Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2236

NAEP Geography Tests Showing Improvement

As ever, the coverage of the latest NAEP geography test scores had a pretty pessimistic tone. But to me this looks like progress:

Something to note here is that under No Child Left Behind, there's a lot more testing of younger kids than of high schoolers, so if your concern is that "drill and kill" testing practices are narrowing the curriculum, there's scant evidence of it here.

Another way of looking at this is through the lens of parental educational attainment. For eighth graders, that looks like this:

Very little change here. What you do see is a decline in the number of very low performing students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. That's not a great result, but it's something. It's always worth remembering that in a very large and diverse country, it's difficult for policy interventions to work on all problems simultaneously. Improving the performance of the weakest and most disadvantaged cohort of students probably requires different steps from those that would improve the number of high-performing kids with college educated parents.

Clearly, though, the real issue here is whether these strong gains at the fourth grade level will pass through on to higher ones. I also note that the 12th grade questions really do seem quite hard!

Spending Paranoia

James Fallows reader DB gives voice to something I've heard from a number of conservatives:

I'm writing to provide a Republican perspective on the debt ceiling negotiations. I think many of [these] insights into the process are helpful. One thing that frustrates me, though, about your and other commenters, is a failure to acknowledge that tax increases are practically immediate, while spending cuts are in the future – often far into the future; I believe the much-touted 3-to-1 cuts-to-increases ratio proposed by Obama contemplated the spending cuts taking place over 12 years. Thinking such cuts will actually take place is naive. What Republicans fear is a deal that says "3-to-1″ but ends up being "zero-to-one." I have yet to hear a mainstream commentator acknowledge this concern.

This reminds me of nothing so much as the conservative view that the success of mixed economy welfare states in the Cold War proved that we should abandon mixed economy welfare state policies in favor of laissez faire. In this case, the view is that in the past arbitrary spending caps have failed to restrain spending, so we ought to become really dogmatic in our insistence on arbitrary spending caps.

My view is that the existence of this kind of paranoia about the implementation of future spending cuts ought to push us in the other direction. Decisions about the future will necessarily be made in the future. There is no present-day economic problem that can be laid at the feet of high current levels of federal spending. So let's not sweat the 2020s. Maybe we'll invent some super-useful but expensive technology that merits giant spending. Who knows? Most likely, voters will continue to demand certain kinds of public services and that will cost money. One such service is health care. Systematic reform of the exceptionally high cost structure of American health care would, fairly reliably, lead to a lower level of future spending. Just saying "cross my heart / hope to die / stick a needle in my eye / public sector health care spending will be lower" doesn't achieve much of anything.

The Euromess And The Limits Of Elite-Driven Policymaking

Ryan Avent seemed to me to have the basic logic of European fiscal consolidation right: "The point at which euro-zone leaders said, 'From here on in, we're in the same boat with them', was back when the euro zone was created. That boat has sailed."

Except I gather that what happened is that the Eurozone's political leaders spent the 1990s not explaining this correctly to the citizens they purported to represent. Or, specifically, the leaders of France and Germany didn't explain it. How exactly this worked is a bit mysterious to me. Of course politicians all over the world lie, but normally you expect partisan competition to at least put this kind of issue on the table. But there seems to have been an adequate degree of elite consensus to keep the fundamental question off the table. Somehow the Brits and the Swedes escaped this fate, but the other nations of Europe (including formally non-euroized but practically pegged Denmark) are now caught up in a kind of grim machinery of financial doom. The only way to make the system workable is a level of fiscal and political integration that is, apparently, totally unacceptable to the voters. Which is fine, but the decision should have been put to them before getting the countries bound up in a remorseless logic of integration. A lot of people are going to be put through an awful lot of avoidable suffering before this ends, and I'm guessing nobody's going to say "sorry" or admit to error. If the continent's mainstream political parties manage to end up discrediting themselves in the process, it'll be hard to say they don't deserve their fate no matter how distasteful some of the rising extreme movements are in many ways.

Affordable Care Act Could And Should Lead To Free Contraceptives

I was reading this Michael Bérubé post from May and thinking of writing something about the falseness of the idea that there are hermetically sealed "economic" and "cultural" issues, when along comes an Institute of Medicine recommendation that Affordable Care Act plans ought to cover contraceptives:

The recommendations came in a report submitted to Ms. Sebelius by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The new health care law says insurers must cover "preventive health services" and cannot charge for them. Ms. Sebelius will decide on a minimum package of essential health benefits, and her decision will not require further action by Congress.

The panel said insurers should be forbidden to charge co-payments for contraceptives and other preventive services because even small charges could deter their use. The recommendation would not help women without insurance.

Right on. And a nice, small example of why whatever disgruntlements people have with President Obama, they shouldn't slight the Affordable Care Act too much. Free birth control for low income women is not nothing, and it's not the only thing in the preventive services package either. Meanwhile, naturally "the Roman Catholic Church raised strenuous objections." But you have a pretty seamless web here between social and cultural liberation and practical economic betterment. Taking human equality seriously requires that useful preventative treatments be broadly available, and taking human equality seriously also requires taking contraceptives seriously as a species of preventative medical treatment.

Doug Henwood, Neoliberal Sellout (Ironically)

Doug Henwood's discussion of Swedish monetary policy helps me to understand what it is we're disagreeing about. The title of his post is that Sweden is "no paradise of monetary ease," but he actually concedes that the Riksbank dealt with the recession through a campaign of aggressive monetary easing. It's just that the Riksbank "believes that there's not much that monetary policy can do to affect the long-term path of an economy," which is something I certainly agree with. But today I'm not that worried about the long-term path of the economy, I'm worried about 9.1 percent unemployment in the short-term. Henwood, though, says this is just a way of dodging the need for structural reform:

It doesn't have all the deep structural problems of the U.S.

So its recovery was relatively quick and strong. Not so the U.S. But the Fed remains indulgent, and is likely to stay that way for months to come.

This is normally the argument we've seen right-wingers make against all fiscal and monetary efforts to stabilize aggregate demand and boost employment. Presumably Henwood has a different set of structural reforms in mind than, say, Narayana Kocherlakota. But their argument about the recession is the same — we shouldn't try to seriously reduce joblessness in the short-run except as part of a more ambitious effort to remake the American economy. Personally, there are any number of reforms I'd like to see implemented in the United States. But I don't think that this is a constructive approach to recessions. There are a lot of people suffering right now who'd be in better shape if we boosted demand.

Change As Such Is Okay

I keep hearing that it's a straw man to say that some people have the view that local regulation should give weight to the goal of preventing change per se, but then I see Lydia DePillis report on the latest missive from Alma Gates at the Committee in 100:

Neighborhood preservation is of great concern because many of the special exception requirements under the current code will become matter-of-right under the [zoning regulations rewrite]. It is reasonable to expect some changes to neighborhoods, but their character, that which makes them unique and defined, should not change. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee neighborhood character will survive under the new zoning code. Given the proposed changes, it's reasonable to ask, "Why have zoning?" Allowed uses in zone districts will be expanded, required off street parking will be significantly diminished, setback and height measurements will change. It is reasonable to expect neighborhood character will also change.

But why? I think we can all accept that across certain margins, there's a tradeoff between certain kinds of economic efficiency goals and certain kinds of aesthetic or communitarian goals. But why should we put weight on the brute desire to avoid change as such? Even if we grant that each neighborhood is a beautiful unique snowflake with a character all of its own, it doesn't follow from that fact that each neighborhood's character should be frozen in amber forever. Indeed, I think that if you look at the "character" of any urban neighborhood in 2011, you'll see that the place was very different in 1961 or 1911. It's natural for it to be different again in 2061 and 2111. Pierre L'Enfant didn't lay the city out with a plan for subsidized automobile parking. Rather than whipping up paranoia about the very idea of change, it would make more sense to talk about what kind of changes might be desirable and by whom. How many people are we hoping the city will accommodate in 50 years? Where might they go? If the net population grows more slowly than the nationwide population, how can we improve living conditions without merely displacing existing residents?

Instead we get "A public education campaign on the scale of Time Warner's publicity for 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.' is needed to wake up residents to the fact their neighborhoods will soon be under attack by developers taking advantage of the increased density that the new code permits."

The Gang Of Six Reinvents The Wheel

My favorite gang is the postpunk Gang of Four, but for now DC is pouring over the Gang of Six proposal for deficit reduction.

There are a lot of moving parts to this proposal, but what's striking to me is that it basically seems to just land us back where we've been stuck for a while. In earlier "grand bargain" talks with John Boehner and Eric Cantor, President Obama appears to have tried to sell them on the idea that they should team up with him to cut Medicare and domestic discretionary spending and that many Democratic votes could be procured for such an agenda if it was paired with some defense cuts and tax increases. Boehner and Cantor rejected that because they're fundamentally opposed to tax increases. Indeed, they indicated that they would settle for smaller spending cuts than Obama put on the table if they could get an all cuts agreement. Now the Gang of Six has returned with what's basically Obama's "grand bargain" proposal which, in turn, was basically the Simpson-Bowles proposal. Spending cuts more or less across the board, plus some tax hikes. Maybe some Magic Senate Fairy Dust turns this into something that's acceptable to the House GOP leadership, but as a matter of logic and consistency, I don't see why that would be.

Breakfast Links: July 20, 2011

— Geography is hard.

—That's why people need to play Carmen Sandiego.

— When you can't spend, you end up regulating.

— Migraine sufferers can be president too.

— Time is, in many ways, the ultimate scarce commodity.

— Adam Smith on .

— The GOP's Mad Men budget.

— The Gang of Six plan that was released yesterday is so vague it won't actually be finished in time for the August 2 deadline.

— "It is largely policies in the creditor countries, in other words, that will determine whether or not the value of those obligations must erode in real terms."

— John Boehner doesn't seem to like the Gang of Six plan.

— Strained relations between Twitter and its ap developers.

State Pensions or: How Conservatives Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Borrowing

By Matthew Cameron

Amid relentlessly depressing news about the national economy and the federal debt situation, The Washington Post reported a rare bit of positive-sounding information this morning:

Gov. Bob McDonnell will announce Tuesday that Virginia ended the fiscal year on June 30 with a surplus of $311 million, according to the governor's office.

McDonnell (R) will outline how he will spend the surplus in a news conference on Capitol Square, though most of the money is already accounted for — including funding for roads, education and the Water Quality Improvement Fund, which is used for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup.

This is the second year Virginia has had a budget surplus after three years of revenue shortfalls when the state had to cut billions from the budget. Last year, Virginia ended the fiscal year with a surplus of about $403.2 million — almost twice the previous estimate.

Before everyone packs their bags and moves to Virginia, however, it's worth looking into this situation more closely. Did the state achieve it's sterling fiscal situation through a balanced package of spending cuts and tax increases? Did it enact a stringent austerity budget along the lines of the Cut, Cap and Balance Act that was up for debate in Congress today?

No on both counts. Instead, let's flashback to a Richmond Times-Dispatch article from last year detailing the state's plan for balancing its budget:

Virginia is taking away more than $620 million that would have been paid toward state employee and teacher pensions, but the state is leaving an IOU.

Beginning in 2013, the state will have to repay the money to the Virginia Retirement System over 10 years, with 7.5 percent interest.[...]

Sen. Walter A. Stosch, R-Henrico, called the provision the most important step taken by the assembly to protect the retirement system, even as it relies on deferred pension contributions for almost one-fourth of the money used to balance the two-year budget.

That's right, Virginia "balanced" its budget and set up this year's surplus by borrowing money from itself. Coming on top of $17.6 billion worth of unfunded pension liabilities, that would have been a rather audacious move for any governor to approve. But that's especially so for McDonnell, who is among the leading vice presidential candidates for a party that presently is waging a total war against increasing the federal government's borrowing authority.

Of course, McDonnell isn't the only conservative who has embraced these accounting gimmicks. The Virginia House of Delegates, which has a solid Republican majority, also voted for the plan. And this Pew report showed that a number of conservative-led states were guilty of underfunding their pension obligations in 2010, including those of GOP governors-turned-presidential hopefuls Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry.

Agency Problems And Political Advocacy

Obviously the most important Aaron Swartz story of the day regards his indictment on some kind of crazy charges. But this post he did yesterday about the difficulty of assessing what works in political advocacy is very good:

Delegations are a lot harder than services. In the same way you can be pretty sure that when you buy a pen it will write, you can be pretty sure that when you hire someone to paint your wall white, she'll actually do it. And if she doesn't, you can just not pay her.

But if you want to hire an interior designer, it's a mess. Let's say you pick one by looking through their portfolio and concluding that you like their work. But when they come to design your place, you hate the result. What can you do? You say that what you got looks nothing like the stuff in the portfolio and they'll just say that every space is different and so has a different result. There's no way to ever prove they did a bad job.

Political advocacy campaigns suffer, he notes, from a very extreme version of this problem. Steve Teles and Mark Schmitt wrote a smart article about the problem but I'm not sure they really "solved" it. And yet, as Swartz says it would be really nice to make progress on this: "when you stop to realize that the world is full of huge problems that can only be solved by collective action, figuring out how to inspire coordinated action most effectively doesn't just seem interesting — it seems essential."

This is one reason why I put a fair amount of emphasis on disparaging the folk theory of political change which holds something like "change happens because the president shows 'leadership' and delivers awesome speeches." Belief in that theory of change tends, I think, to distract people from the reality that it really takes massive, difficult-to-achieve feats of collective action. How exactly one goes about achieving those feats is somewhat mysterious (I'm partial to Theda Skocpol's ideas), but if you're frustrated with the pace of change this is what you need to be working on.