Throughout recorded history, when human kind has come together to form a society, it has also created a government to govern these interactions. The reason for this is obvious. When people get together, crime, disease, and scarcity will plague human interactions and make large gatherings problematic. Governments exist, first and foremost, to protect the populace from malignant external incursions, protect the populace from the deprivations of its own citizens and to create the infrastructure that is required for large quantities of people to live together as healthily as possible. Society benefits from this governing because when humans work together, they accomplish great things. Everyone's lives benefit from human efforts working in concert for the common good.
Need proof? Think of all the wonders of the world. None of them would have been possible without a large governing body overseeing the huge masses of humanity required to create these masterpieces. In order to organize humanity, you need a group of people whose roll it is to oversee them. Someone needs to plan. This general thesis is the argument most people have against a purely libertarian or anarchic state. It is hard to see all the benefits of an organized modern society and not claim that humanity has benefited from the oversight of government.
But now let's look back at those great masterpieces, the wonders of the world. While they were the end result of a great mobilization of humanity made possible by government, they were not created without significant losses of life and other opportunity costs. Take the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was created using slave labor by the Pharaoh. It is not hard to think that Egyptian society of the time would have benefited more if all that effort was put into projects that benefited all of society. So despite that it is now a major tourist attraction and bringing in a huge amount of money to Egypt (well, between civil wars and unrest it does. Once Egypt figures out its government, it will no doubt become a major tourism draw once again) it is hard to argue that the Egyptian populace of the time benefited from its creation. You can say similar things about the Great Wall of China. While it was created with a noble thought in mind, namely keeping the Mongols and other western barbarians out of China (at a time in history when incursions involved murder, rape, theft and arson), it also cost countless human lives to make and failed in its primary purpose. After all, China was eventually conquered by the Mongols and forced to pay tribute to the mongol empire for centuries.
So at what point does a government move from a net positive to a society, to a net negative? This is a complex question and largely depends on what you view the ultimate purpose of government is. I tend to believe that a government that governs least governs best, but I realize there is a large contingent of humanity that wants government to take a more totalitarian roll and run all aspects of human life for the benefit of society. The problem here is that government, while great at organizing people to work for the common good, has historically been very bad at identifying what is in the common good, and terrible at selecting rulers who are actually interested in the common good instead of personal enrichment. Again, think of the Pyramid of Giza and the Great Wall of China.
I write all of the above as a prelude to my next observation. I believe that the US government in particular, though it is certainly not alone (I am looking at you Europe) have transitioned from net positive to net negatives for the societies they govern. Now don't get me wrong, I am not advocating the overthrow of any government. But I would like to see it reformed to better help the populace as a whole.
But lets not get ahead of ourselves. Why do I think government has become a net drag on society? The answers lie in our current economic malaise. We are currently dealing with the 4th or 5th year of a recession that started when the sub-prime real estate market collapsed. This caused property values to decline rapidly. Banks at the time were heavily invested in real estate securities, so this huge decline in value pummeled the stock market and the value of most banks' portfolio of assets. For some financial companies (Lehman Brothers in particular), this drop in value triggered margin calls on their loan agreements which they couldn't pay because their assets were suddenly illiquid and losing value rapidly. The fed then stepped in, bailed out the banks, preventing large scale failures and bank runs. This was government working properly to avoid a disaster.
The problem is that the above disaster was the fault of government in the first place. You see, financial panics caused by real estate collapses are nothing new. The panic in the 1890s, the great depression, and the savings and loan fiascoes all had at least partial roots in real estate crashes. The problem was that after years of economic success, the government relaxed lending standards under the guise of making home ownership more affordable to the less credit worthy, they gutted depression era protections from economic speculation (Glass Steagall), and they allowed easy money policies that further inflated the real estate asset bubble. The result was when property values began to falter due to lack of demand and mortgage rates ticking upwards (from option arms rates resetting), defaults skyrocketed and property values fell. Had better lending standards been in place, had banks not been allowed to speculate on real estate securities (Glass Steagall), and had the government had a less permissive monetary policy, this likely could have been avoided.
When you couple our current economic woes, with what we have been learning about the modern police state we live in. I am referring here to the NSA PRISM program (read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29 ) and our multiple costly wars in foreign countries with questionable strategic significance, it is easy to see how our government has become more parasitic than symbiotic (i.e. it is hurting us more than it is helping). To this I would also add the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd Frank Act and Sarbanes Oxley, but these assertions are likely more contentious to some readers and are better dealt with on an individual basis in separate posts. And while the government has been spending time on these projects, our local infrastructure crumbles, our local governments' tax revenues dwindle (further cutting funds to infrastructure) and our local civil institutions whither. In fact the only area of America to not suffer from the depression was the Federal Government and the greater DC metropolitan area. The government continues to raise taxes while providing worse and worse service to its citizens and the only people benefitting are in the government itself.
When an entity lives off another (in this case society) and benefits at the expense of the host, it is a parasite. And without drastic reform to our federal government, future prosperity will be difficult to achieve. It is time we wean ourselves off the teat of big government and start cutting budgets for programs that do more harm than good.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Don't Let the Unemployment Rate Fool You...
Today I want to talk about the unemployment rate and how it is used to pull the wool over your eyes in regards to the effects of the current recession.
As I have discussed in previous posts, the current recession started around 6 years ago when the housing bubble burst, nearly causing a catastrophic meltdown of the financial system. The end result was that US government stepped in and very selectively doled out aid to Wall Street and to specific non-investment, non-bank institutions to help keep our financial house of cards from completely collapsing. Europe, following in our footsteps in both falling into recession and working to cure it, did much the same thing, but on a national level, offering up huge loans for austerity (i.e. cutting the budget to meet certain deficit targets).
Since then, the nation and the world, has been watching unemployment rates with the frenzied fascination of someone waiting for a bomb to be defused. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is a very misleading measure of the health of the labor economy. The reason? How it's calculated. Most people believe that the official unemployment rate is calculated based on the number of working aged adults not currently employed, but they are wrong. That is actually the labor participation rate (Note: labor participation rate is the rate of employment among working aged adults expressed in percent. But since there are only two option, employed or not, it also reports its opposite, the number not employed). The unemployment rate is based on a survey of 60,000 US families and involves more complex math and fudging. It determines the number of people currently employed in those families, those currently actively seeking work based on a set of narrow criteria, and those that are not in the labor force (who are not counted for purposes of the unemployment rate). It then extrapolates this out to the entire country and then weights the answers (hence my use of the word fudging). But don't take my word for it, read the description of it from the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
So this brings us back to my initial point, how is this used to pull the wool over our eyes. The answer is in the two statistics themselves. While unemployment rates peeked in 2009 and have been steadily decreasing, the labor participation rate is still more or less on the decline. http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 (unemployment rate) http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 (labor participation rate). In fact, labor participation rates have been on a fairly continuous decline since the tech bubble burst around the year 2001 (which you can see by adjusting the dates shown in the above link). Why are the two different? Because unemployment only includes those people who fit the narrow definition of actively seeking work. As you stay unemployed, you move from the actively seeking work category into the "discouraged worker" category and cease to be counted. So why do we focus so much on the unemployment rate and not on labor participation? Supposedly we do this because it focuses on those actively seeking work and thus is a more fair measure of the economic activity of the nation. But I think the reality is that the government and the media focus on this rate because it is much more likely to improve over time (as workers get moved into the non-counted discouraged worker category). After all, if you focus on labor participation, then it looks like the real estate bubble was just a plateau in the continued failure of the American economy. Politicians seeking re-election don't like that because it makes them look incompetent and news papers don't like it because doom and gloom doesn't sell papers, get viewers or help them with advertising revenue. So they together hype the rosier picture.
The reality though is something else. We have record low levels of labor participation in this country not seen since before the 80's boom and women entering the work place. And if the last time we saw participation this low was back then, it means that now, with most women of working age working, we are in much more dire financial straits than we were then. I.E. most of those women in the past were not employed and not seeking a job by choice, not because of the terrible economy (and the stagflation of the 70's was a terrible economy). Now we have more people looking, not finding and being moved into the "discouraged worker" camp slowly bringing unemployment rates down. Doesn't sound as nice as when the government or the papers trumpet the unemployment rates' decline does it?
So don't let the unemployment rate fool you, we are still in dire financial straits. Until we see steady improvement in the labor participation rate, it meas most of the unemployment declines came from people "leaving the work force".
As I have discussed in previous posts, the current recession started around 6 years ago when the housing bubble burst, nearly causing a catastrophic meltdown of the financial system. The end result was that US government stepped in and very selectively doled out aid to Wall Street and to specific non-investment, non-bank institutions to help keep our financial house of cards from completely collapsing. Europe, following in our footsteps in both falling into recession and working to cure it, did much the same thing, but on a national level, offering up huge loans for austerity (i.e. cutting the budget to meet certain deficit targets).
Since then, the nation and the world, has been watching unemployment rates with the frenzied fascination of someone waiting for a bomb to be defused. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is a very misleading measure of the health of the labor economy. The reason? How it's calculated. Most people believe that the official unemployment rate is calculated based on the number of working aged adults not currently employed, but they are wrong. That is actually the labor participation rate (Note: labor participation rate is the rate of employment among working aged adults expressed in percent. But since there are only two option, employed or not, it also reports its opposite, the number not employed). The unemployment rate is based on a survey of 60,000 US families and involves more complex math and fudging. It determines the number of people currently employed in those families, those currently actively seeking work based on a set of narrow criteria, and those that are not in the labor force (who are not counted for purposes of the unemployment rate). It then extrapolates this out to the entire country and then weights the answers (hence my use of the word fudging). But don't take my word for it, read the description of it from the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
So this brings us back to my initial point, how is this used to pull the wool over our eyes. The answer is in the two statistics themselves. While unemployment rates peeked in 2009 and have been steadily decreasing, the labor participation rate is still more or less on the decline. http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 (unemployment rate) http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 (labor participation rate). In fact, labor participation rates have been on a fairly continuous decline since the tech bubble burst around the year 2001 (which you can see by adjusting the dates shown in the above link). Why are the two different? Because unemployment only includes those people who fit the narrow definition of actively seeking work. As you stay unemployed, you move from the actively seeking work category into the "discouraged worker" category and cease to be counted. So why do we focus so much on the unemployment rate and not on labor participation? Supposedly we do this because it focuses on those actively seeking work and thus is a more fair measure of the economic activity of the nation. But I think the reality is that the government and the media focus on this rate because it is much more likely to improve over time (as workers get moved into the non-counted discouraged worker category). After all, if you focus on labor participation, then it looks like the real estate bubble was just a plateau in the continued failure of the American economy. Politicians seeking re-election don't like that because it makes them look incompetent and news papers don't like it because doom and gloom doesn't sell papers, get viewers or help them with advertising revenue. So they together hype the rosier picture.
The reality though is something else. We have record low levels of labor participation in this country not seen since before the 80's boom and women entering the work place. And if the last time we saw participation this low was back then, it means that now, with most women of working age working, we are in much more dire financial straits than we were then. I.E. most of those women in the past were not employed and not seeking a job by choice, not because of the terrible economy (and the stagflation of the 70's was a terrible economy). Now we have more people looking, not finding and being moved into the "discouraged worker" camp slowly bringing unemployment rates down. Doesn't sound as nice as when the government or the papers trumpet the unemployment rates' decline does it?
So don't let the unemployment rate fool you, we are still in dire financial straits. Until we see steady improvement in the labor participation rate, it meas most of the unemployment declines came from people "leaving the work force".
Friday, June 21, 2013
The Value of Privacy
In recent weeks we have been re-alerted to a most scandalizing fact, namely that the NSA and other US intelligence agencies have been spying on all internet and cell phone communications on an unprecedented level. I say re-alerted because we were first made aware of this in May of 2006 when USA Today reported on the NSA building a huge database for compiling phone records. There is a long discussion of the aftermath of these revelations here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy . But the reality is that this is nothing new. Our government, despite getting its hand slapped previously for warrant-less searches of wireless communications, has expanded the program to include all internet communications as well. Given the strictures of the 4th amendment, many are arguing that this is a clear violation of our constitutional rights. I will not argue with them, at least not on theory. However, it is worth pointing out that the Obama administration and the intelligence community have included such legal safeguards as they think are needed to pass constitutional scrutiny. Likely that argument will not be settled until it is in front of the US Supreme Court. But ignoring the pure legal arguments, it is hard to square our nation's stated values of liberty, freedom of speech and right to privacy with the actions of our government.
On the other side of the coin, I understand where the government is coming from. Since September 11th 2001, we as a nation have been made more alert to the dangers posed by terrorists, both foreign and domestic. The US public has been clamoring for the intelligence community to improve our safety in this new and dangerous world. In intelligence work, data is key, and when most of the world's internet communications come through US hubs, gathering that data was easy and convenient. The belief that if we just had more information that we could prevent the next attack drove the community to use questionable means to increase the amount of data they could analyze. It's easy to sympathize with them, especially with civilian lives on the line.
The problem with this theory is that, in many previous cases of terrorism, we already had the tools we needed to prevent disaster. What we lacked was the competence to interpret that data correctly and prevent the attacks. Take Sept. 11th, the Bush administration had received intelligence about Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden and their readiness to attack the USA. Had these warnings been heeded, we may well have avoided the disaster that occurred. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html . More recently, the intelligence community ignored Russian warnings about the Tsarnaev brothers and how they may be radicalizing. These are the brothers who then perpetuated the Boston Marathon bombings. http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/06/fbi-knew-earlier-of-boston-bombing-suspect-166313.html . Two of the largest attacks in recent memory on US soil were both preceded with specific intelligence warnings to the government of the risk of a terrorist attack; intelligence that was ignored. More damningly, this was intelligence gathered through traditional means. If we lacked the competence to interpret this data properly, it is easily imagined that we lack the competence to mine the NSA program properly as well.
So where does this leave us? We have a multi-billion dollar spying program that is manned by the same incompetent people who failed to heed traditional warnings of previous attacks. A spying program that tramples on the world's privacy rights and freedoms which likely will not help us prevent the next attack (if the Boston Marathon bombings are predictive). I can't help but think that our government would have been a lot better off hiring more analysts to mine traditional intelligence than spending billions of dollars on a computer data warehouse. But that is the modern state of our technocratic government. It thinks it is a lot smarter, and a lot more competent, than it actually is. It is now up to the courts to interpret its constitutionality, and the voters to let their representatives know their displeasure.
On the other side of the coin, I understand where the government is coming from. Since September 11th 2001, we as a nation have been made more alert to the dangers posed by terrorists, both foreign and domestic. The US public has been clamoring for the intelligence community to improve our safety in this new and dangerous world. In intelligence work, data is key, and when most of the world's internet communications come through US hubs, gathering that data was easy and convenient. The belief that if we just had more information that we could prevent the next attack drove the community to use questionable means to increase the amount of data they could analyze. It's easy to sympathize with them, especially with civilian lives on the line.
The problem with this theory is that, in many previous cases of terrorism, we already had the tools we needed to prevent disaster. What we lacked was the competence to interpret that data correctly and prevent the attacks. Take Sept. 11th, the Bush administration had received intelligence about Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden and their readiness to attack the USA. Had these warnings been heeded, we may well have avoided the disaster that occurred. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html . More recently, the intelligence community ignored Russian warnings about the Tsarnaev brothers and how they may be radicalizing. These are the brothers who then perpetuated the Boston Marathon bombings. http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/06/fbi-knew-earlier-of-boston-bombing-suspect-166313.html . Two of the largest attacks in recent memory on US soil were both preceded with specific intelligence warnings to the government of the risk of a terrorist attack; intelligence that was ignored. More damningly, this was intelligence gathered through traditional means. If we lacked the competence to interpret this data properly, it is easily imagined that we lack the competence to mine the NSA program properly as well.
So where does this leave us? We have a multi-billion dollar spying program that is manned by the same incompetent people who failed to heed traditional warnings of previous attacks. A spying program that tramples on the world's privacy rights and freedoms which likely will not help us prevent the next attack (if the Boston Marathon bombings are predictive). I can't help but think that our government would have been a lot better off hiring more analysts to mine traditional intelligence than spending billions of dollars on a computer data warehouse. But that is the modern state of our technocratic government. It thinks it is a lot smarter, and a lot more competent, than it actually is. It is now up to the courts to interpret its constitutionality, and the voters to let their representatives know their displeasure.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Why I am not a Scientist, Psychiatrist or Doctor
Sorry about the hiatus, I had a vacation and then some job related things to take care of. Real life intrudes sometimes...
So, without further adieu, here is why I am not a scientist....
When I was graduating from high school, I got it into my head that I should be an MD/PHD psychiatrist. This came from a variety of misconceptions that I had at the time, primarily that learning psychology would give me some sort of insight into the human mind and how people think about things. I also thought it would be a good way to spend my life talking to people and helping them work through the emotional traumas and troubles of their lives. My vision of psychiatry was of a Freudian doctor sitting in a big comfy leather chair in a wood paneled office talking to someone who was lying on a couch discussing their inner turmoils. Unfortunately, modern psychiatry has little to do with traditional therapy techniques. Instead it mostly involves popping people full of pills until they either stop complaining or actually believe you have cured their mental problems.
Now, you can probably tell from the end of the above paragraph that I do not hold modern psychiatry in much esteem. While this is true, I do wish to point out that there are quite a few people whose psychological conditions really are due to neurotransmitter imbalances that can be successfully treated with psychotropic drugs. Unfortunately, these people make up an incredibly small proportion of those seeking help from psychiatrists. Most people are simply depressed due to the modern world and their lives not living up to their ambitions, hopes and dreams and their inability to accept the life they have. Most of these people would likely be better served by not experimenting with drugs but instead working through their problems and analyzing the root causes of their psychological trauma. Unfortunately, years of therapy with a doctor is not cost efficient from an insurance perspective, so instead the grand tradition of psychiatry has been reduced to a happy pill dispensary. A way point between a troubled mind and the pharmacist.
But I digress, I entered college honestly thinking that I would go pre-med and major in psych. In my first year I took intro to psych, chemistry and a class called brain and behavior. Much to my horror, I found the focus of both psych courses to be neurology. Instead of learning about brain development, I was memorizing the taxonomy of a neuron and learning who was the first person to shove electric probes in a mouse's head and have it actually do something other than killing the mouse. It was an incredible let down to say the least. Moreover, in chemistry I found myself confused in lectures and bored in labs. The end result was that I was either obsessively reviewing notes and reading assignments, or sitting in a lab waiting for a solution to properly mix. In labs I would bide my time squirting liquids onto the hot plate to see them sizzle and pop. This included flammable liquids, mostly because they had the most satisfying reactions. The end result of all of this was that my grades were suffering and I had completely burnt out on my chosen collegiate course of study by the middle of the second semester of my first year.
After some personal issues, and some other unrelated problems, I ended up switching majors into a completely unrelated area of academia. Fortunately, I was much more engaged there and my grades improved markedly. In hind sight, my blunder from the very get go was a profound lack of knowledge about myself. I do not have the attention span to watch a chemical reaction slowly occur over a three hour lab. I do not have the patience to sit down and properly balance a chemical equation or memorize all the parts of the body and their Latin names. My mind requires more active thought and discussion. The discussion, and the desire to help people was what made me want to be a psychiatrist. It was the science required to get there that convinced me this was a bad idea. This is why I am not a scientist, psychiatrist or doctor. But it is why I respect the people with the mental discipline and fortitude to put up with all the years of tedium required to follow one of these three professions.
So, without further adieu, here is why I am not a scientist....
When I was graduating from high school, I got it into my head that I should be an MD/PHD psychiatrist. This came from a variety of misconceptions that I had at the time, primarily that learning psychology would give me some sort of insight into the human mind and how people think about things. I also thought it would be a good way to spend my life talking to people and helping them work through the emotional traumas and troubles of their lives. My vision of psychiatry was of a Freudian doctor sitting in a big comfy leather chair in a wood paneled office talking to someone who was lying on a couch discussing their inner turmoils. Unfortunately, modern psychiatry has little to do with traditional therapy techniques. Instead it mostly involves popping people full of pills until they either stop complaining or actually believe you have cured their mental problems.
Now, you can probably tell from the end of the above paragraph that I do not hold modern psychiatry in much esteem. While this is true, I do wish to point out that there are quite a few people whose psychological conditions really are due to neurotransmitter imbalances that can be successfully treated with psychotropic drugs. Unfortunately, these people make up an incredibly small proportion of those seeking help from psychiatrists. Most people are simply depressed due to the modern world and their lives not living up to their ambitions, hopes and dreams and their inability to accept the life they have. Most of these people would likely be better served by not experimenting with drugs but instead working through their problems and analyzing the root causes of their psychological trauma. Unfortunately, years of therapy with a doctor is not cost efficient from an insurance perspective, so instead the grand tradition of psychiatry has been reduced to a happy pill dispensary. A way point between a troubled mind and the pharmacist.
But I digress, I entered college honestly thinking that I would go pre-med and major in psych. In my first year I took intro to psych, chemistry and a class called brain and behavior. Much to my horror, I found the focus of both psych courses to be neurology. Instead of learning about brain development, I was memorizing the taxonomy of a neuron and learning who was the first person to shove electric probes in a mouse's head and have it actually do something other than killing the mouse. It was an incredible let down to say the least. Moreover, in chemistry I found myself confused in lectures and bored in labs. The end result was that I was either obsessively reviewing notes and reading assignments, or sitting in a lab waiting for a solution to properly mix. In labs I would bide my time squirting liquids onto the hot plate to see them sizzle and pop. This included flammable liquids, mostly because they had the most satisfying reactions. The end result of all of this was that my grades were suffering and I had completely burnt out on my chosen collegiate course of study by the middle of the second semester of my first year.
After some personal issues, and some other unrelated problems, I ended up switching majors into a completely unrelated area of academia. Fortunately, I was much more engaged there and my grades improved markedly. In hind sight, my blunder from the very get go was a profound lack of knowledge about myself. I do not have the attention span to watch a chemical reaction slowly occur over a three hour lab. I do not have the patience to sit down and properly balance a chemical equation or memorize all the parts of the body and their Latin names. My mind requires more active thought and discussion. The discussion, and the desire to help people was what made me want to be a psychiatrist. It was the science required to get there that convinced me this was a bad idea. This is why I am not a scientist, psychiatrist or doctor. But it is why I respect the people with the mental discipline and fortitude to put up with all the years of tedium required to follow one of these three professions.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Why Teachers are Important
Recently I have become aware of a new trend, college classes on video. The idea behind this is that a small local school can save money by firing their professors and simply buying video courses taught by professors. The students still get lectures and the school saves on the cost of hiring a live person. Win win right?
The problem here is that it assumes that the sole reason people go to school is to hear lectures. In fact, people pay to go to college to learn. These two concepts get confused because, in college, most courses are taught via lecture. Thus it seems to be an easy substitute to replace professors with video. The truth is that lectures are only part of why students go to college and pay such a high premium to do so. While it is true that 100 level courses are largely lecture, text book reading and memorization based. As a student progresses into higher level courses, class sizes get smaller and training becomes much more interactive. Classic techniques such as the Socratic method, thought experiments, lab work, and many others serve to teach students to think on their feet, apply the knowledge they have learned and learn how to interact with people. To reduce education to simple video lectures and memorization for tests misses half the reason students go to college. Learning is more than simple memorization, and to reduce it to such is a disservice to students.
A good example of this appears in the work of Charles Dickens. Much to my embarrassment I can't remember which book. But it's an indictment of the pure memorization education system. Essentially a teacher asks a student what a horse is. The student replies from wrote memorization "a four footed ruminating mammal." Then the teacher points outside to a horse pulling a cart and asks the child what it is. The child doesn't know despite the fact he was just asked to define it. The reason being that despite memorizing the correct answer the kid had no practical experience with a horse, nor even knew what one looked like. In this simple anecdote Dickens showed all the short comings of relying solely on memorization to teach students. Were the lecture the student was watching a taped lecture, he would not have had that interaction with the professor. He would have continued in his ignorance despite having the correct answer to the question. In short, the child would have continued on in his ignorance.
Also, from a practical matter, college costs a ton of money. State schools now charge in excess of $20,000 a year just for a student to take classes. Private college can cost $60,000 a year. More over, the value of a college education has never been more questioned. With record unemployment after the financial melt down of 2007 and 2008, experience has become more marketable than a degree. College kids now frequently graduate hugely in debt and end up not being able to find professional level jobs. So they are forced to live at home with their parents, work low level jobs part time and barely get by. For a school to reduce the education to merely watching movies seems to further cheapen the value of the education received. It becomes much harder for a working class family to justify the cost when there is no payoff in either education or in the job market. Instead of 4 or more years invested in a future, it is four or more years and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars wasted.
For a degree to have any meaning, the student must both have learned a lot of knowledge, and know how to apply it practically in the modern world. Reducing school to filmed lectures and memorization marginalizes the latter half of this equation. Were I still a student, I would think twice before going into debt to essentially watch a series of videos and have my grade determined solely by a few online computer graded tests. You don't pay for the lecture, you pay to interact with experienced college professors who are in the upper echelons of their fields. Schools should think twice before removing professors from their educational equation, because they may just find that they will no longer have customers.
The problem here is that it assumes that the sole reason people go to school is to hear lectures. In fact, people pay to go to college to learn. These two concepts get confused because, in college, most courses are taught via lecture. Thus it seems to be an easy substitute to replace professors with video. The truth is that lectures are only part of why students go to college and pay such a high premium to do so. While it is true that 100 level courses are largely lecture, text book reading and memorization based. As a student progresses into higher level courses, class sizes get smaller and training becomes much more interactive. Classic techniques such as the Socratic method, thought experiments, lab work, and many others serve to teach students to think on their feet, apply the knowledge they have learned and learn how to interact with people. To reduce education to simple video lectures and memorization for tests misses half the reason students go to college. Learning is more than simple memorization, and to reduce it to such is a disservice to students.
A good example of this appears in the work of Charles Dickens. Much to my embarrassment I can't remember which book. But it's an indictment of the pure memorization education system. Essentially a teacher asks a student what a horse is. The student replies from wrote memorization "a four footed ruminating mammal." Then the teacher points outside to a horse pulling a cart and asks the child what it is. The child doesn't know despite the fact he was just asked to define it. The reason being that despite memorizing the correct answer the kid had no practical experience with a horse, nor even knew what one looked like. In this simple anecdote Dickens showed all the short comings of relying solely on memorization to teach students. Were the lecture the student was watching a taped lecture, he would not have had that interaction with the professor. He would have continued in his ignorance despite having the correct answer to the question. In short, the child would have continued on in his ignorance.
Also, from a practical matter, college costs a ton of money. State schools now charge in excess of $20,000 a year just for a student to take classes. Private college can cost $60,000 a year. More over, the value of a college education has never been more questioned. With record unemployment after the financial melt down of 2007 and 2008, experience has become more marketable than a degree. College kids now frequently graduate hugely in debt and end up not being able to find professional level jobs. So they are forced to live at home with their parents, work low level jobs part time and barely get by. For a school to reduce the education to merely watching movies seems to further cheapen the value of the education received. It becomes much harder for a working class family to justify the cost when there is no payoff in either education or in the job market. Instead of 4 or more years invested in a future, it is four or more years and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars wasted.
For a degree to have any meaning, the student must both have learned a lot of knowledge, and know how to apply it practically in the modern world. Reducing school to filmed lectures and memorization marginalizes the latter half of this equation. Were I still a student, I would think twice before going into debt to essentially watch a series of videos and have my grade determined solely by a few online computer graded tests. You don't pay for the lecture, you pay to interact with experienced college professors who are in the upper echelons of their fields. Schools should think twice before removing professors from their educational equation, because they may just find that they will no longer have customers.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Deifying the 50's is Incredibly Stupid
One of the most persistent obfuscations in American politics is the continued misrepresentation of the historical phenomenon that lead to the economic and social booms of the 1950's and 60's. Republicans look back on that era and laud the stable family structure, wholesome family values and relative success of the economy. Democrats look back at the social activism, the high tax rates and powerful government and rhapsodize. Both parties refer to this era for their current political purposes and appeal to our success as a nation back then as some sort of proof of concept. The problem is that both views mischaracterize the era. This makes their analogies at best unpersuasive, at worst, down right misleading.
So let us harken back to the America of the 50's. It was a time of great prosperity, at least for white America. For blacks and immigrants from other countries, it was still a very unfriendly place. The civil rights movement was in full swing though. Martin Luther King, Jr. was advocating for minority and black rights and white America was finally taking notice and allowing the underclasses the freedom to join in the prosperity of white America. But such social progress was fitful and was often times underscored by violence. Also, America was indeed prospering economically, but the reason for this has as much to do with the end of World War II than it did any virtue of the politics of the era. After all, at the end of World War II, Europe was a bombed out mess, Japan had been nuked, and the cold war between the two largest economies that were not destroyed by the war (the USA and the USSR) was just heating up. This meant that, in the western world, only the USA was left as a provider and manufacturer of goods for a rapidly rebuilding and healing Europe. Once the 60's were over and Europe and Japan were beginning to reach parity with the USA in manufacturing and business, the economy tanked. There were a variety of reasons, the 1973 oil crisis, the failure of the Bretton Woods method of monetary management; but overlooked among these reasons usually is the fact that the USA suddenly had competition from the rest of the world in manufacturing. This competition put strong downward pressure on wages. Manufacturers started to fail all over the USA, unable to compete with the new competition from abroad. It was not till the Reagan era and the Thatcher era that the old system was junked, that taxes were lowered, that capital markets were opened up, that the economy really turned around.
So now let us deal with the Republican's vision of the 50's. As I said above, they laud the 50's for its stable families, prosperity and family values. But as I point out above, this safety and stability only existed if you were white (and since most Republicans are white, it gives them a skewed perspective on events). Also worth noting was the divorce system of that era was a fault based system. You had to have a real demonstrable reason to divorce someone, not liking the person anymore just wouldn't cut the mustard. While courts would rarely force two people to stay together if they no longer wanted to, they did not make it easy for them either. The end result is that, under the veneer of the happy family and lower divorce rate, was a seedier reality. Realities like couples staying together because they couldn't afford a lawyer to gin up a proper at fault reason for them to divorce, or spousal abuse and spousal rapes going unreported because a paternalistic society tended to ignore the complaints made by women. The family may have looked happy from the outside, but the reality was often much grimmer. Regardless, holding the 50's up as some paragon of family values misses the point entirely. The society of the time was just very good at hiding its problems.
The Democrats' view of this era is equally specious. They laud the powerful unions, the high tax rates on the rich and the prosperity of the nation at that time. Presumably, they use it as a model for their current tax and spend agenda. What they ignore is that it was only because of the unique properties of that era that expensive labor, high taxes and unionization didn't bankrupt the nation. As I said above, after WWII, the USA was the only first world nation (other than the USSR) that still had a manufacturing base and healthy economy. The result was that we provided the goods that allowed Europe and Japan to rebuild. Once they had rebuilt, and our industries had to compete on the open market, many of them failed. When they failed, the confiscatory tax rates on the wealthy overly burdened the economy and slowed our recovery. The reality was then, and still is now, that high taxes, organized labor and statist policies bankrupt the nation and make our products uncompetitive on the world market. They only were able to flourish because we had no competition. A reality that no longer exists.
So, in short, let us stop harkening back to the 50's as some sort of model for modern America. Except as a cautionary tale, it has absolutely no relevance on current political and economic problems. Also, do not let yourself be convinced by references to the 50's and the ensuing arguments from analogy to it. Arguments by analogy are formal logic fallacies and the reality of the 50's renders the comparison unpersuasive (even if you accept arguments by analogy as persuasive).
So let us harken back to the America of the 50's. It was a time of great prosperity, at least for white America. For blacks and immigrants from other countries, it was still a very unfriendly place. The civil rights movement was in full swing though. Martin Luther King, Jr. was advocating for minority and black rights and white America was finally taking notice and allowing the underclasses the freedom to join in the prosperity of white America. But such social progress was fitful and was often times underscored by violence. Also, America was indeed prospering economically, but the reason for this has as much to do with the end of World War II than it did any virtue of the politics of the era. After all, at the end of World War II, Europe was a bombed out mess, Japan had been nuked, and the cold war between the two largest economies that were not destroyed by the war (the USA and the USSR) was just heating up. This meant that, in the western world, only the USA was left as a provider and manufacturer of goods for a rapidly rebuilding and healing Europe. Once the 60's were over and Europe and Japan were beginning to reach parity with the USA in manufacturing and business, the economy tanked. There were a variety of reasons, the 1973 oil crisis, the failure of the Bretton Woods method of monetary management; but overlooked among these reasons usually is the fact that the USA suddenly had competition from the rest of the world in manufacturing. This competition put strong downward pressure on wages. Manufacturers started to fail all over the USA, unable to compete with the new competition from abroad. It was not till the Reagan era and the Thatcher era that the old system was junked, that taxes were lowered, that capital markets were opened up, that the economy really turned around.
So now let us deal with the Republican's vision of the 50's. As I said above, they laud the 50's for its stable families, prosperity and family values. But as I point out above, this safety and stability only existed if you were white (and since most Republicans are white, it gives them a skewed perspective on events). Also worth noting was the divorce system of that era was a fault based system. You had to have a real demonstrable reason to divorce someone, not liking the person anymore just wouldn't cut the mustard. While courts would rarely force two people to stay together if they no longer wanted to, they did not make it easy for them either. The end result is that, under the veneer of the happy family and lower divorce rate, was a seedier reality. Realities like couples staying together because they couldn't afford a lawyer to gin up a proper at fault reason for them to divorce, or spousal abuse and spousal rapes going unreported because a paternalistic society tended to ignore the complaints made by women. The family may have looked happy from the outside, but the reality was often much grimmer. Regardless, holding the 50's up as some paragon of family values misses the point entirely. The society of the time was just very good at hiding its problems.
The Democrats' view of this era is equally specious. They laud the powerful unions, the high tax rates on the rich and the prosperity of the nation at that time. Presumably, they use it as a model for their current tax and spend agenda. What they ignore is that it was only because of the unique properties of that era that expensive labor, high taxes and unionization didn't bankrupt the nation. As I said above, after WWII, the USA was the only first world nation (other than the USSR) that still had a manufacturing base and healthy economy. The result was that we provided the goods that allowed Europe and Japan to rebuild. Once they had rebuilt, and our industries had to compete on the open market, many of them failed. When they failed, the confiscatory tax rates on the wealthy overly burdened the economy and slowed our recovery. The reality was then, and still is now, that high taxes, organized labor and statist policies bankrupt the nation and make our products uncompetitive on the world market. They only were able to flourish because we had no competition. A reality that no longer exists.
So, in short, let us stop harkening back to the 50's as some sort of model for modern America. Except as a cautionary tale, it has absolutely no relevance on current political and economic problems. Also, do not let yourself be convinced by references to the 50's and the ensuing arguments from analogy to it. Arguments by analogy are formal logic fallacies and the reality of the 50's renders the comparison unpersuasive (even if you accept arguments by analogy as persuasive).
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Thatcher, and the Beauty of Smaller Government
This week a legend in British Politics passed away. Margaret Thatcher died on April 8th from a stroke after a long decline in health that limited her public appearances in the last years of her life. Perhaps second only to Winston Churchill in modern British Politics, Mrs. Thatcher's influence and impact is unquestionable. She took office in 1979, during a time of great political unrest in Britain. Unions had taken over, the top tax rate was a confiscatory 83%, inflation had reached double digits, public expenditures were 42% of British GDP and the British government accounted for 30% of the work force. The previous two Labour governments lead By Messrs. Heath and Wilson had tipped political power so far towards the unions that the popular consensus of the time was that Britain was ungovernable.
To right the proverbial sinking ship, Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions, lowered taxes (from the above mentioned 83% to 40%), privatized loss leading government run industries and tightly controlled the monetary supply to battle inflation. Her actions likely saved Britain from bankruptcy, and certainly turned the economy around. Under her care, Britain moved from being the 6th largest world economy to 4th largest; and this during a time when most economies were expanding (in most cases, because they followed a similar small government approach).
While this is interesting from a historical perspective, it serves as a good example and a good reminder to current world governments that the path to economic expansion is well known. We may live in different times than Mrs. Thatcher governed, but there are certain undeniable parallels. First, governments have expanded markedly, so has government debt, and the entire banking system has become a ward of the various states. Unions' pay packages, benefits and pensions have grown beyond what most Americans earn in the free market. More over, those pensions are beginning to bankrupt state governments (at least here in America). Instead of raising taxes, we have resorted to deficit spending and printing money to finance the excesses of our governments. This has lead us to a period of persistent unemployment, the lowest labor participation rate since 1979 (the year Mrs. Thatcher took office) and high levels of underemployment. Meanwhile current governments are flailing around unable, or unwilling, to do what is needed to right the ship.
The modern era could well use a Margaret Thatcher. We need a charismatic leader to step in, be the adult in the room, and give our economies and politics the medicine they need. We need someone to take on the public employee unions that are bankrupting us and draining money away from infrastructure projects that would better grow our economy in the long run. We need someone to take on the tax and spend cultures that have invaded the modern first world. Someone to come in and let the citizens keep more of their paychecks to stimulate the economy with. We need someone to instill tighter fiscal policies on our various central banks so that we stop debasing our currencies and penalizing savers. We need someone to privatize the banking system again, cutting off access to the central banks' borrowing windows to investment firms (reinacting Glass-Steagall here in the US would be a good way to do this, ditto ending too big to fail). In short, we could use a dose of Thatcherism in the modern era.
Here is a clip of the Iron Lady lambasting Labour for harping on a wage gap while ignoring the increase in welfare of the poorest members of Britain.
http://youtu.be/okHGCz6xxiw
Here is a bonus quote from the Iron Lady on the profligacy of Socialist governments: "Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."
To right the proverbial sinking ship, Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions, lowered taxes (from the above mentioned 83% to 40%), privatized loss leading government run industries and tightly controlled the monetary supply to battle inflation. Her actions likely saved Britain from bankruptcy, and certainly turned the economy around. Under her care, Britain moved from being the 6th largest world economy to 4th largest; and this during a time when most economies were expanding (in most cases, because they followed a similar small government approach).
While this is interesting from a historical perspective, it serves as a good example and a good reminder to current world governments that the path to economic expansion is well known. We may live in different times than Mrs. Thatcher governed, but there are certain undeniable parallels. First, governments have expanded markedly, so has government debt, and the entire banking system has become a ward of the various states. Unions' pay packages, benefits and pensions have grown beyond what most Americans earn in the free market. More over, those pensions are beginning to bankrupt state governments (at least here in America). Instead of raising taxes, we have resorted to deficit spending and printing money to finance the excesses of our governments. This has lead us to a period of persistent unemployment, the lowest labor participation rate since 1979 (the year Mrs. Thatcher took office) and high levels of underemployment. Meanwhile current governments are flailing around unable, or unwilling, to do what is needed to right the ship.
The modern era could well use a Margaret Thatcher. We need a charismatic leader to step in, be the adult in the room, and give our economies and politics the medicine they need. We need someone to take on the public employee unions that are bankrupting us and draining money away from infrastructure projects that would better grow our economy in the long run. We need someone to take on the tax and spend cultures that have invaded the modern first world. Someone to come in and let the citizens keep more of their paychecks to stimulate the economy with. We need someone to instill tighter fiscal policies on our various central banks so that we stop debasing our currencies and penalizing savers. We need someone to privatize the banking system again, cutting off access to the central banks' borrowing windows to investment firms (reinacting Glass-Steagall here in the US would be a good way to do this, ditto ending too big to fail). In short, we could use a dose of Thatcherism in the modern era.
Here is a clip of the Iron Lady lambasting Labour for harping on a wage gap while ignoring the increase in welfare of the poorest members of Britain.
http://youtu.be/okHGCz6xxiw
Here is a bonus quote from the Iron Lady on the profligacy of Socialist governments: "Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."
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