William Matthews

Did you hear Scott Simon’s interview with Edward Hirsch this morning (NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday)? The occasion was the publication of Hirsch’s book Poet’s Choice, based (I’m assuming) on Hirsch’s WaPo column of the same name, later taken over by Robert Pinsky.

William Matthews had pride of place in the interview, with a reading of his short poem “Grief”, and an antiphonal reading (sometimes I wish Simon would just shut up) of Matthews’ “short but comprehensive summary of subjects for lyric poetry”.

1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.

2. We’re not getting any younger.

3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.

4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what.

Matthews observes (“Dull Subjects”), “It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn’t dull, but the quality of attention we do or do not pay to it, and the strength of our will to transform. Dull subjects are those we have failed.”

Hirsch’s original column, complete with “Grief” and the four (well, five, really, or maybe six) subjects, is online, as is a nice collection of Matthews’ poetry, and a review of Matthews’ Search Party, by Edward Byrne.

The most persistent theme in Matthews’s poetry becomes that of temporality, the unyielding progression of time as it weakens one’s abilities and eventually ends one’s life, especially in dramatic or tragic instances where mortality shuts down the gifted artist.

#2, of course.

Goods over people?

Josh Bivens argues that those who favor free trade in goods ought to oppose restrictions on immigration.

I’m a professional worrier about the impact of trade on the American income distribution. The optimal response to my worries is to strike grand bargains that compensate American workers for the harm done to them by globalization. The corporate class gets NAFTA, American workers should have gotten universal health care. The corporate class gets membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), American workers should have gotten labor law reform to help willing workers more easily form unions.
…
Unlike trade, I’m personally not willing to call for immigration restrictions, even in the absence of the optimal response. Why not, if I’m willing to risk professional approbation in the trade debate? First, it’s just a fact that embargoing people at national borders is an inherently uglier business than embargoing goods. Second, immigration offers truly enormous economic benefits to the immigrants themselves. Some argue that tariff-free access to the US market offers huge benefits to workers in developing nations. They’re wrong: the gains (to developing country workers) from immigration dwarf the gains from market access.
…
To take this further, if one is concerned about the economic prospects of low-wage workers, why not respond to potential distributional problems caused by immigration with trade tariffs? How serious am I about this? Not very. There’s still an ideal response to both – using broader tools to bolster economic security for all Americans. But, the odd deference given to the movement of goods over the movement of people in the global economy remains pretty jarring to me.

(Via MaxSpeak, You Listen!.)

The Nation: Taming Global Capitalism Anew

From a series in The Nation.

Taming Predatory Capitalism, James K Galbraith:

In 1899 Thorstein Veblen described predation as a phase in the evolution of culture, “attained only when the predatory attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude…when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life.” After an entire century’s struggle to escape from this phase, we’ve suffered a relapse. The predators are everywhere unleashed; and the institutions built to contain them, from the United Nations to the AFL-CIO to the SEC, are everywhere under siege. Predation has again become the defining feature of economic life. Our first problem is to grasp this reality in full.
…
The truths are that egalitarian growth is efficient, that speculation must be regulated, that crime starts at the top and that peace is the primary public good. These truths are poison to predators and are the reason predators have fostered and subsidized an entire cynical intellectual movement devoted to “free” markets made up of a class of professor-courtiers now everywhere in view. Taming predatory capitalism could start with breaking this econo-corporate analytical axis, and reviving the concept of countervailing power, first formulated by John Kenneth Galbraith in 1952.

A Progressive Response to Globalization, Joseph E Stiglitz:

Globalization is often viewed as posing a major threat to “capitalism with a human face.” Trade liberalization puts downward pressure on unskilled wages (and increasingly even skilled wages), increasing inequality in more developed countries. Countries trying to compete are repeatedly told to increase labor-market flexibility, code words for lowering the minimum wage and weakening worker protections. Competition for business puts pressure to reduce taxes on corporate income and on capital more generally, decreasing funds available for supporting basic investments in people and the safety net. And international agreements, such as Chapter 11 of NAFTA and the intellectual property provisions of the Uruguay Round of trade talks, have been used to short-circuit national democratic processes.

Yet Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries have shown that there is an alternative way to cope with globalization. These countries are highly integrated into the global economy; but they are highly successful economies that still provide strong social protections and make high levels of investments in people. They have been successful in part because of these policies, not in spite of them. Full employment and strong safety nets enable individuals to undertake more risk (with the commensurate high rewards) without unduly worrying about the downside of failure. These countries have not abandoned the welfare state but have fine-tuned it to meet globalization’s new demands. We should do the same.

At the same time, we must temper globalization itself–not by withdrawing behind protectionist borders and not by trying to enhance the well-being of our citizens at the expense of those abroad who are even poorer. Rather, we should reshape globalization to make it more democratic, and we should moderate its pace to give countries more time to cope. There will still be losers in a reshaped globalization, but the vast majority of citizens in both the North and the South will be better off with the right policies.

Reich on Stiglitz

Robert Reich reviews Fair Trade for All, by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, in which the authors maintain that the current program of global trade liberalization is not benefiting poorer countries, contrary to the hype associated with NAFTA and various WTO trade rounds. (Stiglitz is quoted more extensively in an earlier post.

Hence, the authors argue, the pace at which poorer nations open their markets to trade should coincide with the development of new institutions — roads, schools, banks and the like — that make such transitions easier and generate real opportunities. Since many poor nations can’t afford the investments required to build these institutions, rich nations have a responsibility to help.

Without these other institutions in place, the authors say, trade by itself can do more harm than good. They point out that inequality increased after trade was liberalized in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay. Ten years after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, Mexico’s real wages are lower than they were before, and both inequality and poverty have grown. Many of the manufacturing jobs that came to Mexico in the wake of Nafta have since been lost to China, partly because China invested heavily in education and infrastructure while Mexico, lacking tariff revenues, couldn’t afford to do so. According to Stiglitz and Charlton, every developing country that has succeeded in achieving rapid growth has protected its market to some extent until it was ready to dismantle trade barriers. China’s growth, for example, escalated in the 1970’s, before it lowered its barriers.

Stiglitz and Charlton, Reich argues, fail to suggest how this might be fixed, and that in their analysis of inequality created by globalization, they don’t go far enough.

Surprisingly, though Stiglitz has spent some years in Washington, he doesn’t answer the obvious next question: How can this commendable agenda be sold to richer nations? Their political leaders are in a bind since so many of their own citizens are also losing jobs and experiencing declining incomes and, rightly or wrongly, blaming globalization for their plight. This is one of the major reasons the antiglobalization movement is as strong in the developed world as in the developing. It was, after all, Americans who marched and demonstrated against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in December 1999, at what was to have been the start of the new round of trade liberalization. And just months ago, with a Republican in the White House and a Republican-controlled Congress and with the solid support of American business leaders, the modest Central American Free Trade Agreement squeaked through the House of Representatives by only two votes.

While Stiglitz and Charlton nobly assert that trade agreements should be viewed as presumptively unfair if they bestow disproportionate benefits on richer nations, they fail to acknowledge that within richer nations free trade is already disproportionately benefiting the best educated and best connected. The wealthy are growing much wealthier while the middle class is being squeezed. In fact, the adjustment mechanisms the authors find lacking in most developing economies — good public schools, modern infrastructure and adequate social safety nets — are coming to be less and less available even in America. Free trade surely generates the gains Ricardo claimed for it. But until those gains are more widely shared — within richer countries as well as between richer and poorer — we can kiss any further round of trade liberalization goodbye.

Stiglitz: Social Justice and Global Trade

“Today, liberalization discriminates against developing countries. It needs to discriminate in their favor.”

Joseph Stiglitz’s critique of global trade liberalization is behind FEER’s paywall. Thanks to Mark Thoma for this extended excerpt.

FEER: Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University, argues that trade liberalization must be re-examined to take into account how it damages poor countries.

Economists are in near-univeral agreement that globalization is a Good Thing. But the globalization that economists theorize about isn’t the globalization that politicians negotiate.

Social Justice and Global Trade, FEER, March 2006, By Joseph Stiglitz.

The history of recent trade meetings—from Seattle to Doha to Cancun to Hong Kong—shows that something is wrong with the global trading system. Behind the discontent are some facts and theories.

The facts: Current economic arrangements disadvantage the poor. Tariff levels by the advanced industrial countries against the developing countries are four times higher than against the developed countries. The last round of trade negotiations, the Uruguay Round, actually left the poorest countries worse off. While the developing countries were forced to open up their markets and eliminate subsidies, the advanced developed countries continued to subsidize agriculture and kept trade barriers against those products which are central to the economies of the developing world.

Indeed, the tariff structures are designed to make it more difficult for developing countries to move up the value added chain… As tariffs have come down, America has increasingly resorted to the use of non-tariff barriers as the new forms of protectionism. Trade agreements do not eliminate protectionist sentiments or the willingness of governments to attempt to protect producer and worker interests.

The theories: Trade liberalization leads to economic growth, benefiting all. This is the prevalent mantra. Political leaders champion liberalization. Those who oppose it are cast as behind the times, trying to roll back history. Yet the fact that so many seem to have been hurt so much by globalization seems to belie their claims. …the details of the trade agreements—make a great deal of difference.

That Mexico has done so poorly under NAFTA has not helped the case for liberalization. If there ever was a free trade agreement that should have promoted growth, that was it, for it opened up for Mexico the largest market of the world. But growth in the decade since has been slower than in the decades before 1980, and the poorest in the country, the corn farmers, have been particularly hurt by subsidized American corn.

The fact of the matter is that the economics of trade liberalization are far more complicated than political leaders have portrayed them. There are some circumstances in which trade liberalization brings enormous benefits—when there are good risk markets, when there is full employment, when an economy is mature. But none of these conditions are satisfied in developing countries. With full employment, a worker who loses his job to new imports quickly finds another; and the movement from low-productivity protected sectors to high-productivity export sectors leads to growth and increased wages. But if there is high unemployment, a worker who loses his job may remain unemployed. A move from a low-productivity, protected sector to the unemployment pool does not increase growth, but it does increase poverty. Liberalization can expose countries to enormous risks…

Perhaps most importantly, successful development means going stagnant traditional sectors with low productivity to more modern sectors with faster increases in productivity. But without protection, developing countries cannot compete in the modern sector. They are condemned to remain in the low growth part of the global economy. South Korea understood this. Thirty-five years ago, those who advocated free trade essentially told South Korea to stick with rice farming. But South Korea knew that even if it were successful in improving productivity in rice farming, it would be a poor country. It had to industrialize.

What are we to make of the oft-quoted studies that show that countries that have liberalized more have grown faster? Put aside the numerous statistical problems that plague almost all such “cross country” studies. Most of the studies that claim that liberalization leads to growth do no such thing. … Studies that focus directly on liberalization—that is, what happens when countries take away trade barriers—present a less convincing picture that liberalization is good for growth.

But we know which countries around the world have grown the fastest: they are the countries of East Asia, and their growth was based on export-driven trade. They did not pursue policies of unfettered liberalization. Indeed, they actively intervened in markets to encourage exports, and only took away trade barriers as their exports grew…

The point is that no country approaches liberalization as an abstract concept… Every country wants to know: For a country with its unemployment rate, with its characteristics, with its financial markets, will liberalization lead to faster growth?

If the economics are nuanced, the politics are simple. Trade negotiations provide a field day for special interests. … Exporters want others’ markets opened up; those threatened by competition do not. Trade negotiators pay little attention to principles… They pay attention to campaign contributions and votes.

In the most recent trade talks, for example, enormous attention has been focused on developed countries’ protection of their agricultural sectors—protections that exist because of the power of vested agricultural interests there. Such protectionism has become emblematic of the hypocrisy of the West … Some 25,000 rich American cotton farmers, reliant on government subsidies for cotton, divide among themselves some $3 billion to $4 billion a year, leading to higher production and lower prices. The damage that these subsidies wreak on some 10 million cotton farmers eking out a subsistence living in sub-Saharan Africa is enormous. Yet the U.S. seems willing to put the interests of 25,000 American cotton farmers above that of the global trading system and the well-being of millions in the developing world. If those in the developing world respond with anger, it is understandable.

The anger is increased by the United States’s almost cynical attitude in “marketing” its offers. For instance, at the Hong Kong meeting, U.S. trade officials reportedly offered to eliminate import restrictions on cotton but refused to do anything about subsidies. The cotton subsidies actually allow the United States to export cotton. When a country can export a particular commodity, it does little good to allow imports of that commodity. The U.S., to great fanfare, has made an offer worth essentially zero to the developing countries and berated them for not taking it up on its “generous” offer. …

In short, trade liberalization should be “asymmetric”, but it needs to be asymmetric in a precisely opposite way to its present configuration. Today, liberalization discriminates against developing countries. It needs to discriminate in their favor. Europe has shown the way by opening up its economy to the poorest countries of the world in an initiative called Everything But Arms. Partly because of complicated regulations (“rules of origin”), however, the amount of increased trade that this policy has led to has been very disappointing thus far. Because agriculture is still highly subsidized and restricted, some call the policy “Everything But Farms.” There is a need for this initiative to be broadened. … In fact, the advanced industrial countries as a whole would be better off, and special interests in these countries would suffer.

There is, in fact, a broad agenda of trade liberalization (going well beyond agriculture) that would help the developing countries. But trade is too important to be left to trade ministers. If the global trade regime is to reflect common shared values, then negotiations over the terms of that trade regime cannot be left to ministers who, at least in most countries, are more beholden to corporate and special interests than almost any other ministry. In the last round, trade ministers negotiated over the terms of the intellectual property agreement. This is a subject of enormous concern to almost everyone in today’s society. … It reflected the interests of U.S. drug and entertainment industries, not the most important producers of knowledge, those in academia. And it certainly did not reflect the interests of users, either in the developed or less-developed countries. But the negotiations were conducted in secret, in Geneva. The U.S. Trade Representative (like most other trade ministers) was not an expert in intellectual property; he received his short course from the drug companies, and he quickly learned how to espouse their views. The agreement reflected this one-sided perspective.

Several reforms in the structure of trade talks are likely to lead to better outcomes. The first is that the basic way in which trade talks are approached should be changed. Now they are commercial negotiations. Each country seeks to get the best deal for its firms. This stands in marked contrast to how legislation in all other arenas of public policy is approached. Typically, we ask what our objectives are, and how we can best achieve them. … If we began trade talks from this position of debate and inquiry, we could arrive at a picture of what a true development round look like. …

As more and more countries have demanded a voice in trade negotiations, there is often nostalgia for the old system in which four partners (the U.S., EU, Canada and Japan) could hammer out a deal. There are complaints that the current system with so many members is simply unworkable. We have learned how to deal with this problem in other contexts, however, using the principles of representation. We must form a governing council with representatives of various “groups”—a group of the least developed countries, of the agricultural exporting countries, etc. Each representative makes sure that the concerns of his or her constituency are heard. …

Finally, trade talks need to have more focus. Broadening the agenda also puts developing countries at a particular disadvantage, because they do not have the resources to engage on a broad front of issues.

The most important changes are, however, not institutional changes, but changes in mindset. There should be an effort on the part of each of the countries to think about what kind of international rules and regulations would contribute to a global trading system that would be fair and efficient, and that would promote development.

Fifteen years ago, there was a great deal of optimism about the benefits which globalization and trade would bring to all countries. It has brought enormous benefits to some countries; but not to all. Some have even been made worse off. Development is hard enough. An unfair trade regime makes it even more difficult. Reforming the WTO would not guarantee that we would get a fair and efficient global trade regime, but it would enhance the chances that trade and globalization come closer to living up to their potential for enhancing the welfare of everyone.

Truth or shrill?

Krugman.

Bruce Bartlett, the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” is an angry man. At a recent book forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is “unconscionable,” “irresponsible,” “vindictive” and “inept

It’s no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that “if he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears.”

Oh, wait. That’s not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It’s what Mr. Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much what he’s saying now.

Human nature being what it is, I don’t expect Mr. Bartlett to acknowledge his about-face. Nor do I expect any expressions of remorse from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative Time.com blogger who also spoke at the Cato forum. Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize President Bush, whom he lionized. Now he himself has become a critic, not just of Mr. Bush’s policies, but of his personal qualities, too.

Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent epiphanies by conservative commentators who have finally realized that the Bush administration isn’t trustworthy. But we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there’s something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush’s deceptions, even though the administration’s mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

According to this view, if you’re a former Bush supporter who now says, as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that “the administration lies about budget numbers,” you’re a brave truth-teller. But if you’ve been saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you’re a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that “the people in this administration have no principles,” you’re taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

‘No quick fix’ from nuclear power

The BBC reports:

Building new nuclear plants is not the answer to tackling climate change or securing Britain’s energy supply, a government advisory panel has reported. The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) report says doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035.

The body, which advises the government on the environment, says this must be set against the potential risks.

The government is currently undertaking a review of Britain’s energy needs.

more

The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It

Paul Krugman and Robin wells, writing in the New York Review of Books.

This inefficiency is a bad thing in itself. What makes it literally fatal to thousands of Americans each year is that the inefficiency of our health care system exacerbates a second problem: our health care system often makes irrational choices, and rising costs exacerbate those irrationalities. Specifically, American health care tends to divide the population into insiders and outsiders. Insiders, who have good insurance, receive everything modern medicine can provide, no matter how expensive. Outsiders, who have poor insurance or none at all, receive very little. To take just one example, one study found that among Americans diagnosed with colorectal cancer, those without insurance were 70 percent more likely than those with insurance to die over the next three years.

In response to new medical technology, the system spends even more on insiders. But it compensates for higher spending on insiders, in part, by consigning more people to outsider status—robbing Peter of basic care in order to pay for Paul’s state-of-the-art treatment. Thus we have the cruel paradox that medical progress is bad for many Americans’ health.

The idiosyncratically American practice of tying health care to employment is heading for a crisis.

Providing health insurance looked like a good way for employers to reward their employees when it was a small part of the pay package. Today, however, the annual cost of coverage for a family of four is estimated by the Kaiser Family Foundation at more than $10,000. One way to look at it is to say that that’s roughly what a worker earning minimum wage and working full time earns in a year. It’s more than half the annual earnings of the average Wal-Mart employee.

Health care costs at current levels override the incentives that have historically supported employer-based health insurance. Now that health costs loom so large, companies that provide generous benefits are in effect paying some of their workers much more than the going wage—or, more to the point, more than competitors pay similar workers. Inevitably, this creates pressure to reduce or eliminate health benefits. And companies that can’t cut benefits enough to stay competitive—such as GM—find their very existence at risk.

Once consequence of this trend is that Medicaid is under increasing pressure.

Medicaid has grown rapidly in recent years because i has been picking up the slack from the unraveling syste of employer-based insurance. Between 2000 and 2004 th number of Americans covered by Medicaid rose by remarkable eight million. Over the same period the ranks o the uninsured rose by six million. So without the growth o Medicaid, the uninsured population would have exploded and we’d be facing a severe crisis in medical care

But Medicaid, even as it becomes increasingly essential to tens of millions of Americans, is also becoming increasingly vulnerable to political attack. To some extent this reflects the political weakness of any means-tested program serving the poor and near poor. As the British welfare scholar Richard Titmuss said, “Programs for the poor are poor programs.” Unlike Medicare’s clients—the feared senior group—Medicaid recipients aren’t a potent political constituency: they are, on average, poor and poorly educated, with low voter participation. As a result, funding for Medicaid depends on politicians’ sense of decency, always a fragile foundation for policy.

The Bush administration’s response to the problem is to push consumer-directed health care. Bad idea.

What’s wrong with consumer-directed health care? One immediate disadvantage is that health savings accounts, whatever their ostensible goals, are yet another tax break for the wealthy, who have already been showered with tax breaks under Bush. The right to pay medical expenses with pre-tax income is worth a lot to high-income individuals who face a marginal income tax rate of 35 percent, but little or nothing to lower-income Americans who face a marginal tax rate of 10 percent or less, and lack the ability to place the maximum allowed amount in their savings accounts.

A deeper disadvantage is that such accounts tend to undermine employment-based health care, because they encourage adverse selection: health savings accounts are attractive to healthier individuals, who will be tempted to opt out of company plans, leaving less healthy individuals behind.

Yet another problem with consumer-directed care is that the evidence says that people don’t, in fact, make wise decisions when paying for medical care out of pocket. A classic study by the Rand Corporation found that when people pay medical expenses themselves rather than relying on insurance, they do cut back on their consumption of health care—but that they cut back on valuable as well as questionable medical procedures, showing no ability to set sensible priorities.

It’s worse than, that, though.

But perhaps the biggest objection to consumer-directe health reform is that its advocates have misdiagnosed th problem. They believe that Americans have too muc health insurance; the 2004 Economic Report of the President condemned the fact that insurance currently pays for “many events that have little uncertainty, such as routine dental care, annual medical exams, and vaccinations,” and for “relatively low-expense items, such as an office visit to the doctor for a sore throat.” The implication is that health costs are too high because people who don’t pay their own medical bills consume too much routine dental care and are too ready to visit the doctor about a sore throat. And that argument is all wrong. Excessive consumption of routine care, or small-expense items, can’t be a major source of health care inefficiency, because such items don’t account for a major share of medical costs.

Remember the 80–20 rule: the great bulk of medical expenses are accounted for by a small number of people requiring very expensive treatment. When you think of the problem of health care costs, you shouldn’t envision visits to the family physician to talk about a sore throat; you should think about coronary bypass operations, dialysis, and chemotherapy. Nobody is proposing a consumer-directed health care plan that would force individuals to pay a large share of extreme medical expenses, such as the costs of chemotherapy, out of pocket. And that means that consumer-directed health care can’t promote savings on the treatments that account for most of what we spend on health care.

The administration’s plans for consumer-directed health care, then, are a diversion from meaningful health care reform, and will actually worsen our health care problems. In fact, some reformers privately hope that George W. Bush manages to get his health care plans passed, because they believe that they will hasten the collapse of employment-based coverage and pave the way for real reform. (The suffering along the way would be huge.)

The obvious answer, of course, is universal single-payer health care. I won’t try to summarize the case here (read the whole thing), but the real problem is political, not medical or economic.

We believe that the compromise plans being proposed by the cautious reformers would run into the same political problems, and that it would be politically smarter as well as economically superior to go for broke: to propose a straightforward single-payer system, and try to sell voters on the huge advantages such a sys-tem would bring. But this would mean taking on the drug and insur-ance companies rather than trying to co-opt them, and even progressive policy wonks, let alone Democratic politicians, still seem too timid to do that.

So what will really happen to American health care? Many people in this field believe that in the end America will end up with national health insurance, and perhaps with a lot of direct government provision of health care, simply because nothing else works. But things may have to get much worse before reality can break through the combination of powerful interest groups and free-market ideology.

Go BRT!

Sierra, the membership magazine of the Sierra Club, published an interview with Jaime Lerner, architect and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, on the subject of BRT (bus rapid transit) systems.

Jaime LernerJaime Lerner wants to give the bus a makeover. The former mayor of the Brazilian city of Curitiba, population 1.7 million, beats the drum worldwide for BRT (“bus rapid transit”) systems, which transform dowdy bus lines into sleek transportation networks. All it takes, Lerner says, are a few relatively simple modifications—dedicated lanes in the center of the street where transit vehicles run unimpeded, “boarding tubes” where passengers pay fares before their bus arrives, and curb-level entries so they board and exit quickly—and a hefty dose of political will. Today more than 60 cities worldwide—including Seoul, South Korea, with 10.3 million residents—have some version of a BRT. Sierra sat down with Lerner to talk about his experience in Curitiba, the future of public transportation, and the health of cities that depend on it.
…
Sierra: What about light rail, which many U.S. cities are considering?
Lerner: Light rail is sometimes 10 to 20 times more expensive than a BRT, and it takes more time to implement. But it’s much better than a subway. When you have time and money and are able to subsidize the system, light rail is OK. But when you have to subsidize every ticket, you’re taking money from other social investments. That’s the main issue. You can have a BRT system that’s as good as an underground or light rail, and it pays for itself.

BRT is a fascinating concept, and the interview is well worth reading. There’s more on the site of the Bus Rapid Transit Policy Center.

NSA follies

Does the warrantless-wiretapping flap really accrue to the benefit of the Bush administration? Glenn Greenwald thinks not, and adduces a pile of convincing evidence that the administration doesn’t think so either.

While spouting that bravado, the Administration’s actions reveal that they fear this scandal and want more than anything for it to disappear. At every turn, they have tried to prevent a meaningful investigation into the legality of their actions. If the NSA scandal is really the political weapon which the GOP can use to bash Democrats as being weak on national security, wouldn’t the White House be doing the opposite – that is, encouraging every hearing and investigation possible?

Especially telling is an editorial from “the Pat Roberts-loving Wichita Eagle“.

Many Kansans, including members of The Eagle editorial board, have long admired Sen. Pat Roberts for his plainspokenness and reputation for fair brokering of issues.

So it’s troubling that Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is fast gaining the reputation in Washington, D.C., as a reliable partisan apologist for the Bush administration on intelligence and security controversies.

We hope that’s not true. But Roberts’ credibility is on the line….

This week, Roberts sidetracked a Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry into the possibly illegal National Security Agency wiretap program, saying the White House had agreed to brief lawmakers more regularly and to work with him on a behind-the-scenes “fix” of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

That prompted a scathing New York Times editorial Friday headlined “Doing the President’s Dirty Work,” which opined: “Is there any aspect of President Bush’s miserable record on intelligence that Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is not willing to excuse and help to cover up?”…

But whether the law needs a “fix” is far from certain. Roberts’ deal could thwart Congress’ duty to learn more about and evaluate this program, while securing from the White House only a vague pledge to talk about fixing the law down the road….

What’s bothering many, though, is that Roberts seems prepared to write the Bush team a series of blank checks to conduct the war on terror, even to the point of ignoring policy mistakes and possible violations of law.

That’s not oversight — it’s looking the other way.

Revisiting ethanol

A group of researchers from UC Berkeley have published a paper that tries to reconcile conflicting studies on the energy efficiency of using ethanol as a transportation fuel. From the press release:

The analysis, appearing in this week’s issue of Science, attempts to settle the ongoing debate over whether ethanol is a good substitute for gasoline and thus can help lessen the country’s reliance on foreign oil and support farmers in the bargain. The UC Berkeley study weighs these arguments against other studies claiming that it takes more energy to grow the corn to make ethanol than we get out of ethanol when we burn it.

The report concludes that ethanol from corn has a slightly positive energy return (that is, somewhat less fossil fuel is used to produce it than is produced), and conjectures that cellulosic ethanol would be a much bigger win.

The study neglects important costs such as displacement of food-crop land and erosion.

Additional environmental metrics are now being developed for biofuels, and a few have been applied to ethanol production, but several key issues remain unquantified, such as soil erosion and the conversion of forest to agriculture

The paper’s abstract:

To study the potential effects of increased biofuel use, we evaluated six representative analyses of fuel ethanol. Studies that reported negative net energy incorrectly ignored coproducts and used some obsolete data. All studies indicated that current corn ethanol technologies are much less petroleum-intensive than gasoline but have greenhouse gas emissions similar to those of gasoline. However, many important environmental effects of biofuel production are poorly understood. New metrics that measure specific resource inputs are developed, but further research into environmental metrics is needed. Nonetheless, it is already clear that large-scale use of ethanol for fuel will almost certainly require cellulosic technology.

Elsewhere, Gary Jones is unhappy about the paper:

Water use, biodiversity reduction, soil CO2 and methane emissions from cultivation and a host of other considerations are also glossed over, mainly by pointing to a future when the cellulose rather than just the starch component of plants can be used in a multi-step process that uses microorganisms to first turn the cellulose into starch so that other microorganism can turn the starch into ethanol. It is assumed that the ethanol yield will then be so great that any environmental or production costs will be insignificant in comparison. They also fail to consider other competing uses for the biomass or the resources consumed in its production, and switch back and forth between static views of present behaviors and dynamic futures when it favors their arguments. For example they say that there are “a billion tons of currently unused waste available for ethanol production”, but fail to note that these “unused wastes” are resources rapidly being discovered as their value rises. They aren’t wastes, they are resources that have had low values though that is changing.

The full paper is available on Science Magazine’s website (subscription required).

Related post: Corn-fed pork

Not “Freedom Pastries”?

Via Kenneth Baer, the AP reports,

TEHRAN, Iran — Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad.”

Bakeries across the capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners’ union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.

“Given the insults by Danish newspapers against the prophet, as of now the name of Danish pastries will give way to ‘Rose of Muhammad’ pastries,” the union said in its order.

“This is a punishment for those who started misusing freedom of expression to insult the sanctities of Islam,” said Ahmad Mahmoudi, a cake shop owner in northern Tehran.

A Way to Cut Fuel Consumption That Everyone Likes, Except the Politicians

Robert Frank in the NY Times., via Mark Thoma.

Suppose a politician promised to reveal the details of a simple proposal that would, if adopted, produce hundreds of billions of dollars in savings for American consumers, significant reductions in traffic congestion, major improvements in urban air quality, large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and substantially reduced dependence on Middle East oil. The politician also promised that the plan would require no net cash outlays from American families, no additional regulations and no expansion of the bureaucracy.

As economists often remind their students, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. So this politician’s announcement would almost surely be greeted skeptically. Yet a policy that would deliver precisely the outcomes described could be enacted by Congress tomorrow — namely, a $2-a-gallon tax on gasoline whose proceeds were refunded to American families in reduced payroll taxes.

Five myths about universal health care

The Truth About Universal Health Care: Tyler Zimmer, writing in Campus Progress, has a concise treatment of some of the most often heard myths about UHC.

Myth #1: It would be too expensive

Rather than cost more money, UHC would actually reduce the cost of health care. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that UHC could save up to $14 billion annually by spreading the risk evenly over the entire population, eliminating deductibles and co-pays and making preventive medicine available to the poor and uninsured. The federal government already subsidizes private health insurance in the form of tax deductions.

Private insurance companies also spend billions on administration and overhead, advertising, and determining and inspecting patient eligibility, all while trying to make a profit. UHC would not be burdened with some of those costs, like advertising, and unlike private business, it could run at a loss and still be viable. The pressures of profitability would no longer close the door for millions of Americans and drive up costs. As a result, Americans would effectively pay less for health insurance than they do now, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Myth #2: It would require a HUGE, inefficient bureaucracy

The current system is already a HUGE, inefficient bureaucracy! As previously mentioned, much of the unnecessary overhead and micromanaging in the system now could be eliminated if UHC were implemented. For example, the bureaucracy and paperwork involved in determining patient eligibility would be completely unnecessary if everyone were eligible and covered. Insurance companies spend an estimated 25 cents of every dollar on administration. Canada, which already has a comprehensive UHC in place and still manages to pay 70 percent less per citizen on health care, spends about the equivalent of about 12 cents of every dollar on administration.

Myth #3: It would restrict patient choice

How can we even begin to talk about choice when 40 million Americans don’t have any health insurance at all? “Choice” really isn’t an appropriate topic for those who can’t afford health care. Many of the chronically sick are simply denied coverage by private insurance companies because they aren’t good financial investments. The concept of choice probably doesn’t resonate much for people in this situation, either. But even for those who are insured under the current system, HMOs and insurance companies alike restrict patients to a strict list of complying physicians. UHC wouldn’t directly dictate what doctor you have to see in order to get treatment and would thus enable more choice in selecting a physician than the current system would for many, if not most, Americans.

Myth #4: It would be a socialist seizure of the medical industry

It would be nothing of the sort. Socialized medicine would entail hospitals and doctors becoming employees of the state. UHC only provides funding for people’s health care, but doesn’t provide the health care itself. The only difference is that health care insurance plans would be funded by the state. Hospitals, physicians, and other health care employees would all remain part of the private sector. Competition between doctors and hospitals would not be eliminated. Although using the “s” word in attacking UHC has proven effective in frightening the populace, UHC would be no more socialist than Medicare and arguably less so than public education. Granted the far-right would gladly see both of those programs destroyed, but the overwhelming majority of Americans would not.

Myth #5: UHC would impede economic growth

An added benefit of UHC would be that private business would no longer have to worry about health-care benefits, and employees wouldn’t have to remain in unpleasant jobs just to keep their benefits. Benefits wouldn’t interfere with wage increases, and employers would have more financial mobility. The recent problems General Motors has been having with maintaining health benefits for its workers while trying to remain financially afloat have been well-documented. GM estimates that health-care benefits account for nearly $1,500 of the price of every car they build and sell. Many other companies are switching to “temporary” or outsourced jobs in order to avoid paying benefits. Not only would UHC relieve businesses of having the burden of providing health insurance for their workers, but the workers would also be unconditionally covered regardless of where they work.

Public vs private schools

“The performance of private schools actually turns out to be worse or about the same as that of public schools, not better”

Kevin Drum summarizes a study of private vs public school performance, based on an analysis of 2003 NAEP results, with links to the study itself, as well as to a NY Times article about it.

Do private schools do a better job of educating our kids than public schools? Lots of people think so. But a new, large-scale statistical analysis of the 2003 NAEP test results suggests that when you control for things like income, race, home environment, and so forth, the performance of private schools actually turns out to be worse or about the same as that of public schools, not better.

Of course, parents send their kids to privates schools in large part in order to “control for things like income, race, home environment, and so forth,” but study goes more to the question of whether the privatization of education is likely to have any benefit for the rest of us.

Welcome to Pragmatos!

I’ve moved my blog to pragmatos.net; the previous address (http://lobitos.net/wordpress) will be redirected for the foreseeable future. The old RSS feed should still work (NetNewsWire will update the link automatically), but it’s probably advisable to update to the new one.

I’ve also updated WordPress to 2.0; painless, and so far so good.

Why pragmatos? In part, an homage to William James, and in part, the meaning (cf Strong’s 4229) seems appropriate for my blogging.

No Child Left Behind Fails to Close Achievement Gap

NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday had a nice piece by Claudio Sanchez; give it a listen.

Weekend Edition – Sunday, January 8, 2006 · Four years after the No Child Left Behind Act became law, test results show progress in some areas. But many schools are not reducing the achievement gap between white and minority students, and closing that gap may take longer than the law’s requirements.

In the piece, we hear from Richard Rothstein, of the Economic Policy Institute. In the introduction to his book, Class and Schools, Rothstein argues,

Good teachers, high expectations, standards, accountability, and inspiration are not enough
As is argued in this book, the influence of social class characteristics is probably so powerful that schools cannot overcome it, no matter how well trained are their teachers and no matter how well designed are their instructional programs and climates. But saying that a social class achievement gap should be expected is not to make a logical statement. The fact that social class differences are associated with, and probably cause, a big gap in academic performance does not mean that, in theory, excellent schools could not offset these differences. Indeed, there are many claims today, made by policy makers and educators, that higher standards, better teachers, more accountability, better discipline, or other effective practices can close the achievement gap.

The most prominent of these claims has been made by a conservative policy institute (the Heritage Foundation), by a liberal advocacy group (the Education Trust), by economists and statisticians who claim to have shown that better teachers do in fact close the gap, by prominent educators, and by social critics. Many (although not all) of the instructional practices promoted by these commentators are well designed, and these practices probably do succeed in delivering better educations to some lower-class children. But a careful examination of each claim that a particular school or practice has closed the race or social class achievement gap shows that the claim is unfounded.

In some cases, the claim fails because it rests on the misinterpretation of test scores; in other cases, the claim fails because the successful schools identified have selective student bodies. Remember that the achievement gap is a phenomenon of averages — it compares the average achievement of lower- and middle-class students. In both social classes, some students perform well above or below the average performance of their social class peers. If schools can select (or attract) a disproportionate share of lower-class students whose performance is above average for their social class, those schools can appear to be quite successful. Many of them are excellent schools and should be commended. But their successes provide no evidence that their instructional approaches would close the achievement gap for students who are average for their social class groups.

…

For nearly half a century, the association of social and economic disadvantage with a student achievement gap has been well known to economists, sociologists, and educators. Most, however, have avoided the obvious implication of this understanding — raising the achievement of lower-class children requires amelioration of the social and economic conditions of their lives, not just school reform. Perhaps this small volume can spur a reconsideration of this needlessly neglected opportunity.

No child’s behind left: the test

Yes, but which people?

Greg Palast:

New York — Today and tomorrow every 8-year-old in the state of New York will take a test. It’s part of George Bush’s No Child Left Behind program. The losers will be left behind to repeat the third grade. Try it yourself. This is from the state’s actual practice test. Ready, class?

“The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In February, Serena won her first pro singles championship. In March, the sisters met for the first time in a tournament final. Venus won. And at doubles tennis, the Williams girls could not seem to lose that year.”

And here’s one of the four questions:

“The story says that in 1999, the sisters could not seem to lose at doubles tennis. This probably means when they played

A) two matches in one day
B) against each other
C) with two balls at once
D) as partners”

OK, class, do you know the answer? (By the way, I didn’t cheat: there’s nothing else about “doubles” in the text.)

My kids go to a New York City school in which more than half the students live below the poverty line. There is no tennis court.

There are no tennis courts in the elementary schools of Bed-Stuy or East Harlem. But out in the Hamptons, every school has a tennis court. In Forest Hills, Westchester and Long Island’s North Shore, the schools have nearly as many tennis courts as the school kids have live-in maids.

Now, you tell me, class, which kids are best prepared to answer the question about “doubles tennis”? The 8-year-olds in Harlem who’ve never played a set of doubles or the kids whose mommies disappear for two hours every Wednesday with Enrique the tennis pro?

Is this test a measure of “reading comprehension” — or a measure of wealth accumulation?

If you have any doubts about what the test is measuring, look at the next question, based on another part of the text, which reads (and I could not make this up):

“Most young tennis stars learn the game from coaches at private clubs. In this sentence, a club is probably a

F) baseball bat
G) tennis racquet
H) tennis court
J) country club”

Helpfully, for the kids in our ‘hood, it explains that a “country club” is a, “place where people meet.” Yes, but which people?

Madison on war

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare….”

firedoglake channels James Madison:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people…. [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and … degeneracy of manners and of morals…. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare….

The monsters who eat escargot

“France is the latest country to fill American conservatives’ need for a foreign boogeyman that will keep liberals in their place.”

Jonathan Chait

…

Instead of just ridiculing the conservative argument, let’s take it seriously for a moment. Near as I can tell, they seem to be saying this: Liberals want bigger government. Europe has bigger government. Bad things are happening to Europe. Q.E.D.

Do conservatives have even a germ of a point here? No. It’s true that liberals admire some things that Europe does, and it’s also true that Europe has some highly destructive policies. But there’s almost no overlap between the two. By almost all accounts, the single most damaging aspect of European and French policy is the absurdly restrictive rules on firing employees, which discourage businesses from hiring anybody and result in high unemployment.

I’ve never, ever heard an American liberal call for emulating French labor regulations. You do, on the other hand, hear liberals praising France’s effective public transportation and, above all, its healthcare system. Tanner’s column doesn’t try to cite France’s advanced rapid transit as a cause of social decay, but it does mention its “universal national healthcare system.”

This is particularly laughable. France’s healthcare system does cover everybody, has far more doctors per capita than the U.S. and produces better health outcomes. Is this lavish socialist system bankrupting the country? Far from it. France spends about 10% of its national income on healthcare, as opposed to 15% in the U.S. In fact, we’re the country being bankrupted by its healthcare system, which is by far the most market-intensive in the advanced world. Skyrocketing healthcare costs are discouraging job growth and strangling the automobile industry, among others.

…