotionally provocative.

While Kristof opines, "Teaching is so important that it should be like other professions, with high pay and good working conditions", he ignores the push in the opposite direction - to demean teaching as a profession, to strip away benefits, to put downward pressure on compensation. He ignores trends that make teaching less and less attractive to high performing college students, and for that matter less and less attractive to school teachers who have options outside of the profession. When you make teaching less attractive to the best teachers, guess who remains when they leave?

One of the reasons that inner city schools, or the "lousy" schools in "Southern states without strong teachers’ unions" (Kristof should be clear that some of those states have no teachers' unions) seem to have more problem teachers is that they attract a weaker candidate pool. Yes, there are teachers who want to make a difference and, despite strong credentials, seek education jobs in the inner city, but most teachers with options choose not to apply. Alas, those who try to make a difference may find that their efforts are unappreciated, if not impeded by structural problems, inadequate resources and incompetent administrators.

Perhaps Kristof should approach these issues from a slightly different angle. If the problems of the inner cities also exist in impoverished schools in states that offer teachers no job protections, the problem cannot be job protections - unless you presuppose that school administrators in the non-union states are either incompetent or indifferent to the quality of their schools. Also, most schools in this nation manage to do pretty well despite teachers' job protections - if the problem does not lie with the pool of candidates, why are those districts so much better than the inner cities and non-union states at identifying and hiring competent teachers? And if the problem is with the pool of candidates, isn't it fair to assume that the schools are already hiring the best candidates they can identify? why does Kristof believe that purges will result in those schools hiring better teachers?

Early Childhood Intervention Matters

I was reminded the other day of a sad fact - we have been experimenting with school reforms of one type or another for many decades and, once you expand the reform to a statistically meaningful population, every single reform has failed. Other than its obsessive focus on handing taxpayer money to private testing companies and for-profit charter schools, there's nothing to distinguish the present round of reforms from past rounds. The biggest lesson appears to be that if you provide struggling children with significantly more hours in a structured learning environment, or provide quality tutoring, you can increase academic performance in the short-term, but those increases are likely to fade once that extra support is removed.

A recent column by Nicholas Kristof describes this phenomenon:

“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.

“Schooling after the second grade plays only a minor role in creating or reducing gaps,” [economist James] Heckman argues in an important article this year in American Educator. “It is imperative to change the way we look at education. We should invest in the foundation of school readiness from birth to age 5.”

Kristof notes that, although there's reason to doubt that there will necessarily be lasting improvement in test scores from a focus on early learning, there may be strong social and society gains:

One of the most studied initiatives in this area was the Perry Preschool program, which worked with disadvantaged black children in Michigan in the 1960s. Compared with a control group, children who went through the Perry program were 22 percent more likely to finish high school and were arrested less than half as often for felonies. They were half as likely to receive public assistance and three times as likely to own their own homes....

One of the Harvard scholars I interviewed, David Deming, compared the outcomes of children who were in Head Start with their siblings who did not participate. Professor Deming found that critics were right that the Head Start advantage in test scores faded quickly. But, in other areas, perhaps more important ones, he found that Head Start had a significant long-term impact: the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. Head Start alumni were more likely than their siblings to graduate from high school and attend college.

Our society seems inclined to approach educational issues from an "all or nothing" perspective. A few months ago I read an exchange between Bryan Caplan and "the Tiger Mom", which largely boiled down to Caplan arguing that whatever parents do a child's academic performance is likely not to be significantly affected, versus the "Tiger Mom" philosophy that with aggressive, controlling over-parenting and demand for excellence, any child can become an educational super-achiever. The truth lies somewhere in between, probably more on the Caplan side (because outside of Lake Wobegon half of the children will actually be below average).

Consider, for example, piano lessons - if you, as a parent, provide the opportunity for your child to learn how to play piano, even if they never make it to Carnegie Hall they will have learned a skill that they can continue to use for life. If you do not, odds are your child will never learn to play the piano. The skills that help people achieve in school and society are largely learned - if you provide a small child a robust set of cognitive tools, you increase the odds that the child will succeed within your society, but the longer you wait to introduce the tools to the child the less likely it is that the child will learn them, let alone master them. Delay also creates the opportunity for a child to learn the wrong lessons, to internalize rules and practices that are maladaptive.

A Caplan-style, "Don't worry, it will even out in the end" approach is not unreasonable for people who are middle class or above, and who live in strong communities, have stable jobs and incomes, and whose children are immersed in a culture that rewards educational achievement, college attendance, and ultimately "getting a good job". Children who live in violent, dangerous communities, for whom fear is a part of daily life, do not enjoy a similar luxury. If you don't attempt to influence their environment, they will never have the opportunity to reach their potential.

Our society seems fixated on the idea that education makes you smarter. That if you force reading on a child who may be too young to cognitively process the lessons, you'll end up teaching strong reading skills that will last a lifetime. That any child can be "college material", that everybody will benefit from a college education, and that everybody can perform jobs that perform a high level of cognitive function.

On the one hand, if people work hard and push themselves, they truly can accomplish a lot more than they would if they take a relaxed (or, if you will, lazy) view toward life, education and career. On the other hand, work that is cognitively easy for some people will be a constant struggle for others and, no matter how much effort the exert, beyond the reach of still others. That's true across the board - every person has subjects or activities that are beyond their skill set, and beyond what they can reasonably hope to master. Education does not make you smarter, but it can expand your horizons, allowing you to identify those areas in which you can achieve some level of mastery and to maximize your performance.

Living in a Bubble

Atrios comments,

Pampered over-privileged scribe finally discovers that it's kinda bad when people don't have any jobs or money. Better late then never I guess.

It's difficult to argue with that summary of Kristof's column. How can you not notice unemployment or its impact on the lives of ordinary people unless you live in a bubble? Would there have been too much risk of a paper cut, were somebody to suggest that Kristof scan down the page from his own column and occasionally take note of Paul Krugman? Kristof has realized,

Unless more people are working, paying taxes and making mortgage payments, it’s difficult to see how we revive the economy or address our long-term debt challenge. While debt is a legitimate long-term problem, the urgent priority should be getting people back to work. America now has more than four unemployed people for each opening. And the longer people are out of work, the less likely it is that they will ever work again.

I had thought that this stuff was pretty obvious, even back in 2009. I wonder if, two or three years from now, Kristof will suddenly realize that the choice to focus on economic factors other than unemployment (and the difficulties of individual homeowners) was a deliberate policy choice, even if we grant the decision-makers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they believed that their choices would lead to lower unemployment.

I think Kristof is sincere - I believe that all of this passed below his notice, and that he truly believes we need to focus on lowering unemployment. But given how long it took him to produce this column, I feel like I'm damning him with faint praise.

Courageous? Serious? Come On....

Nicholas Kristof gets off to a good start, with a bipartisan excoriation of Congress for the dereliction of duty, opportunistic preening and general disdain for the welfare of the nation (all that counts is getting reelected, even if you harm the country in the process). But then he spouts the standard beltway line of unadulterated bovine excrement about the coward Paul Ryan:

The House Republican budget initiative, prepared by Representative Paul Ryan, would slash spending and end Medicare and Medicaid as we know them — and it justifies all this as essential to confront soaring levels of government debt. Mr. Ryan is courageous to tackle entitlements so boldly, and he has a point: we do have a serious long-term debt problem, and Democrats haven’t had the guts to deal with it seriously.

At this point, given how thoroughly the issue of Ryan's incompetent and absurdly unrealistic "budget" has been dissected within Kristof's own publication, I am left wondering if the man can read. (Perhaps he dictates his columns?) If he were paying even the slightest bit of attention to the Affordable Care Act, Kristof would be aware that it's the first serious measure to address the growth in healthcare spending since... well, perhaps ever. What does Ryan propose to do? Why, of course, to repeal that act and replace it with wishful thinking. How serious. Wow... and Kristof continues,

In other words, the Republican position is that America faces such a desperate debt crisis that we must throw millions under the bus — yet the result is more debt than if we do nothing.

That's what passes for "serious" in Kristof's world? I would ask, "Seriously?", but I'm not sure that he understands what the word means.

Answer me this: What price has Ryan paid for his supposed "courage"? Is he less of a darling with beltway pundits who are, as usual, eager to describe anything that involves the slashing of entitlement benefits as "serious" - in Kristof's case even as he concedes that the result would be to balloon the deficit? Does he have any chance of losing his next election campaign? Of facing a primary challenger? Is he at risk of losing his position in the House? Is he getting fewer invitations to right-wing cocktail parties? No invitations to dinner from Evan Bayh? If you take even a passing glance at the situation, you can see that not only has Ryan offered up one of the least serious budget proposals in the history of our nation, by doing so he has advanced himself personally and politically.

You know what would be courageous for somebody like Ryan? Telling the truth. Standing up to his own party. Proposing a budget that admits the long-term goal of ending Medicare and Medicaid and leaving the poor and elderly largely uninsured and unable to afford insurance. Or, if he prefers to continue to work against the interest of balancing the budget, flat-out admitting that his budget is designed to slash taxes for the wealthy, slash government benefits for everybody else, and will result in a massive increase in the deficit. I'll reiterate: The word for somebody like Ryan is "coward". Kristof is happy to slap that label on all of Ryan's peers - Kristof truly believes that every other Republican is a coward for pushing Ryan and his plan forward as representative of their vision of the future, but that Ryan's being "courageous" for his role as an eager mouthpiece?

You Should Sacrifice For Others

Take it from Nicholas Kristof. Writing of a teenager who convinced her family to sell its manse and to donate half of the value to charity, Kristof writes,

Eventually, that’s what the family did. The project — crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring — is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.” It’s a book that, frankly, I’d be nervous about leaving around where my own teenage kids might find it. An impressionable child reads this, and the next thing you know your whole family is out on the street.

The joke about his own teenagers is illustrative of what is sometimes referred to as limousine liberalism. Yes, the family did move from their first house to one half its size and cost. Yes, they dedicated half of the proceeds form the sale of their larger home to charity. But please, before asking that your readers share in similar sacrifice (while joking about your own reluctance), how about some context?

• House #1, 6,162 square feet, equipped with its own elevator, five beds, four baths, eight fireplaces, recently sold for $1,450,000.

• House #2, 2,986 square feet, three beds, four baths, sold for $962,200.

I don't mean to belittle the act of moving into a smaller home and donating a substantial amount of money to charity. But really....

Back home, our friends and family kept asking us, "What is it like to live in half the space?" Before we downsized, we were a little worried. Would we feel squeezed? Or like we'd made too big a sacrifice? Two years later, I can tell you: It's the best move we ever made.

Of course, our new house required some lifestyle adjustments. In our old home, French doors opened onto a balcony and a wooded yard, and sunshine filled the kitchen. The views from our current kitchen are obscured by our neighbor's house. Our pots and pans fit in the cabinets, but that's about the extent of the space. We can't open the silverware drawer without closing the dishwasher first.

Squeezing a family of four into a 3,000 square foot, four bathroom, $million home? What sort of peer group do you think we're talking about that their first question is "How do you survive?" Also, in context, it's apparent that the family could have afforded to both dedicate half of the house's value to charity while remaining in the larger home. It's on a smaller scale, but Kristof's column still feels a bit like the statement, "Bill Gates gave $1 billion to his charitable foundation - and please don't ask what I have done - but what have you done lately?"

From what I can see about the Salwens, what they're doing is admirable. They've moved on from successful first careers that gave them considerable financial security and are now following a path that is largely focused on self-transformation through helping others. They respect the fact that others are probably not positioned to follow a similar path,

We had more than enough house, and it was something we could cut in half to help those in need. But most people can find some commodity in their lives they could give up, whether it's time (halving the hours of TV you watch each week and volunteering instead?) or stuff (donating half the clothes in your closet?). Like us, your family could set out to make a small difference in the world—and transform yourselves in the process.

According to Kristof, the Salwen's "aim [is] to encourage people to step off the treadmill of accumulation, to define themselves by what they give as well as by what they possess." I just find it interesting that the message is presented to the mass market, rather than being directed at the millionaires and billionaires of our society who rage and froth at the notion of a half-percent tax increase to help the less fortunate. I really wish Kristof, being quite fortunate himself, had taken a step beyond telling his readers what they should do - or joking about what his own kids might ask of him - and telling us of the sacrifices the book inspired him to make.

Random Memories

When I was about ten, we had a "guest" of some sort come to our class with a project for us to complete. We were divided into groups, and each group received an envelope of pieces for a simple puzzle - but no one had all of the required pieces. Our task was to trade with other groups so that we could complete the puzzle.

When my group opened our envelope we found a large number of identical pieces, and two other unique pieces - well short of the number we needed to complete the puzzle. You're probably guessing at this point that the pieces were distributed randomly, so we could simply go around the room trading our large set of pieces for the others we needed. Wrong. Everybody already had that puzzle piece. And we couldn't trade our other pieces without ending up exactly where we started - no, there was no artificial scarcity of those pieces such that we might have been able to do a two-for-one trade. It was one-for-one at best, so a trade would leave us exactly where we started. So, basically, we sat out the exercise while we watched the other groups complete their puzzles.

We did have options, I'll grant, but none that would have worked in a controlled classroom setting. We could have "declared war" on another group to take the pieces we needed. We could have attempted to trick other groups out of their pieces ("I'll trade you the pieces you need, hidden in this envelope, for the following..."). We could have tried stealing. Or begging. In retrospect, a war might have been fun, but by now you've figured out that we were in an impossible situation.

As no explanation was provided to the class, once we were done I asked our visitor why we were given no chance of succeeding. I was told that the exercise was to demonstrate international trade, and that we were in the position of a "have not" nation. Perhaps that was realistic, as none of the "haves" even noticed that our group existed, but there was a bit of a problem: they also didn't notice that they were supposed to be learning something beyond the immediate exercise of trading puzzle pieces. Even within my group the lesson was far from obvious. I think, by virtue of my asking, I was the only person who was let in on the little secret of what we were supposed to have learned.

Many years later, I went to see a documentary with a group of friends. One asked, "What's the movie about?" The response, "A journalist in Haiti."

"Oh, then it has an unhappy ending."

"How do you know?"

"Because it happened in Haiti."

Going back to my elementary school exercise for a moment, I don't think you have to have any great amount of insight to recognize why a nation that has virtually nothing in the way of resources has a difficult time emerging from poverty. You can argue that some form of paternalism could help Haiti improve itself, and you would probably be right, but perhaps you shouldn't do so after glorifying the rise of the resource-rich, uber-authoritarian People's Republican of China. (Is it something in the water at the Times building?)

You can also argue that there's "no consistently proven way to reduce corruption" or increase growth; but that doesn't mean we can't figure out, in retrospect, why a particular nation has high levels of corruption or why it hasn't grown. You can talk about how Haiti and the Dominican Republic share a desperately poor island, but that the Dominican Republic is much less desperate in its poverty and "has trees", but to then switch topics to China, the Barbados and Harlem suggests an overt effort to avoid drawing any lessons from Haiti's history. It's not as if Haiti's trees one day decided things were better in the Dominican Republic and snuck across the border - there's a history there.

Perhaps you should also start by recognizing that people who are mostly concerned with getting enough food to eat aren't going to be listening to your moral disapprobations over their own stomachs, no matter how benign your paternalism or how misguided you believe their religion to be. China has the puzzle pieces. Harlem has the puzzle pieces. Even controlling for massive earthquakes, Haiti still has to beg.

It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people - maybe just in a neighborhood or a school - with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.

That shouldn't be too hard. I suspect Haiti actually does have enough middle class people to fill up, um, one neighborhood¹....

It's the darndest thing - sometimes a people's belief "that is life is capricious and planning futile" is borne of the fact that their world is miserable. Sure, you have Nick Kristof to occasionally tell you of the glories of child sweatshop labor as a means to rise... if not out of poverty, at least away from the need to sell your children or prostitute yourself. But when companies decide to move their factories out of Haiti to the relative stability of China, where does that leave you?
--------------
1. I exaggerate, but:

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty.
* * *
Household income or consumption by percentage share:
* lowest 10%: 0.7%
* highest 10%: 47.7% (2001)

A "Type B" Nation

So Cost Ricans are the happiest people on Earth? An alternative explanation to Kristof's "make schools, not war" - Tico time. It may often drive westerners crazy to try to do business in Costa Rica, but you never sense that they're stressing about schedules and deadlines.

Long-Term Care vs. Medical Costs

Nicholas Kristof relates the story of a friend who divorced her husband in order to avoid having to contribute to his long-term care costs.

If M.’s husband required long-term care, the costs would be catastrophic even for a middle-class family with savings.

Eventually, after the expenses whittled away their combined assets, her husband could go on Medicaid — but by then their children’s nest egg would be gone, along with her 401(k) plan. She would face a bleak retirement with neither her husband nor her savings.

A complicating factor was that this was a second marriage. M.’s first husband had died, leaving an inheritance that he had intended for their children. She and her second husband had a prenuptial agreement, but that would not protect her assets from his medical expenses.

It should be noted that although we treat long-term care costs in many ways as medical costs, they're a somewhat different creature. Absent Medicare or Medicaid coverage, long-term care is generally not covered by even the goldest of gold-plated health insurance. Instead, it's separately insured as (surprise!) "long-term care insurance".

My wife was recently offered the opportunity to buy long-term care coverage as a benefit at work. The price was reasonable, due to her age, but coverage was not available for anybody else in the family. The limits on raising premiums were big enough to drive a truck through - with the cost of insurance also jumping considerably at various age thresholds. It was nice of her employer to make the effort, but it wasn't a good deal for her. As with any choice not to carry insurance, we're playing the odds.

Kristof's friend and her husband made two mistakes, the first of which may have been consistent with the odds at the time the decision was made: they chose not to obtain long-term care insurance, and they chose not to engage in estate planning that would have involved both protecting separate assets and intended inheritances, as well as preparing for possible disability and Medicaid eligibility. Kristof is arguing that, as a rule, society should pick up the cost of long-term care. And that can be part of the current debate - whether long-term care should be included as a basic benefit in health insurance plans. But as it stands, if you don't insure for long-term care, you can expect to pay for a good portion of it - and the trend is for states to be more aggressive in pursuing the assets of people receiving Medicaid benefits, not less so.

But let's not forget, somebody is paying for long-term care. If it's not the recipient of the care, or that person's family, then it's the taxpayer. It's not at all unreasonable as a public policy for the taxpayers to say, "You need to contribute significantly to your own costs of care before we step in." It's possible to increase the exemptions for long-term care, such that the effect on somebody like M. is less pronounced, but why should a taxpayer in effect subsidize her children's inheritance - paying for her husband's care so that her kids can inherit more money?

It should also be remembered that we're talking about more than long-term care for the elderly. We're talking about any recipient of Medicaid or government disability benefits, at any age. There are young people who don't marry because, as one or both of them are disabled, they would have their benefits cut as a result of their combined marital income. There are parents who either don't leave money to disabled children, or who construct special needs trusts that control how the money can be used, in order to keep the inheritance from being taken by the state as reimbursement for the cost of Medicaid. An argument can be made in each of these contexts that the care or benefits should be provided without respect for need, but again there's a countervailing argument that people who can afford to pay for their own care should do so before asking the taxpayer to take over.

The current situation does create absurd outcomes. People do marry in a church but without getting a marriage license, while others live together as spouses, living lives every bit as committed as those in "real" marriage but flying under the government radar. Some, like M., are divorced "in name only", continuing to live with and care for their spouse. But here's something to remember - as long as we impose any income or asset threshold on government benefits, the same "unfairness" will continue to exist. If we raise the threshold we reduce the number of people who are asked to pay for part or all of their own care, or to experience a reduction in their benefits due to their total household income, but we increase the burden on the taxpayer.

If Kristof is trying to make the argument that 100% of long-term care costs should be paid out of tax revenues, it's a perfectly legitimate argument to make - but he doesn't quite come out and say that. I suspect he would concede that some people are wealthy enough that they should pay at least part of that cost. I don't personally see any way to provide universal long-term care insurance, with no means testing, without a significant increase in tax revenues or deficit spending.

If your goal is to stay with the spouse you love, while still protecting your separate assets and preserving inheritances you intended for children from a prior marriage, consult a good estate planning lawyer. (Kristof's tale suggests that when M. married her husband she had considerably more money than him, hence the prenuptial agreement that protects her in divorce but not in his illness. A prenuptial agreement is not an estate plan.)

Silly Political Tests

In what you might mistake for a David Brooks column, Nick Kristof shares two questions that supposedly indicate whether you're "liberal (which he later defines as believing that "morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm") or conservative (which he implicitly defines the same way, but as also "upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust").

How’s this: Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit?

And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom?

Kristof explains,

Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.

Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

I would expect them to be even more likely to self-identify as non-parents. Seriously, for Kristof's examples of "disgusting" things, he seems to focus on things you're likely to inure to with experience. Does it disgust you to "smell urine in a tunnel"? That reaction is likely to diminish over time if you live in a major city and it becomes part of the "background noise" of your daily experience.

Kristof challenges his readers to take the "disgust" test, so I did. And the results told me that (thanks probably exclusively to being a parent) on the whole I find things marginally less disgusting than an average person, they said nothing about my politics. So I read the background information on the test and read,

Disgust appears to play a role in moral judgment, moral conflict, and ethno-political violence. (For the best work on disgust and politics, see David Pizarro.)

Fair enough. And it seems like a paper, "Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D.A., & Bloom, P. (in press) Conservatives are more easily disgusted. Cognition and Emotion.", would be right on point. But not in the way Kristof represents. It's not about sink knobs and earthworms.

In the first study, we document a positive correlation between disgust sensitivity and self-reported conservatism in a broad sample of U.S. adults. In Study 2 we show that while disgust sensitivity is associated with more conservative attitudes on a range of political issues, this relationship is strongest for purity-related issues—specifically, abortion and gay marriage.

Although the disgust effect was not exclusive to "'sociomoral' issues of gay marriage and abortion ... a greater disapproval of gay marriage and greater disapproval of abortion", results are correlational and thus " it is possible that there are other variables related to both disgust sensitivity and conservatism that may account for the observed relationship." The study's conclusions are presented as a starting point for further research. But to the extent he wants to claim that "studies suggest" a link, the type of disgust Kristof should be focusing on is the type that sees purity as a moral virtue, and is evoked by behaviors that offend one's sense of purity even if they're harmless to the actor and to others. The type of purity you're likely to hear about in church, or see evoked in a Ross Douthat column.

As for comedy skits in which you slap your parent, that seems to tie more into Kristof's definition of conservatism as authoritarian in nature. But you don't have to be conservative to be authoritarian and, despite a correlation, don't have to be authoritarian to be conservative. But Kristof doesn't follow through on that claim, choosing instead to focus on disgust. If you're testing for authoritarianism, a better question would probably be, "Would you be more likely to slap your father with his consent as part of a comedy act, or to slap your child out of anger or to impose discipline?" But I think the answer would only correlate to political leanings for the aforementioned reason, that authoritarian personalities are more likely to espouse conservative politics.

A Lunatic Investigation....

Hey, I have an idea. You know how people always complain about "letting the lunatics run the asylum"? Well, what proof do you have that it would actually be all that bad? We're making rash assumptions based upon logic, common sense, law... but is that fair to lunatics? So here's what we do:

We create a commission, but we don't let psychiatrists, legal experts, or sane people lead the commission. If we did that, the lunatics might denounce it as a witch hunt. Instead we find and appoint prominent lunatics to head the commission. We can appoint some of the sane people and experts also, but as window dressing. We wouldn't want to demonstrate bias by letting them run the show or influence the panel's findings.

Sure, some sane people will complain about the heavy presence of lunatics on such a panel. But the alternative is no panel at all. Why? Because I said so. I mean, in fact, sane people, legislators, psychiatric experts could hold such a panel any time they wanted to, but shut up - I'm pontificating here. So when I say "surely any panel is better than where we’re headed: which is no investigation at all", don't question me.

And I'm confident that when the panel concludes its investigation it will issue a stinging repudiation of letting inmates run asylums that no one could lightly dismiss. And we can use that consensus in the future - because laws, the constitution, sound public policy... if the lunatics take over, they could all go out the window. If we form a consensus on these issues, and by that I mean letting the lunatics decide what we should do, we'll be better off when the lunatics once again rule! And the rest of the world will once again respect us!

The Business of Charity

You know, sometimes I get a bit tired of columnists who (uncritically) read a book, decide it has the answers to some or all of the world's problems, then pen a column espousing the book's thesis. It's not as bad as stenography of the latest party memo, but generally speaking it's a path to a weak column.

Nicholas Kristof recently read a book by a failed businessman, Dan Pallotta, lamenting how after he raised a ton of money for some wealthy charities he was cast aside. Kristof makes a huge assumption, that the reason Pallotta's company failed was his salary:

But Mr. Pallotta’s company wasn’t a charity, but rather a for-profit company that created charitable events. Critics railed at his $394,500 salary - low for a corporate chief executive, but stratospheric in the aid world - and at the millions of dollars spent on advertising and marketing and other expenses.

Kristof then wrestles, in a peculiar way, with the question of whether higher salaries for the leaders of charities would lead to better or worse results:

I also worry that if aid groups paid executives as lavishly as Citigroup, they would be managed as badly as Citigroup.

Is that the issue? Pallotta worked with the Avon Foundation. Did Kristof call Avon and ask, "Does the person who heads your multi-million dollar charitable trust earn $400,000 or more?" Does he know that the CEO of the Red Cross earns more than $500,000 per year? That the President of the United Way has a salary of about $400,000 in compensation and an expense allowance (plus benefits), but pulled in an additional $800,000 in bonuses in 2007? $1.2 million isn't sufficiently "corporate" compensation? Here's where I'll give Pallotta his due - he was innovative, and shifted the ground for large charitable fundraising events. Have you noticed that the United Way has done anything particularly different or innovative that would justify the huge bonuses "earned" by its president? If so, it has occurred way below my radar.

Sure, it may raise people's hackles that charities are paying their executives astronomical bonuses, but despite some brief negative publicity the United Way hasn't failed. So perhaps we should take a step back, and consider why people give to charity? By spending few minutes on Google, Kristof would have come up with this interesting case study:

When the individual gives money to a charity, no product or service is necessarily provided to them. What the individual purchases is much more ethereal. A contributor to charity receives a sense of reward, self-satisfaction, pride, or deeper purpose from the act of giving. Donors receive the pleasure of altruism as the product of their economic transaction.

The pleasure of altruism is the product supplied by charities. For example, a dollar given to a homeless person on a street corner might buy a small amount of altruistic pleasure, but a million dollar grant to find a cure for AIDS might buy much more. The homeless person and the AIDS cure charity provide different altruistic pleasures. You may not know the homeless man, but you may know someone who has or has died from AIDS. Or perhaps the opposite is true. But such a personal connection is just one example of how a charity creates differentiation among the many suppliers of altruistic pleasure. We most often correlate a charity’s purpose with its worthiness, and therefore with the quantity of altruistic pleasure it can provide.

Here is where the traditional Neo-classical view of markets begins to fall apart. The charity market is not a perfectly competitive market that balances the supply of worthy causes with the demand for altruistic pleasure because no two worthy causes are the same. While the supply of worthy causes is practically infinite, the market is highly differentiated. One cause may be deemed more worthy by more people, create more altruistic pleasure, and therefore receive more funds than its competitors. Price is not the primary means by which the resource of altruistic pleasure is allocated.

Pallotta's company, Pallotta TeamWorks (PTW), was truly innovative in maximizing the altruistic pleasure felt by participants in its events - and then it dropped the ball. Their innovation was in designing targeted events

tailored to elicit the extreme emotions of altruistic pleasure.... such as biking across a dessert to support AIDS charities or walking 60 miles for three days in the footsteps of breast cancer survivors. The events supported people in doing things that they never achieved before in the name of a worth cause, a desirable vehicle for acquiring altruistic pleasure.

They used sophisticated marketing to communicate to participants "the altruistic pleasures that could be received" through participation in an event. They also provided front-to-back support for participants, to help them succeed first in raising a substantial amount of money required simply to enter the event, and carrying through equipment purchases, training, and support during the event itself.

And at the event, PTW created mobile cities in which the participants ate, slept, and most importantly, intermingled with others inspired to champion the same cause. Through such support PTW was able to keep existing participants involved in future events while continuing to attract new ones. “The organizations that are going to survive and effectively provide services,” says Terje Anderson, executive director of the National Association of People With AIDS, “are going to be the ones that figure out ways to market themselves to new private donors and, at the same time, successfully keep their old donor base”

Although none of these ideas were new, Pallotta's innovation was in bringing them together and creating more efficient fundraising processes. If a charity could afford his services, for a flat fee he would provide them with soup to nuts support for their event - they needed no experience or expertise. The only requirement was that they pay his seven figure event planning fee. And while there were events that were not successful, most of Pallotta's events returned considerably more than his fee.

By 2001, PTW’s ideas, people, and competitive fundraising events were creating real economic growth. PTW’s charities had received more than 3 million donor contributions, equal to more than 1% of the US population (Pallotta TeamWorks 2002, p. 30). But in 2001 PTW’s fundraising numbers began to decline and its participants began dropping out. PTW carefully designed an attractive set of attributes, created a higher value product, and lowered transaction costs for their market by reaching a huge audience. So where did the firm go wrong?

The article suggests that PTW's success depended upon "participants’ approval and excitement over the emotional, engaging way that the firm produced money for charity". Early events returned an average of about 67% of the proceeds to charity, but by 2000 that amount had dropped to about 53%, raising concerns about PTW's management of funds. An alternative theory that, to me, seems more intuitive is that annual events were starting to burn out their participants and their participants' sponsors, and may have started to seem like "the same old thing" rather than a new and cool thing you could do for your charity. But no question, when the money stops rolling in, people start looking at the money trail - and that's where a salary that may have been an irrelevancy a year or two before can suddenly seem excessive. And there is no question that, for example, participation levels for Avon's breast cancer walks were dropping. Low participation makes the high cost of these events seem unwise - for the 2002 D.C. AIDSRide, it's reported that 86% of the proceeds went to overhead and expenses.

Pallotta also started to heavily cross-market his own company and, reportedly, other PTW events:

PTW began cross-marketing events for other new events and causes to existing participants using slick brochures, kiosks, and infomercials disguised as safety videos. Event participants “saw Pallotta merchandise, like books by the company’s founder, all along the route” (Winters 2002). T-shirts, sweatshirts, and other collateral were hawked to participants, all trumpeting the PTW brand, not the cause. A former PTW employee and event participant complained that the AIDSRide events “became a Pallotta TeamWorks event, and they stopped even talking about AIDS” (Freiberg 2002). To event participants the PTW brand smacked of commercialism and obstructed their access to the real product, the pleasure of altruism.

(PTW reportedly denies cross-promoting other events at its 3-day events.) This opened the door to criticism and skepticism of PTW and its integrity, ultimately causing its flagship partners to fire PTW. There are a couple of lessons here that Pallotta and Kristof seem to have missed:

Participants didn’t care that PTW was the brand producing the altruistic pleasure. They cared about the means of how it was produced and the quality of that product. As Peter Drucker reminds us, quality “is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for”

In other words, Pallotta stopped producing the product his customers wanted. And in that respect, PTW was like any other business - if you can't sell the customer what she wants, you'll fail.

The case study goes on to describe some of the economics of scale produced by Pallotta's massive events, and how some charities managed to generate millions of dollars in donations (despite marketing costs approaching 60% of revenues) while more "cost-efficient" traditional fund-raising might have only raised a fraction of that amount. This brings me back to Kristof's piece, in which he observes, "It’s notable that leaders of Oxfam and Save the Children have publicly endorsed the book". No, it's not particularly notable, at least when you get past the notion that Pallotta's innovation was his own salary as opposed to his emphasis on effective marketing and his desire to get away from efficiency as the best measure of charitable success.

Oxfam and Save the Children spend a lot of money on marketing. At the same time, their charitable ratings depend upon their keeping their administrative and fundraising expenses low as compared to the money they apply to their programs. A multi-million dollar investment in marketing might bring in tens of millions of dollars in new donations - but could drag down their efficiency ratings and turn off or scare away another set of potential donors. Charity ratings sites often list, right along with the charity you're evaluating, a series of similar charities - it's easy to find one with a better efficiency rating, and to direct your money to that charity instead. A big part of Pallotta's failure might be attributed to the rating standards of the Better Business Bureau:

The BBB had issued more stringent guidelines, which became effective in 2003. Prior to 2003, CBBB standards limited fund-raising expenses to 50% of related donations (Heaney 2003). The Avon 3-Days historically averaged fund-raising costs close to 40% of total donations through 2001 (PTW 2001), complying with watchdog group guidelines. In 2003, the NCIB and the CBBB merged, forming the BBB Wise Giving Alliance. A new standard required fund-raising expenses to be no more than 35% of “related contributions” (BBB 2006a). This meant that Avon Foundation’s historic average level of performance would no longer be good enough to comply. Another standard called for program spending to exceed 65% of total expenses.

The trend of the Avon events’ fund-raising ratio going into 2003 was not good. In 2001, in part because of disruption caused by the September 11 attacks, the fund-raising ratio had risen from 36% in 2000 to 43%. The 2002 event season had some unusual costs related to the shut-down of PTW in August (Avon 2002), and the fund-raising ratio rose to 49% of related donations. Program spending as a percent of total expenses was only 41%, far below the 65% level specified by the BBB.

Yet it appears that part of that warm, altruistic feeling many people get from making donations arises from the knowledge that only a small part of their contribution will go to administrative costs and marketing. While this is a bit different than the environment for a traditional business, within the world of charitable giving it's something that's not likely to change. The lesson that Oxfam and Save the Children might draw from Pallotta's experience is that by providing a good altruistic experience you can push marketing and administration costs past the 30% level, but as they approach 50% you can expect the backlash to begin. As Pallotta can no doubt attest, that can turn into a microscopic examination of everything you do by the people who feel that you took advantage of your altriusm. Seemingly overnight, you can go from being seen as a helpful symbiote to being perceived as a destructive parasite.

Meanwhile, six years after his business failed, other than marketing himself, what's Pallotta offering to the rest of the world?

Kristof concludes with a couple of stories about how capitalist enterprises can return social utility. This, apparently, surprises him. He describes how a consulting firm helped Rwanda improve its public image in the United States, and significantly increase the price of Rwandan coffee and tea. He also describes how a Nigerian businessman is making money installing pay toilets - he rents, leases and sells port-a-potties. I'm not sure why this would surprise anybody - or why Kristof would see the return of social utility as the province of a charity as opposed to a business. I get my electrical, phone and gas service from profit-making utility companies - I get great benefit from those services, but none of the providers are charities. Furthermore, if there's money to be made and free market forces will result in the spread of a good in a manner equivalent to or better than that which could be achieved by a charity, the charity should invest its efforts and resources elsewhere.

Breaking News

Nicholas Kristof has figured out that Bill and Hillary Clinton are related.

If Hillary Rodham Clinton serves two terms, then for 28 years the presidency will have been held by a Bush or a Clinton. By that point, about 40 percent of Americans would have lived their entire lives under a president from one of these two families.

Wouldn’t that make our democracy seem a little, er, Pakistani?

No. For that we would need a military coup.

I have previously shared my thoughts on "dynasty" and my conclusion,

I personally have some real problems with Hillary Clinton's ascendency, but they aren't about dynasty. With no offense intended, as good as the Democratic slate of candidates looks when contrasted with the Republican slate, is this truly the best we can do? I think not, so perhaps it is time for our nation to spend some time thinking about why those we would truly like to serve as President are turned off of politics, or are unable to get any traction within the major political parties. With no slight intended to Ms. Clinton as compared to anybody else in national politics, if our political system were currently elevating our best and brightest to the leadership positions of our nation we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Our Schools Lag Behind Those In [Insert Asian Country of Choice]

Today, behind the firewall, Nicholas Kristof warns us that our schools lag way behind those in Japan... I mean, China.

But kids in the good schools in Chinese cities are leaving our children in the dust. ... Yet, there isn't any magic to it. One reason Chinese students learn more math and science than Americans is that they work harder at it. They spend twice as many hours studying, in school and out, as Americans.

He also describes the intense pressures that Japane..., er, Chinese students face to succeed in school.

Yet if the Chinese government takes math and science seriously, children and parents do so even more. At Cao Guangbiao elementary school in Shanghai, I asked a third-grade girl, Li Shuyan, her daily schedule. She gets up at 6:30 a.m. and spends the rest of the day studying or practicing her two musical instruments.

So if she gets her work done and has time in the evening, does she watch TV or hang out with friends? "No," she said, "then I review my work and do extra exercises."

A classmate, Jiang Xiuyuan, said that during summer vacation, his father allows him to watch television each evening - for 10 minutes.

The Chinese students get even more driven in high school, as they prepare for the national college entrance exams.

Even more driven? I guess that means no more music lessons, and the end of the ten minute daily television interludes during the summer break? Kristof relates all of this to the U.S.:

I don't think we could replicate the Chinese students' drive even if we wanted to. But there are lessons we can learn - like the need to shorten summer vacations and put far more emphasis on math and science.

Oh, that's helpful.

By now you've figured out that, at least in my opinion, we've heard this all before, back in the 1980's when Japanese schools were described as superior to U.S. schools, with Japanese businesses on the verge of dominating the world. We didn't learn much then, so we won't learn much now. Our more recent education "reforms", such as mandatory homework policies, create more busy work for kids but I have yet to see even the slightest evidence that they improve school performance - is there any? Shortening summer vacations means a number of things - air conditioning buildings in the hottest months of the year (some of which don't even have air conditioning systems installed), paying to keep schools open additional hours, paying teachers to teach additional classes.... One of the reasons for the shrinking U.S. public school academic year is cost-savings.

Putting an emphasis on math and science ? That's not a new theme for Kristof. Yet between the Sebastian "We don't need no stinkin' science" Mallabys of the world, and the fact that we (as a nation) don't really care about maths and sciences (and cutting them from a school's curriculum can also save money), don't count on it.

Just look at another of the latest "school reform" bandwagons - capping funds which can be spent on administration. The astroturf organization which is spearheading that initiative classifies expenses to support the football team as educational - just like classroom instruction. A school library, librarian, library books? Isn't it obvious - administrative expenditures. Keep the football team but cut the library, and you're on the right track for education in today's America.

What if Kristof Wanted To Teach Journalism?

Today, behind the NY Times firewall, Nicholas Kristof offers Teachers Without Pedigrees, a proposal that we should reduce or eliminate teacher certification requirements to increase the pool of candidates for public K-12 education. Kristof doesn't mention accelerated certification programs already available, perhaps because he deems an additional nine to fifteen months of schooling and student teaching to be too much of an impediment to somebody whose interest is more transitory.

Suppose Colin Powell tires of giving $100,000-a-pop speeches and wants to teach high school social studies. Suppose Meryl Streep has a hankering to teach drama.

Alas, they would be "unqualified" for a public school. Elite private schools would snap them up, of course, but public schools that are begging for teachers would have to turn them away because they don't have teacher certification.

Why are we dreaming up these hypotheticals, involving celebrities with no apparent interest in taking over a public school classroom? Why isn't Mr. Kristof describing his own desire to teach, and how he is unable to do so by virtue of his lack of a teaching certificate? Because that's the heart of the issue - the best teachers aren't people we wish were in the classroom due to their celebrity, but are people who want to be in the classroom. Kristof notes,

The other problem is that the quality of teachers is deteriorating, mostly because — fortunately! — women have more career options. A smart and ambitious woman graduating from college in 1970 often ended up as a third-grade teacher; today, she ends up as a surgeon or senator.

So the problem is that most people, given a choice between being a K-12 classroom teacher or a different career, choose a different career? And the solution to this is to make it easier for people who have chosen other career paths to dip their toes into the water of public education, without making any real commitment to that career path?

It's not that I'm enamored with teacher certification programs - I'm not. It's also not that I disagree with the idea that people who do not have teaching certificates should be able to experience what it is like to try to teach in a public school classroom - in fact, I've seen some people who wanted to be teachers find out during student teaching or their first year of teaching that they really don't want to be in a classroom or simply don't have the aptitude for classroom management. I wouldn't mind seeing more students get some classroom experience before they are accepted into public education programs, but suspect that such an initiative might in fact further reduce the pool of graduates from teaching colleges.

Kristof suggests giving principals the option of hiring highly qualified, thoroughly screened, but uncertified teachers:

That's the situation in some of America's most elite private high schools. Phillips Exeter Academy, for example, says that 85 percent of its faculty have advanced degrees but probably only a handful are certified. (Since it is private, it doesn't worry about certification or even keep track of which teachers are certified.)

At Exeter, for example, biology is taught by a former doctor. Japanese is taught by a former businessman who worked in Japan. And a history teacher arrived with no teaching experience but has published five books.

Hoo boy.... We're going to pretend that the experience of Phillips Exeter Academy, with day tuition and fees approaching $30,000 per year, would be shared by public schools? Why not make a comparison to parochial schools, which are also at liberty to hire uncertified teachers, but which often pay less and offer fewer benefits than public schools? Who knows? Maybe somewhere in the Catholic school system there's a former doctor teaching biology classes.

I have some personal experience from "way back when" working as a substitute teacher. (In most public school districts you can serve as a substitute teacher if you have a bachelor's degree, or possibly if you have completed certain undergraduate coursework.) I recall a subsequent law day when I gave a number of presentations in public schools (something that is, by the way, much easier than teaching) followed by a presentation in a Catholic middle school. The difference was striking - well-behaved, well-groomed kids, sitting quietly in their desks? It isn't that their teachers are paid more or are better qualified. It is that the kids' parents have a different attitude toward education, with different overall attitudes both to the teachers and to their own kids, and their school can decline to accept them back (or even expel them) if they fail to comport to expected standards of conduct.

Kick that same concept up to a level where the tuition is higher than most of those Catholic schoolkids' parents were taking home on an annual basis, and you're going to not only have a much more enjoyable teaching environment, but one which can pay teachers very well. Public school teachers aren't lining up to take a cut in pay or benefits to work in a private school, just as Meryl Streep, Colin Powell, and Nicholas Kristof aren't lining up to teach in public school, but I doubt that Exeter has any shortage of highly qualified applicants.

Kristof also mentions a program which places college graduates in inner city classrooms,

One superb initiative for young college graduates is Teach for America, which last year had 17,000 applicants for 2,000 spots teaching in low-income schools. Among those who applied were 12 percent of Yale's senior class and 8 percent of Harvard's and Princeton's.

Sure. They make a two-year commitment to teach in the inner city. With the ability to reject 88% of the applicants the program should have no difficulty selecting applicants who have the necessary interest and aptitude to complete the program. Program participants come in with a new college graduate's energy and enthusiasm and are gone long before they burn out. Teach for America indicates that 60% of those who complete the program remain in education as "teachers, principals, education policy advisors and leaders and staff of education reform organizations", but provides no figure for how many remain in inner city schools.

For Kristof, the essence of teacher qualification isn't training or intelligence - "Maybe it helps to be brilliant and to have studied teaching, but mostly it is personality." So it is his own reflections on his personality which keeps "math geek" Kristof from teaching high school calculus?

You know what? We're not going to get a significantly increased pool of highly qualified teachers (with or without sparkling personalities) without making some changes to our attitudues toward teaching, without being willing to increase teacher pay, and while we continue to drive good teachers out of the profession with standardized testing requirements which drive the fun (and real learning) out of a good classroom.

Looking For Villains In All The Wrong Places

Recently, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column, The Hubris of the Humanities, in which he quite rightly pointed out that the U.S. is losing ground in maths and sciences.

But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It's only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole.

One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.

In this society, which for generations has venerated the high school athlete and demeans studious ("geek", "egghead", "nerd", etc.), who is to blame for this?

The problem isn't just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of ... well, of people like me - and probably you.

Now I admit to having a liberal arts education, which (as you would expect) included extensive study of the natural sciences and math. Kristof conflates the liberal arts with the humanities.

Leaving aside his careless choice of words, I can agree with Kristof's overall argument that our society would benefit from greater scientific literacy. Kristof's examples, though, seem designed to advance his notion that it is experts in the humanities who are somehow at fault for this nation's poor grasp of science:

What do I mean by that? In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it's considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares.

* * *

In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines. A year ago, I wanted to ornament a column with a complex equation, so, as a math ninny myself, I looked around the Times newsroom for anyone who could verify that it was correct. Now you can't turn around in the Times newsroom without bumping into polyglots who come and go talking of Michelangelo. But it took forever to turn up someone confident in his calculus - in the science section.

Apparently, those Times employees confident in their calculus did not include Kristof, hence his need for verification. Which isn't a surprise as, "math ninny" or no, if you don't exercise your calculus skills they become rusty. And Kristof concludes,

But there's an even larger challenge than anti-intellectualism. And that's the skewed intellectualism of those who believe that a person can become sophisticated on a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleavened by statistics or chromosomes. That's the hubris of the humanities.

This isn't the first time that Kristof has invented a soft target at which to aim his barbs. I am wondering - can he identify even one person who believes "that a person can become sophisticated on a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleavened by statistics or chromosomes"? And upon what basis could he possibly suggest that this fictitious faction poses a greater danger to scientific literacy than anti-intellectualism? Perhaps it's all the sports dads suddenly pulling their kids off of the football team to study Monet and Michelangelo.

Kristof perhaps takes his call for scientific literacy beyond what I would deem necessary. I could devote the necessary time to refresh my math, calculus, physics, and other science knowledge and skills, or even to expand them. But realistically, there is not much call for calculus in my daily activities, and when there is I find it more efficient to refresh my memory in relation to the specific need. My knowledge of science and statistics provides a framework which I attempt to use when processing information, even as some of the specifics become hazy. I would like to see our society embrace the maths and sciences as an important part of all levels of education, and to provide both opportunity and encouragement to kids who are inclined toward the maths and sciences.

Internal Consistency?

I recall a few months ago, reading Nicholas Kristof insist that Blue America had to refrain from condescending to Red America. This article summarizes his stance:

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argued in favour of an implicit split in America, saying that the Democrats had "lost touch" with blue-collar voters who were once the backbone of the party.

"One-third of Americans are evangelical Christians and many of them perceive Democrats as often contemptuous of their faith," Kristof wrote. "Frankly, they're often right."

Today, in arguing for more depictions of interracial couples on TV, Kristof argues:

Popular entertainment shapes our culture as well as reflects it, and one breakthrough might come late next year with the possible release of "Emma's War." That's a movie that 20th Century Fox is considering, in which a white woman - Nicole Kidman is being discussed - marries an African. It's great that Hollywood is close to catching up to Shakespeare's "Othello."

Let's hope that Hollywood will finally dare to be as iconoclastic as its audiences. It's been half a century since Brown v. Board of Education led to the integration of American schools, but the breakdown of the barriers of love will be a far more consequential and transformative kind of integration - not least because it's spontaneous and hormonal rather than imposed and legal.

Now, it's not that Kristof doesn't have a point that interracial relationships make TV and movie producers nervous. But isn't this an argument for Hollywood to finish a process of social transformation, and implicit within that argument that it is blue-collar America and the Bob Jones-type evangelicals who need to be brought into the 21st century? Does he really think those segments of society which still get hung up on interracial dating and marriage are going to have an epiphany after seeing a Nicole Kidman movie?

Oh No.... We Must Save The Children

Yesterday, Nicholas Kristof brought us a peculiar editorial in which he argued:

Iraqis are paying a horrendous price for the good intentions of well-meaning conservatives who wanted to liberate them. And now some fuzzy little kittens, who want nothing more from life than lapping milk and having their ears scratched, are seeking a troop withdrawal that would make matters even worse.

Well, not quite. He actually said that it was "some well-meaning liberals", not fuzzy little kittens. But the logic is about the same - some undefined group with no discernible power base is alleged to want something that is not going to happen. And this is a problem because... what? Kristof needed a hook for his columns, and bashing "well-meaning liberals" is easy? (And what would he say of those conservatives who are arguing that we should cut our losses and get out? Well-meaning, or no?)

But the weakness of his analysis doesn't end there. He claims an enormous loss of life among Iraqi civilians as a result of the invasion, arguing,

That's apparently because of insecurity. A doctor in Basra told me last year how physicians and patients alike had had to run for cover when bandits attacked the infectious diseases unit, firing machine guns and throwing hand grenades, so they could steal the air-conditioners. Given those conditions, women are now more likely to give birth at home, so babies and mothers are both more likely to die of "natural" causes.

I haven't read the Lancet article, but let's take Kristof's spin that the deaths are effectively all the result of a security void, and not a direct consequence of warfare. Kristof suggests to us that the solution for a security void is to "stay the course" and... well, at a minimum keep the country from falling apart. Beyond that, Kristof has no apparent notion of what "staying the course" means - he simply predicts a humanitarian disaster with even greater loss of civilian life if we don't stay the proverbial course.

Perhaps Kristof needs to take a harder look at Islamic countries and their internal security situation. There is no question but that prior to the invastion Afghanistan was a failed state, for example, but the Taliban kept order in the streets. (Disagree with its techniques, certainly, but there was order.) That is to say, it is possible that a fragmented Iraq which falls into the hands of various factions of Islamic extremists would be far more secure for the people than the situation we have presently provided. That security would of course come at an enormous price in personal freedom, but if the goal is security police states and totalitarian governments usually have an edge over democracies.

Kristof understandably doesn't want that outcome, but instead of addressing it he pretends it does not exist. I guess, though, that it's easier to present false dichotomies, and criticize an undefined faction of "well-meaning liberals".

Kristof is Perplexed

Poor Nicholas Kristof today declares, "I understand the painful ethical choices of Abdelrahim's family, of Mr. Hassan and of the international aid agencies. But what I can't fathom is our own moral choice, our decision to acquiesce in genocide".

We in America could save kids like Abdelrahim and Muhammad. This wouldn't require troops, just a bit of gumption to declare a no-fly zone, to press our Western allies and nearby Arab and African states, to impose an arms embargo and other targeted sanctions, to push a meaningful U.N. resolution even at the risk of a Chinese veto, and to insist upon the deployment of a larger African force.

Instead, President Bush's policy is to chide Sudan and send aid. That's much better than nothing and has led Sudan to kill fewer children and to kill more humanely: Sudan now mostly allows kids in Darfur like Abdelrahim to die of starvation, instead of heaving them onto bonfires. But fundamentally, U.S. policy seems to be to "manage" the genocide rather than to act decisively to stop it.

Well, Nicholas, if you can convince Karl Rove how doing more will translate into votes for Bush (and not for Kerry), perhaps Bush will have a moral awakening.

Kristof's Cure for Negative Campaigning

Boy, why didn't anybody else think of this?

The only hope for stopping the mudslinging is if well-meaning people try to police their own side.

Now that such a brilliant idea has been presented, certainly both sides will actively police against distortions of the record and muckraking in their own ads, and the ads of their supporters, and will actively condemn any misrepresentation. After all, it is better to lose an election than to win dishonorably.

Right?