Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2372

The Case For Human Life

Ingrid Robeyns writes about a radical experiment in fighting poverty by giving people money in Otjivero, Nigeria. Specifically:

[A] two year experiment in which the (about) 1,000 residents of a very poor community were unconditionally given N$100 (about 10 Euro) on a monthly basis for two years (from January 2008 till December 2009). The mid-term effects (on income generating activities, health, school enrollment, reduction of the number of underweight children, …) were very positive.

What's called for now is more research, and one of the issues she wants to investigate is this:

One relates to fertility effects: if we give a BIG to each individual, also to the mothers or fathers of newborns, then there will (at least in theory!) be a financial incentive to have babies. I am one of those people who believes that (at current global fertility rates) it would be better if there were less babies on earth, so if this empirical hypothesis were true, that would be an undesirable unintended effect (which could perhaps be 'solved' by additional measures, such as limiting the number of grants the parents can claim for their children to two).

I don't really understand the concern here. Africa's less densely populated than Europe or Asia so it's not like the extra people couldn't fit. And poor Nigerians have a small ecological footprint. If you imagine a community with a fixed income generating potential, you might worry that population growth means lower per capital living standards but the hypothesis here is specifically that people would be having more children in order to raise their incomes. What's more, the beneficial impacts here ("income generating activities, health, school enrollment, reduction of the number of underweight children") seem to point in the direction of increased human capital and greater growth. Meanwhile, I dunno, to me it seems that if people want to have more babies that's more human flourishing. The idea that we should be trying to manipulate poor women's fertility as a goal of aid policy strikes me as kind of creepy (see Michelle Goldberg's awesome book for more).

So mark me down as untroubled by this possibility, and also as someone who thinks that cash grants to Nigerian villagers would be a better way of expressing America's commitment to human betterment than firing missiles. That said, given a fixed budget constraint it seems perfectly sensible to establish a "one grant per household" rule as a way of spreading the wealth around.

Gingrich Warns America May Become a Secular Atheist Country Dominated By Radical Islamists

I've seen a lot of people making fun of Newt Gingrich for his view that the anti-Christian views that allegedly dominate America will create a country that's simultaneously atheistic and subordinated to Islamism:

"I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9," Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American." [...]

The evening worship was a boisterous celebration of American patriotism. A 100-person choir sang "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" between hymns. The church's orchestra struck up the anthem for each of the five military branches and a loud cheer went up for veterans and active duty members who stood up during their song.

I think it's important to actually understand what Gingrich is saying here and not just make fun of him for contradicting himself. This speaks, I think, quite accurately to what the conservative movement in the United States is about—the identity politics of middle aged white suburban conformists. Note that Jesus Christ was not an American patriot. Indeed, there was no United States of America at the time the Gospels were written down. Nor were the early Christians some kind of Roman nationalists. But American conservatives are both Christians and Americans and it's important to them to affirm these identities simultaneously, even though it makes a bit of a hash of things. This is also why in the United States loud proclamations of Christian faith are typically associated with enormous belief in the beneficent possibilities of organized violence, but only among Christians who are also white people.

You have to think of "America" in Gingrich's eyes as constituting not so much a place as a specific tribe of people. The concern is that tribe of people might all go secular, which will leave the country exposed to takeover by radical Islamists. This is what many conservatives appear to believe has happened in Europe. A place like France has supposedly managed to both go secular and also be ground zero for Eurabia. Those two things are causally related because secularism enfeebled France by undermining support for Christian patriotic militarism, and they're non-contradictory because French Muslims aren't "really" French. This is how it gets to be the case that overturning marriage equality in Iowa is somehow a blow against the threat of creeping sharia.

Incentives To Cheat

Obviously if you try to measure performance in some field, including teaching, then this creates both an incentive to perform well and also an incentive to game the system. So I don't think we should be at all surprised that the introduction of more performance measurements into the field of K-12 education has led to a non-zero level of cheating, which is what USA Today seems to be uncovering. And to my eye, they should be applauded for their efforts. Efforts to measure performance only work if we actually try to measure performance, which requires scrutiny of potential cheaters.

But it seems to me that these revelations are leading to some weird reactions from people who appear to be implying that the possibility of cheating means we should give up on measuring performance. Alternatively, I'm seeing proponents of performance measurements just trying to hand-wave past these problems. Both responses strike me as slightly absurd. As Ryan McNeely wrote last summer the solution to the possibility of cheating is to try to catch cheaters:

A smarter response is to simply acknowledge that while assessing and acknowledging difference in teacher quality is both promising and important its promise will be undermined unless proponents address cheating. The good news is that the Jacob and Levitt study demonstrated that even very simple oversight measures, such as making teachers aware that scores will be scrutinized for irregularities, can dramatically reduce cheating frequency. As the trend toward greater reliance on tests increases, responsible policymakers will have to remain vigilant about the potential for cheating and inform themselves about the most effective countermeasures.

Dana Goldstein writes along similar lines for the Daily Beast:

Of course, creating better testing systems will be expensive, and implementing them will demand significant expertise on the part of school administrators. But as the Obama administration and national education reformers—Michelle Rhee chief among them—ask states and school districts nationwide to tie teacher evaluation scores and pay to student performance, it is crucial that we measure student academic growth in nuanced ways that encourage deep learning, not in over-simplified ways that create perverse incentives to dumb-down the curriculum and cheat.

Meanwhile, I hope that people who are skeptical about the possibility of measuring school performance will spell out in greater detail what they think the implications of this view are. Not "Michelle Rhee is a bad person" but the implications for K-12 education policy. Does this mean we should turn all education funding into an unregulated voucher? Does it mean that public schools are just a kind of intangible neighborhood benefit (like a park) that should be funded exclusively at the municipal level?

Why We Need an ACLU

Well done:

A Terrebonne Parish girl will be allowed to wear a tuxedo to her senior prom after all. Nason Authement, parish secondary education supervisor, says an exception to the policy that boys must wear tuxes or suits and girls must wear dresses or gowns will be made for 19-year-old Monique Verdin. Authement says the policy is based on long-held tradition, but will probably be changed now that attorneys have said it would not hold up in court. The ACLU of Louisiana says schools barring girls in tuxes or boys in dresses, or barring same-sex dates, are in violation of the law.

It's pretty amazing the extent to which our society goes to formally sanction gender-inappropriate attire, while simultaneously insisting that rigid gender norms are part of the law of nature.

Will Libya Kill Momentum For Defense Budget Discipline?

Carrie Budoff Brown argues, persuasively, that the limited humanitarian intervention in Libya with kinetic elements will severely hamper the previously emerging consensus that the defense budget needed some trimming. She quotes Doug Holtz-Eakin engaging in a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy:

"It is just plain vanilla that it will make it harder to cut defense in the near term," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist with close ties to congressional Republicans. "We're going to have to fund more of this than you realize."

Basically DHE is saying here that thanks to Obama's decision to go to war, the previous tensions that had been building up inside the conservative coalition on this point are now easing and the whole right-of-center establishment will get behind the idea that the Pentagon shouldn't be cut.

This is one reason why I think left-of-center hawks have been way to blithe about dismissing the fiscal concerns surrounding this mission. It's true that nothing about claiming that you're going to establish a no-fly zone in Libya and then instead offering tactical air support to rebel groups forces you to slash spending on global public health. But the mission in Libya is a shot in the arm for the politics of wasteful defense spending, and unduly high equilibrium levels of defense spending encourage further cost-ineffective "humanitarian" military adventures.

Endgame

No recess:

— I had never heard of Melissa Cosgrove until I saw this article, so I guess I'm out of touch.

— But this is right.

— Very little is done to support college students who are also parents.

— States wouldn't be so broke if they didn't cut takes so much. And related.

— Comparing apples with cows.

— Captain America stages a limited humanitarian intervention with some kinetic elements.

— A defense of the multi-camera sitcom.

Nirvana, "School".

Atlas Shrugged

I'm confused:

Why does the sexy capitalist want to build a socialistic train? If only Ayn Rand had listened to George Will.

The Birther Lexicon

Adam Serwer unveils his allowing us to grapple with the many flavors of this particular tendency. He describes Birtherism, Post-birtherism, Ironic Birtherism, and Pseudo-birtherism as the key varieties.

David Koch as told to Matt Continetti is a pseudo-birther:

David agreed. "He's the most radical president we've ever had as a nation," he said, "and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we've ever had." David suggested the president's radicalism was tied to his upbringing. "His father was a hard core economic socialist in Kenya," he said. "Obama didn't really interact with his father face-to-face very much, but was apparently from what I read a great admirer of his father's points of view. So he had sort of antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences affecting him almost all his life. It just shows you what a person with a silver tongue can achieve."

Even people like me who grew up in the same house as our father and regularly discussed political ideas with him throughout our childhood often end up a somewhat different place ideologically, but according to Koch, Obama's father's brand of Kenyan Socialism is so powerful that he was able to brainwash his son without actually speaking to him. Remarkable stuff. Meanwhile, I'm sure that David Koch's brand of "rich oil barons are awesome" ideology was in no respect inherited from his rich oil baron father.

Dental Cartel Looking To Lock Down New Business

Big Teeth

I thank Conversion Party for alerting me to the latest news from the dental licensing wars:

The State Dental Commission held a hearing in December to review whether teeth whitening should be classified as "dentistry" – a move that would result in the procedure being done only under a dentist's supervision. The commission is set to vote on the issue at its May 11 meeting. If the panel rules that it is dentistry, others who provide the service in shopping malls, salons and spas could be put out of business.

"I'm running a business in the state helping the economy," said Stephen Barraco, owner of Smile Bright, a Branford company employing five people that sells whitening products in salons.

Three of the six dentists on the state commission advertise that they offer teeth whitening in their practices, including the commission chair, Jeanne P. Strathearn, a West Hartford dentist. She declined through her staff to talk with C-HIT for this story. The commission also has three slots for non-dentist "public members." But two of those seats are vacant.

Here in the District of Columbia five of the seven members of the relevant commission must be dentists, and one of the seven must be a dental hygenist. And to be clear, this isn't a case where you're hiring technical experts for a full-time regulatory position. The idea is that you're a dentist who makes a living selling dental health services, but who also gets to use his or her authority as a regulator to shelter your business from competition. At the federal level, the revolving door at least revolves.

Catching Up With The Last Wave of DADT Victims

The Obama administration came into office promising to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, but for political reasons they took a verrrrrry slooooooow approach to actually doing it. As a political matter, this strategy has been a resounding success. But it does mean that a number of gay and lesbian soldiers found themselves being dismissed who could have been saved by a speedier policy.

Amanda Terkel did an interview with Dustin White, a former member of the New Jersey National Guard, who will hopefully be one of the last people to see his military career cut short in this manner:

"But it's still always in the back of my mind when I apply for a job," said White. "I'm always wondering whether they're going to find my record and what it's going to say. What is it going to make them think about me as a person? I did everything that I had to do in the military. I always did my job, supported other soldiers, and I performed my duties to the best of my ability. I never got in trouble, never had any disciplinary actions taken against me. If that general discharge that I received makes people think less of me in any way, it really is a shame, because I don't think I did anything to deserve that."

Being discharged also affected White financially. After he left the service, he received a letter from the military demanding that he pay back $8,000, the unearned portion of his enlistment bonus.

One of the occupational hazards of politicians and their staff is, I think, a tendency to forget that this stuff isn't just a game. There's a real human price to be paid for bad policy, and it doesn't go away even if the right side "wins" in the end.