David Brooks is creepy

He’s not alone, I’m sure. In an opinion piece in the NY Times, Brooks informs us that US education is going to hell in a handbasket. We’re falling behind.

America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.

Well, OK. I’m skeptical of golden-age claims, but there’s no denying that we’ve made a hash of our schools. Maybe because states like California, once exemplary educators, have cut public education funding in half, as a fraction of personal income? No say Brooks’s sources.

It’s not falling school quality, [Heckman] argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not.

How does Heckman know? He “intuits” it, via “common sense”. Our children need to be “bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development.”

Creepy.

Rank-ordering Congress

I’ve been meaning to link to Voteview for a while now. It’s a project of Keith T Poole, now at UCSD, that ranks congressfolk on a liberal-to-conservative scale based on their voting history. There’s lots to browse, but the rankings themselves are as interesting as anything on the site. Check out the 110th Senate, for example, and find John McCain in the 109th Senate rankings (but first, without peeking, guess where he ends up on the scale).

There’s an infrequent blog; the most recent entry is nominally about the political closeness of Clinton and Obama, but goes on provide historical perspective on Congress’s current polarization.

NCLB close to home

I wrote a piece over at Coastsider.com on what is, in the event, a rather minor agenda item from the last meeting of our local school board.

The district’s middle school has reached the final stages of NCLB’s “Program Improvement” (that’s what California calls it; I think the Feds say “School Improvement”). Having failed to made “Adequate Yearly Progress” for six years running, the school was due for “major restructuring” of its governance. In California, that means creating Yet Another Committee, and business pretty much as usual.

That’s not all bad, but it’s a missed opportunity. Read the whole thing.

Sort of a tragedy…

NPR’s On the Media is on balance my favorite radio program these days. Last week’s episode had a nice remembrance of Tony Schwartz.

In his 84 years Tony Schwartz produced over 30,000 recordings, thousands of groundbreaking political ads, media theory books and Broadway sound design, invented the portable recorder, delivered hundreds of lectures and had full careers as an ad executive and a pioneering folklorist. And he did it all without leaving his zip code. Schwartz died in June and we offer a piece from the Kitchen Sisters, looking back at his life spent listening.

Listen to a brief sample.

Mere filler

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.

Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.

The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy society, they look healthy, in a sick one, like ours, they look sick. And really they are neither one nor the other. They are mere filler.”

It was November 8, 1941.

Booooring

My regular commute to work ends with a walk from the Mountain View Caltrain station to my office, and the walk includes a freeway overpass (Shoreline Blvd over US 101 for the locals). Lots of lanes, lots of cars.

God, but we drive drab cars in this neck of the woods. The palette runs from white through various shades of gray and silver to black. The grays and silvers might have a subtle tint, and the blacks might be replaced by a green or blue so dark as to be indistinguishable from black. Oh, and the occasional tan or brown.

The one bright exception is that we appear to have permission to drive red cars.

There are rare exceptions, of course, just enough to demonstrate that if we chose to buy them, we could drive brightly colored cars. I predict a resurgence of yellow, you’ll see the occasional bright primary color, or even pink or violet, though few pastels and fewer two-tones (thank you Mini).

Take a look next time you’re on a freeway or in a crowded parking lot. Why is it that our cars are about as flamboyant as a man’s business suit?

philosophy bites

philosophy bites is “podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics.” Each podcast is c. 15 minutes long, and new ones show up about twice a week. The topics are wide-ranging, and the discussions are of interest to interested non-professionals as well as professional philosophers in other fields.

A sampling of recent bites:

Simon Blackburn on Plato’s Cave
Mary Warnock on Philosophy in Public Life
Stephen Law on The Problem of Evil
John Cottingham on The Meaning of Life
Miranda Fricker on Epistemic Injustice
Barry Smith on Wine
Alain de Botton on The Aesthetics of Architecture
Anne Phillips on Multiculturalism
Edward Craig on What is Philosophy?
Roger Crisp on Mill’s Utilitarianism
Adrian Moore on Infinity
Anthony Grayling on Atheism
David Papineau on Physicalism
Timothy Williamson on Vagueness
Jonathan Wolff on Disadvantage
Simon Blackburn on Moral Relativism
Brad Hooker on Consequentialism
Peter Adamson on Avicenna
Mary Warnock on Sartre’s Existentialism
Jonathan Rée on Philosophy as an Art
Tim Crane on Mind and Body
Anthony Kenny on his History of Philosophy
Quentin Skinner on Hobbes on the State
Onora O’Neill on Medical Consent
Stewart Sutherland on Hume on Design
Angie Hobbs on Plato on Erotic Love

Subscribe directly from the site, or through iTunes.

Sick around the world

Last month, PBS’s Frontline showed a fascinating documentary on the state of health care delivery in five developed countries around the world.

The program is available online. Watch it.

From the introduction,

In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland — deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

Reid’s first stop is the U.K., where the government-run National Health Service (NHS) is funded through taxes. “Every single person who’s born in the U.K. will use the NHS,” says Whittington Hospital CEO David Sloman, “and none of them will be presented a bill at any point during that time.” Often dismissed in America as “socialized medicine,” the NHS is now trying some free-market tactics like “pay-for-performance,” where doctors are paid more if they get good results controlling chronic diseases like diabetes. And now patients can choose where they go for medical procedures, forcing hospitals to compete head to head.

While such initiatives have helped reduce waiting times for elective surgeries, Times of London health editor Nigel Hawkes thinks the NHS hasn’t made enough progress. “We’re now in a world in which people are much more demanding, and I think that the NHS is not very effective at delivering in that modern, market-orientated world.”

Reid reports next from Japan, which boasts the second largest economy and the best health statistics in the world. The Japanese go to the doctor three times as often as Americans, have more than twice as many MRI scans, use more drugs, and spend more days in the hospital. Yet Japan spends about half as much on health care per capita as the United States.

One secret to Japan’s success? By law, everyone must buy health insurance — either through an employer or a community plan — and, unlike in the U.S., insurers cannot turn down a patient for a pre-existing illness, nor are they allowed to make a profit.

Reid’s journey then takes him to Germany, the country that invented the concept of a national health care system. For its 80 million people, Germany offers universal health care, including medical, dental, mental health, homeopathy and spa treatment. Professor Karl Lauterbach, a member of the German parliament, describes it as “a system where the rich pay for the poor and where the ill are covered by the healthy.” As they do in Japan, medical providers must charge standard prices. This keeps costs down, but it also means physicians in Germany earn between half and two-thirds as much as their U.S. counterparts.

In the 1990s, Taiwan researched many health care systems before settling on one where the government collects the money and pays providers. But the delivery of health care is left to the market. Every person in Taiwan has a “smart card” containing all of his or her relevant health information, and bills are paid automatically. But the Taiwanese are spending too little to sustain their health care system, according to Princeton’s Tsung-mei Cheng, who advised the Taiwanese government. “As we speak, the government is borrowing from banks to pay what there isn’t enough to pay the providers,” she told FRONTLINE.

Reid’s last stop is Switzerland, a country which, like Taiwan, set out to reform a system that did not cover all its citizens. In 1994, a national referendum approved a law called LAMal (“the sickness”), which set up a universal health care system that, among other things, restricted insurance companies from making a profit on basic medical care. The Swiss example shows health care reform is possible, even in a highly capitalist country with powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Today, Swiss politicians from the right and left enthusiastically support universal health care. “Everybody has a right to health care,” says Pascal Couchepin, the current president of Switzerland. “It is a profound need for people to be sure that if they are struck by destiny … they can have a good health system.”

Super Cub nostalgia

Honda Super CubWired notes the Honda Super Cub’s 50th anniversary and 60-millionth unit sold. That places the first sales in 1958, which also happens to be the year I moved (with my family) to Tokyo.

The Cub must have been an immediate hit, because I remember them as ubiquitous. Years later, attending New College in Sarasota Florida in the late 60s, I briefly owned a derivative of the Cub, one without the step-through styling and (am I remembering this right?) a 90cc engine.

A brief search on eBay turns up some Cub parts, gasket kits and such, and Cub-themed Zippo lighters and refrigerator magnets. But no Cubs.

Better thinking through chemistry

Cognitive enhancement | All on the mind | Economist.com

Provigil and Ritalin really do enhance cognition in healthy people. Provigil, for example, adds the ability to remember an extra digit or so to an individual’s working memory (most people can hold seven random digits in their memory, but have difficulty with eight). It also improves people’s performance in tests of their ability to plan. Because of such positive effects on normal people, says the report, there is growing use of these drugs to stave off fatigue, help shift-workers, boost exam performance and aid recovery from the effects of long-distance flights.

Via /.

Churchill on Hitler, Trotsky

I’ve been reading Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke.

Winston Churchill was readying his book Great Contemporaries for the press. It was August 1937. In it was his article on Hitler, written a few years earlier. “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms,” he said, “have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” Despite the arming of Germany and the hounding of the Jews, “we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age,” Churchill wrote. He was doubtful, though.

Churchill also included a piece on Leon Trotsky, king in exile of international bolshevism. Trotsky was a usurper and tyrant, Churchill said. He was a cancer bacillus, he was a “skin of malice,” washed up on the shores of Mexico. Trotsky possessed, said Churchill,

the organizing command of a Carnot, the cold detached intelligence of a Machiavelli, the mob oratory of a Cleon, the ferocity of Jack the Ripper, the toughness of Titus Oates.

And in the end what was Trotsky? Who was he? “He was a Jew,” wrote Churchill with finality. “He was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that.” He called his article “Leon Trotsky, Alias Bronstein.”

Links mine.

Borah, Hitler and Bush

David Kaiser: Facts are stubborn things

A couple of days ago President Bush ignited a firestorm before the Knesset by attacking those who support talking with hostile foreign leaders as practitioners of appeasement. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” he said, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” White House officials have identified the Senator as William Borah of Idaho, one of the longest-serving members in the history of that body, a one-time chairman and long-time ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a committed isolationist who opposed American entry into the First World War (and died in January 1940 before entry into the Second had become a major issue.)

That fact that Borah was a Republican has been cited as ironic by several commentators. David Kaiser suggests that the entire business is apparently a fabrication (unlike, it also appears, the suggestions of Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush’s financial connections with the Nazi war machine).

The purported quote from Borah has been a favorite of neoconservative Charles Krauthammer for some time. There is, however, one problem. While I cannot claim to have researched the issue exhaustively, the Proquest database of major newspapers includes not one shred of evidence that Borah ever said any such thing—and an enormous amount of evidence that he never would have.
…
More to the point, however, Borah was anything but naive about Hitler and was in fact a violent opponent of Fascism, Nazism, and the Munich agreement reached by the western powers. A selection from the reports of major newspapers during the 1930s leaves no doubt about this. Like many isolationists, he blamed Hitler’s rise largely on the Versailles treaty (an opinion which I personally do not share), but he never minced words about the nature of Hitler’s regime. In 1934 he referred to Nazism as “the malign influence which the world now contemplates with amazement and horror.” In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he violently attacked Mussolini and Hitler for making war on the government of Spain and argued that domestic Fascism was a greater threat than domestic Communism. In a radio address in late March 1939, after Roosevelt had proposed amendments to the neutrality act to allow the British and French to buy arms, Borah argued that those powers did not deserve our help. “What they are contending for is the realization of their imperialistic scheme and not the destruction of Nazism,” he said. He attacked the British for failing to oppose the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931 and for letting Hitler know they would not object to the annexation of Austria a year earlier (an apparent reference to the famous Halifax mission of late 1937.) “During the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia,” he said, “no mention was ever made of the teachings of Nazism and the dangers of enlarging its influence in Europe. ” He also criticized the British and French for failing to make any provision for the many anti-Nazis who had fallen under German sovereignty as a result of the Munich agreement. In the absence of a direct, sourced quote—which no one so far has produced—I cannot believe that this man would have made the statement that our President attributed to him.

Tom Friedman’s glorious, transcendent struggle

Glenn Greenwald: Tom Friedman’s latest declaration of war

So congratulations to us. After years of desperately searching, we’ve finally found our New Soviet Union. Nay-saying opponents of the New War … may try to point out that it’s a country whose defense spending is less than 1% of our own, has never invaded another country, and could not possibly threaten us, but those are just small details.
…
There’s a reason that Friedman occupies the place he does in America’s foreign policy establishment. He’s perfectly representative of it. It’s an establishment in perpetual search of an Enemy and the next war. And finding it (or creating it) is the one thing they do well.

Reading “unreadable” CDs

I have a longish commute, and I like to pass the time listening to audiobooks. I get them mostly on CD from my local library system, but because my commute is evenly split between car, train and walking, I rip the CDs to my iPod.

Unfortunately, library CDs are often not in the best shape, and often individual tracks are unreadable, or, as with a book I was ripping this morning, the CD won’t load at all.

As it happens, almost all computer CD drives these days are actually DVD drives, and a DVD drive is at best a compromise when it comes to reading CDs. It occurred to me to resurrect an old external CD drive from my parts closet (I used it back when my old PowerBook didn’t have a CD writer), and presto, all three CDs I was having trouble with on my DVD drive (and my wife’s DVD drive, an entirely different model) were readable with no trouble at all.

So if you’ve got an old external CD drive lying around, you might want to hang on to it.

(The audiobook in question: Elmore Leonard’s The Switch, which I’m listening to because I’m a fan of the narrator, Mark Hammer, and I’ve found Leonard’s stuff entertaining in print.)

Update. I meant to pass along another tip. I find that sometimes, maybe one time in ten, but erratically, the insertion of an audio CD wakes up iTunes, but doesn’t get mounted (or ejected, as can happen with a bad CD). When this happens, it can be difficult to eject the CD (because the system doesn’t recognize it as mounted); if you do manage to eject it, inserting it again, perhaps more than once, will eventually persuade iTunes to see it.

An easier and quicker solution is to run Disk Utility, where you’ll see an unmounted “Audio CD”. Select it, click the Mount button, and Bob’s your uncle.

Arithmetic, Not Ideology

Dean Baker on one of his favorite subjects, the attribution of ideological motivations to political actors, quoted here mainly for its fine last line.

Frank-Dodd Bailouts: Arithmetic, Not Ideology

It is remarkable how often reporters/columnists feel the need to assert that political disputes are about ideological issues. Why do they feel the need to make assertions for which there is generally no evidence?
Politicians get elected by getting the support of individuals and groups with power. They don’t get elected by being political philosophers.

Contrary to what Gretchen Morgenson (ordinarily a very good reporter) tells NYT readers, the battle over the Frank-Dodd bailout plans is not about ideology. The bills are crafted in ways that make them very friendly to banks. The banks get to decide which loans get put into the program. Presumably they don’t make this decision unless they think they will benefit from the bailout.

In addition, the appraisals on which the government’s guarantee price is set are based on sale prices, which may still be seriously inflated in the bubble markets. It would have been easy to avoid the problem of inflated appraisals by setting the guarantee price based on a multiple of rents. However, the supporters of these bills chose not to go this route.

At least some of the opposition to these bills is based on the view that giving more taxpayer dollars to banks should not be a higher priority than paying for health care, child care and other important needs. It is not clear what ideological issue is at stake here, since the ideology that we all should pay higher taxes to keep the banks rich has never been well articulated.

Emphasis mine.

Econbrowser: What if we’d been on the gold standard?

James Hamilton speculates on the consequences of a US move to a gold standard in 2006.

What if we’d been on the gold standard?:
If the U.S. had decided to go back on the gold standard in 2006, where would we be today? That’s a question my friend Randy Parker recently asked me. Here’s how we both would answer.
…
In 1929, the U.S. was on a gold standard, with the exchange rate fixed at $20.67 per ounce of gold. Geopolitical insecurity and financial worries warranted an increase in the relative price of gold, which, with the dollar price of gold fixed, required a decline in the dollar price of most everything else. Speculators bet (correctly) that Britain would abandon the standard in 1931, but the U.S. fought against the speculation, with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York raising its discount rate from 1.5% to 3.5% in October 1931. This sharp increase in interest rates at a time of great financial turmoil succeeded in defending the parity with gold, but produced an economic disaster.

What’s the alternative, he asks, to abandoning the gold standard when staying on it requires raising interest rates in the face of a declining economy?

Or the other option would be to say, no, we really mean it this time, honest, we’re serious about this whole gold standard thing. So, we drive interest rates higher and watch the deflation mount. Outstanding debt that is denominated in dollars becomes more and more costly for people to repay, and we’d see a really impressive level of bankruptcies and business failures. The cycle would continue until the politicians who promised to stay on the gold standard are driven out of office and the deflation spiral could finally be ended by the new leaders choosing option 1 [abandoning the gold standard] after all.