Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 617

Britain Removes Hurdle to Shale Production

After the British Geological Survey doubled its estimates for British shale gas resources up to a sizable 1.3 quadrillion cubic feet, we wrote that shale was hale in the UK. But though our partners across the Atlantic had the most important ingredient for a shale boom (shale hydrocarbons themselves), now, more than two years later, no boom has yet materialized. The UK’s great shale hopes have so far been a non-starter, largely stymied by local opposition that has effectively stopped firms from drilling exploratory wells in the British countryside. Now, as the WSJ reports, the British government is taking steps to expedite the local approval process:

The move limits to 16 weeks the time that local governments in England have to make a decision on whether to allow a company to explore for shale gas using hydraulic fracking […]

“To ensure we get this industry up and running we can’t have a planning system that sees applications dragged out for months, or even years on end,” said U.K. Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd. Under the new rules, which take immediate effect, the government will have the power to intervene and make a decision to approve or reject applications when local authorities are taking too long.

In other words, a British minister will step into the approval process if it’s deemed that local councils are mired in discussions or are making “slow and confused” decisions. “Local authorities are still going to be very much involved, but the Secretary for State for communities and local government will now have a increased role in making sure they stick to the planning timetable”, reassured Rudd.

It often seems that when we look at shale’s progress abroad, we’re reminded of another facet of the American success story that we perhaps took for granted. In the UK’s case, councils are making decisions and having to balance a tangled mess of stakeholders with disparate concerns. In the U.S., however, by and large that decision falls to the property owner, thanks to the fact that land ownership here gives the owner mineral rights as well. When a geologist tells you that you’re sitting on a major oil or gas find in America, you’re in luck, as a payday is likely headed your way. Elsewhere in the world, that discovery will only produce dismay, as most governments retain the rights to underground resources.So Britain is striking a match in the hopes of lighting the shale fuse. We’ll have to wait and see if it catches.

Millennials as Traditionalists

Are Millennials just conventional Americans after all? For the last several years, pundits have been fascinated by millennials’ social and romantic habits and captivated by the received wisdom that Americans born after 1980 will turn out to be progressive individualists, skeptical of marriage and the nuclear family. But more and more data is calling that picture into question. The latest: a new study by the research group Demographic Intelligence, which shows that while Millennials have been delaying wedlock, they ultimately will opt for relatively traditional family structures. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Demographic Intelligence predicts that ultimately about 60% of the children of millennials will be born to married parents, up from about 45% today.

“The narrative about millennials has been they’re putting parenthood before marriage, never going to get married,” said Sam Sturgeon, president of Demographic Intelligence, based in Charlottesville, Va. “Now that the cohort is in the middle of their 20s, from here on out you’re going to see a lot of millennial marriages and a lot of millennial married births.”

This isn’t the only way this generation’s behavior has defied expectations of its supposed cultural liberalism. As the New York Times recently reported, “millennial men have the least traditional notions about gender roles of any generation or time period”, but are still opting for a more or less traditional division of work and family responsibilities with their partners.

Millennials may turn out to be more similar to the Baby Boomers than they would like to admit. In the 1960s and 1970s, Boomers seemed to be fiercely socially progressive and eager to experiment with alternative social arrangements. Their generation was expected to upend American political and social life. But as they grew older, the Boomers’ radicalism slowly abated, and they married, had children, and lived relatively conventional lifestyles. Perhaps today’s young people are following a similar trajectory.

How Low Can It Go?

The People’s Bank of China hastily convened a rare press conference today to acknowledge that it was intervening in the market to prop up the sagging yuan, while at the same time still insisting that it will stick to its more market-based approach to determining the currency’s value on a day-to-day basis. The Financial Times:

On Thursday, Yi Gang, deputy PBoC governor, said the central bank would continue to step into the market to guide the currency to an appropriate level when it felt it was becoming “too volatile”.

“This kind of managed exchange rate system is appropriate for China’s national conditions,” Mr Yi said. “When market fluctuations are too big, we can carry out effective management to provide the market with more confidence towards the exchange rate system and ensure greater stability in the market and the functioning of the economy.”

The yuan was down more than 1 percent in early trading on Thursday, but recovered half its losses after the PBOC presser. The currency is currently down more than 3.3 percent since Monday’s big surprise. And the floor may not yet be in sight. Reuters was told by sources that “some powerful voices within government were pushing for the yuan to go still lower, suggesting pressure for an overall devaluation of almost 10 percent.” The Financial Times, meanwhile, speculated that authorities may have wanted a drop of only up to 5 percent, but having now opened up Pandora’s box by unleashing long-suppressed market forces, are looking at a drop as steep as 15 percent. The PBOC denied all such rumors.

As WRM wrote yesterday, the consequences of these kinds of currency movements could be profound:

The fact that leaders in Beijing determined that devaluation is necessary is more evidence that the economic troubles we’ve been seeing in China are more than a blip on the screen. […]

China is exporting deflation. Overproduction of key materials and goods in China—the Great Bubble of excess manufacturing capacity that powered much of China’s massive growth but is now a greater and greater burden—is forcing Beijing to reduce the price of its exports so that companies can sell more of their excess production at lower prices abroad.This is going to hit two important economic sectors and the countries who depend on them: there will be additional deflationary pressure on commodities worldwide, and there will also be deflation in the cost of manufactured goods. When China’s currency loses value against the dollar, everything at Walmart gets a little cheaper. That’s good for consumer standards of living, but bad for the firms competing to sell stuff that China makes.

If Beijing really is determined to pursue this kind of policy, it’s going to be a bumpy ride to the bottom.

Assad Retreats Further

The Assad regime continues to falter in Syria as international actors continue to discuss its fate. The Times of London:

The Syrian government pulled back its forces from most of the Sahl al-Ghab plain, a strategic 40-mile-wide corridor. They now occupy a defensive line along the eastern edge of mountains that form the historical heartland of the Alawite sect.

The new front line puts rebel forces within striking distance of the city of Hama, to the south, and its vulnerable supply lines. Also threatened is the village of Qardaha, the ancestral home of the Assads.

As Walter Russell Mead wrote yesterday, the Obama Administration seems to be open to letting Iran fill the vacuum in Syria as it thinks there is no credible Sunni alternative, in hopes that Tehran will become a “responsible stakeholder” in the region. The Administration is also bringing Russia back into prominence in Middle Eastern diplomacy in a way not seen since the Cold War. Iran and Russia, Assad’s principal backers, for their part now appear more open to brokering some kind of an end to the conflict as well. As Joshua Landis, the author of the indispensable Syria Comment told the Times:

“I think the military situation is deteriorating for Assad rapidly. There is a general sense of an emergency and a looming defeat. […] Obviously the world powers are very frightened there could be a sudden collapse and that is why we are seeing Moscow, the U.S., Turkey, Saudi, etc. all putting their heads together. The great fear is a chaotic ending, that the international community will have no influence once the wheels come off.”

Well the diplomats better act fast, or they could lose their best chance to save Assad’s skin.

Quality Up, Price Down

Buried inside an otherwise interesting article over at the FT about how Japanese men are increasingly bargain-hunting at ¥100 shops (the Japanese equivalent of dollar stores) is an important detail that gives us insight into how we fail to correctly measure the modern economy:

In the next reshuffle of goods used to calculate Japan’s consumer price index, compilers are likely to remove coffee cups and wine glasses — items that are now so frequently bought in Y100 shops they are no longer meaningful within a family’s average monthly spend.

There is just a lot more usable stuff at the ¥100 price point than there used to be. This reflects three important trends of recent years: the cost of manufacturing has fallen, the cost of good design has fallen (so low end products look better and last longer than they used to), and retail margins have also fallen in a broadly more competitive age.

John Kay, writing elsewhere in the FT, notes that the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne has deputized a former deputy governor of the Bank of England to look with fresh eyes at how official statistics are compiled. This part gets it just right:

The data framework within which economic analysis is conducted is largely the product of the second world war. In the 1930s American economist Simon Kuznets began to elaborate a system of national accounts. That work was given impetus when the war led governments to take control of important sectors of economic activity. It was soon realised that this required far better data than had previously existed, which in turn raised the challenge of how best to structure such information.

The framework of national accounts constructed then, and the indices and other tools derived from it, have been the basis of data collection by statistical agencies around the world ever since. The UN has provided a forum for international standardisation. And yet the wartime origins of the processes linger into current practice. […]We look at aggregate statistics and worry about the slowdown in growth and productivity. But the evidence of our eyes seems to tell a different story.

As we look ahead to the rest of the 21st century, it’s critical to remember that the tools we use to get a sense of how well things are going are increasingly failing to capture important measures of progress. The problem is this: when two cars have a fender-bender, GDP goes up by about $5000. But when somebody realizes that her old car is actually still running like new and decides she doesn’t need to buy a new one that year, our economic stats take a hit.

Changing out the gauges that economists use to see how well the economy is humming along will not be easy—and it will certainly not happen overnight. But countries around the world at least appear to be waking up to the fact that we need new ones, because the ones in place are just not giving accurate readings.

The Developed World Is Unprepared for Climate Summit

As national commitments continue to trickle in ahead of this December’s climate summit in France, we’re starting to get an idea of the starting positions delegates will be working off of. The developed world—those nations primarily responsible for the current amount of carbon emissions and therefore the group expected to take the lead in mitigation and adaptation techniques—seems to be on a path to committing to reducing emissions 30 percent by 2030, from 2010 levels. As Reuters reports, that won’t be nearly enough to satisfy climate scientists:

A Reuters review of national pledges shows that a core group of developed nations intends to cut emissions to the equivalent of 9.0 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030 from 12.2 billion in 2010. […]

“The overall ambition of the developed countries is still not sufficient,” said Niklas Hoehne, founding partner of the New Climate Institute that tracks pledges, referring to a U.N. goal of limiting rising temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.Last year the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said rich nations that were members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in 1990 should halve emissions by 2030 from 2010 to limit warming.

The gap between a 30 percent cut in emissions and a 50 percent one is enormous, and it’s sure to be seized upon by the developing world as a sign that the West isn’t ready to commit to solving the problem. There’s already a wide gap between the developed and developing worlds’ positions on climate change: the former got us into this mess, while the latter looks to exacerbate the problem further in future decades as it industrializes. You can be sure the third world will harp on that discrepancy between the developed nations’ targets and what the IPCC recommended in the Paris negotiations.

Officials close to the summit have spent the summer backpedaling in a desperate attempt to deflate expectations. Talks in the run-up to the conference have failed to pare down the 80+ page draft text, while the UN’s own climate chief admitted that Paris won’t put the world on the path towards avoiding 2 degrees Celsius of warming, again defying IPCC recommendations. And whatever document Paris produces, you can be sure it won’t be binding to its signatories, as at the very least Congress will refuse to ratify any such agreement. A watered-down unenforceable climate deal lies just ahead. Is this the best way to be spending precious political capital in the fight against climate change

Snow White and the Seventeen Dwarfs

Fair Warning: I know that my readers expect that every week my blog will contain profound observations about the endlessly fascinating religious landscape. Not this week, where I will make some sardonic comments about the current political scene in the U.S. This scene, which is increasingly surreal, has little to do with religion (beyond the fatuous rhetoric of American politicians). Except in one way: Politics takes place in everyday life, which is covered by the news media and which Alfred Schutz called the “paramount reality”, because its reality is so powerful that it blots out all other realities. When everyday reality begins to seem “surreal”, the idea dawns that maybe it is not as real as one thought. Perhaps there are other realities. Religion is the intuition, and indeed the hope, that this is so. Put differently, the “surreal” is, at least potentially, an antechamber of the supernatural.

On July 6, 2015, as The Boston Globe reported, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court threw out a law which prohibits the publication of false statements about a candidate for public office. A candidate had sued under that law, which the Court now deemed to be unconstitutional, because it violates the constitutional right to free speech. I took the trouble of actually reading the Court’s decision. Basically the decision said that the courts should not be asked to usurp the electorate’s right to decide what is acceptable in political controversies; if one does not like what is said in political speech, the democratic remedy is counter-speech, not recourse to judges. I am not a lawyer, but I find this argument persuasive. However, a lay person might conclude that the law now gives every political actor a constitutional license to lie. Given the legendary recklessness of American political discourse (hardly worse today than it has ever been), this may enhance the plausibility of Mark Twain’s pithy advice: “Don’t vote; it only encourages them”. It also recalls a conversation between an interviewer and H.L. Mencken, another jaundiced commentator on American life: “If you feel this way about the country, Mr. Mencken, why do you choose to live in America?” – “Why does a man go to the circus?”So as not to be misunderstood, I will make a personal comment here: I don’t know about Mencken, but I actually chose to live in America. I didn’t choose to come here; I immigrated with my parents when I was barely eighteen; but I chose to stay here. When I had become seriously notorious, I had two plausible feelers about applying for professorships in my native Austria. It was tempting. One feeler was from Vienna; if I had successfully pursued it, I would have become a very big fish in a very small pond. There would have been a number of cultural attractions. Starbuck’s is a grotesque parody of the central-European coffee house; there are few Gothic cathedrals or Baroque palaces in America; it would be relaxing to resume citizenship in a very unimportant country of eight million, as against the most powerful country in the world country in the world with 319 million. [When I occasionally visit Austria, I open a local newspaper over breakfast. Big headline: Coalition government threatened by huge scandal in Finance Ministry. I have no idea what the scandal is. I don’t care, don’t have to care. Nobody cares. Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), famous Austrian poet – barely known outside Austria – wrote somewhere: “Denn die Groesse ist gefaehrlich”/”For greatness is dangerous”. I have been a citizen of the United States almost of my adult life. I am supposed to care about every country from Vietnam to Venezuela—just as the Pentagon has a command for every strategically important region in the world!] But I am digressing. There are good reasons for wanting to live in America: The sturdiness of its democratic institutions (despite the crimes and follies that have marked their history). The diversity of its culture and the vitality of its intellectual life. The space it allows for individuals to re-invent themselves and to create innovative enterprises (even in bureaucratized academia). The vigor of the American language and of American humor. Having thus re-affirmed my long-standing American patriotism, I turn to the so-called first “debate” of all the 17 Republican presidential candidates, selected by fiat of the polls, as interpreted by Fox News (frequently attacked as a mouthpiece of the Republican party, for which reason the Fox interviewers were especially aggressive in their questions, to demonstrate that their nastiness is non-partisan). The event impressed me as a sort of Hollywood remake of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale of Snow White and the 17 Dwarfs . One looks anxiously for any individual who might stand out as a credible commander-in-chief and winner in a contest with Hillary Clinton, thus far standing alone as a highly miscast Snow White against the Republican circular firing squad. The candidates were divided in accordance with their respective standings in the polls: 10 putative winners performing in a packed auditorium, 7 putative losers relegated to a virtually empty space (Fox allowed no visitors to what looked like the kiddies’ party—I would think that some court would decide that this arrangement was unconstitutional since it pre-empted the choice of the electorate). It is not for me to say here who, in this formidable array, most shows signs of adulthood. I can only say that I will not dissent from the general view (non-partisan) that Donald Trump is running as Bozo the Clown. The good news is that, if one leaves aside the predictable pieces of red meat thrown to the two (not quite overlapping) core constituencies of Tea Party and Evangelicals, no one except Bozo gets a gold medal for outright lying. Though I will mention one disappointment I had—about Mike Huckabee: I rather liked him, because he was good if accompanied by a guitar and because he was believable as a person with a genuine religious commitment. But he was decidedly out of line when he implied that Obama’s Iran deal is a collusion with the Ayatollahs to lure Israelis into a new Holocaust.Hillary, willy-nilly the Belle of the Ball, has her own need to throw red meat to core constituencies (supposedly Methodist, she must continually re-affirm that she is for abortion without limits and for exhaustive LGBT rights), and she has her own issues that require her to skirt the truth a bit (Benghazi, huge numbers of deleted emails on her illicit servers). But her main problem is more basic: Nobody likes her—not even those who intend to vote for her. Apparently she has been advised that she must show more personal warmth. She tries, keeps talking about being a grandmother. Well, we’ll see whether this will work to erase the image of an ice-cold power junkie. Thus far there is no plausible challenger. Elizabeth Warren (her Massachusetts fans call her “our fighting Cherokee senator”) is so far to the left that she is probably un-electable; Joe Biden, if he should decide to come in, has a certain problem with gravitas and a habit of putting his foot in his mouth. Yet the most intriguing candidate running as a Democrat is Bernie Sanders, independent (party-unaffiliated) senator from Vermont. He combines one electoral plus with two electoral minuses—he is Jewish (survey data show that Jews are number one on any list of most-liked people), but he is also an avowed socialist and described as “unabashedly irreligious” (these two items almost certainly make him unelectable, except maybe in a constituency of refugees from the 1960s who moved to bucolic Vermont to work in pottery and handmade jewelry). But on August 7, 2015, Religious News Service reported that Sanders has accepted to speak in September at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, the fundamentalist institution founded by Jerry Falwell and now headed by his son. The event will be at the start of the Jewish High Holidays. Sanders explained his acceptance by saying that he wants to reach out to people with whom he disagrees on many things, and that this would make him a good president. Maybe so. Survey data have also found that more Evangelicals than Jews believe that God gave the Holy Land to his chosen people. Although I do not generally give advice to political candidates, I would suggest to Sanders to be very quiet about socialism in Lynchburg, but to attend a local or nearby synagogue ostentatiously wearing a yarmulke. (Only in America!)On August 5, 2015 President Obama, on the eve of the Republican extravaganza, made his much-awaited speech on the nuclear deal with Iran, which has yet to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. To say that the speech was aggressive is a gross understatement. As usually oozing with hubris, Obama asserted that this was an “interim deal”, that it would be reliably verified, and that, if Iran were to cheat, “all options remain on the table” (including resumption of sanctions and, by implication, military action). He conceded that the deal was not ideal, but that the only alternative was ”some sort of war”. I, on my part, will agree that this is a very difficult situation, and that this may well be the best deal under the circumstances. But there is good reason to be skeptical about both sides. Iran has a long history of cheating on its international commitments, including promises to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities. Obama downplayed this fact. But there is also reason to be skeptical about Obama’s reaction if Iran did not abide by the deal. After the euphoria likely to be unleashed by an agreement it would be very difficult to re-impose sanctions—not only domestically, but in terms of getting Russia and China to go along. As to the “option” of military action, this threat is empty coming from the Obama administrations overriding policy of appeasement toward Russia and China, and of “no boots on the ground” (at least not American ones) in the Middle East. No gold medals for truth-telling to the Obama administration either! In his column in The New York Times on August 7, 2015, David Brooks (who has generally been rather mild in his criticisms of Obama) wrote that there have been two previous strategic defeats of the United States in Vietnam and in Iraq—and that this “partial surrender” to Iran is the third. (I think that Brooks could have added Libya, Syria and Afghanistan to this dismal list). Brit Hume, on Fox Notes, was less restrained in characterizing the Iran speech: he called it “dishonest, partisan, insulting”. However one wants to understand the deal with Iran—perhaps the best of several bad options—it is unlikely to be the jewel in the crown of Obama’s achievements in foreign policy (not to mention the record of truth-telling transparency in his administration.I don’t want to end on a depressing note. I continue to have confidence in the future of the American experiment in democracy. In conclusion I just want to inform my readers of two new items that might interest them: 1) Pope Francis, advised by a committee of Brazilian nuns, is composing an encyclical to gays and lesbians to assure them of his deep affection. The title of the encyclical is “Carissimi tutti frutti” – loosely translated as “Beloved Fruitcakes”. 2) After giving the matter serious thought, I have accepted the invitation to serve as national chairman of “Monica Lewinski for President”.

Low Oil Prices Are Here to Stay

At least, that’s the impression the International Energy Agency (IEA) is giving with its latest report that predicts, among other things, that the oversupply in the global oil market will persist through the end of next year. Prices plunged to six year lows this week, less than half of their levels last summer, on tepid demand in Europe and Asia and booming American and OPEC supplies. The WSJ reports that, though the IEA’s report doesn’t paint a worst-case scenario, it does claim the oversupply has staying power:

The IEA did warn that the oversupply is likely to persist as global production “continues to grow at a breakneck pace.” […]

Many, however, are expecting further selling in the days to come. The IEA said that many in the industry see oil prices staying lower for longer as “muscular pumping” from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ top producers Saudi Arabia and Iraq is adding to the global glut.“While a rebalancing has clearly begun, the process is likely to be prolonged as a supply overhang is expected to persist through 2016—suggesting global inventories will pile up further,” the IEA said. 

Contributing to the global oversupply will be Iranian exports, due to be unleashed in the coming months as Western sanctions are lifted as part of the nuclear deal (if, that is, the deal goes through). If and when that happens, the country could begin to increase its daily oil production by as many as 730,000 barrels, according to new IEA estimates. “While significantly higher production is unlikely before next year, oil held in floating storage—at the highest level since sanctions were tightened in mid-2012—could start to reach international markets before then”, the report said. On the whole, the country could increase total monthly output from July’s 2.87 million barrels per day to 3.4-3.6 million “within months” of sanctions relief. The IEA’s estimates are more restrained than Iran’s own, but nevertheless they provide further evidence that the global oil glut is here to stay.

But while it appears that the supply side of the market will keep prices from rebounding significantly in the near future, a forecasted increase in demand should help stop the slide. This is, after all, a buyer’s market, and global demand is expected to increase at its fastest rate in five years in 2015. For sellers like petrostates and American shale producers, however, the picture is grim, as bargain rates seem here to stay.

UK Goes Scott Walker

No longer bound by the constraints of coalition government, the British Conservatives are embracing their inner Scott Walker. The Guardian reports:

Up to 3.8 million public sector workers will lose the right to have their trade union subscriptions automatically deducted from their pay cheques after the government announced plans to end the “outdated practice”.[…]

Under the proposals, it is claimed that administrative costs will be saved in the public sector as 3.8 million trade union members – 54% of the public sector workforce – are told to make their own arrangements to pay their union subscription, mainly by direct debit. Unions say this will lead to a loss in funds by making subscription payments more complicated.

Of course, the Conservative proposal to end automatic dues collection in the UK may seem somewhat small bore; it isn’t, at least, as dramatic as what Gov. Walker has done in Wisconsin. But the Conservatives aren’t just trying to roll back government-enforced dues collection; they are also pursuing other union reform proposals:

Union leaders will say that the change is another example of the government’s hostile approach to their movement after the publication of the trade union bill earlier this month, which included plans to criminalise picketing and to raise the threshold in a strike ballot by requiring that at least 40% of those asked to vote support the strike in key public services.

The UK is not exactly a bastion of right-wingery. As a hoary political joke has it: In the UK, they have two parties—the Labour Party, which we in the U.S. would call the Socialist Party, and the Conservative Party, which we in the U.S. would also call the Socialist Party. And in the American context, Wisconsin is not a particularly right-wing state. Why are unions not getting their way in these places?

The answer is not, pace the wailings of Richard Trumka, a labor leader and Scott Walker critic, that Gov. Walker is some unique right-wing monster—and the same holds true for British PM David Cameron. As Richard Aldous pointed out in a must-read essay yesterday, the British voters reelected Cameron because of, not despite, his austerity and reform agenda; likewise, Wisconsin voters chose three times to keep Scott Walker in office.To the moderate voter, it seems faintly ludicrous that public sector unions, alone of all political advocacy groups, are entitled to government-enforced dues collection. And then, that voter opens the London papers and sees that unionized public sector workers such as London’s tube drivers, who make far more than that same average voter, are going to strike for the second and third time this month over issues that have nothing to do with safety, job security, or any of the supposed traditional arguments for unionization. (The rural-American equivalent would be a school strike in a Wisconsin town over pension and health contribution levels that the average voter can only dream of.)The waning of the blue model isn’t just an American phenomenon. The inability of Western countries to support and pay for lavish public sector pensions and benefits is becoming more apparent. Voters are giving politicians on both sides of the pond a mandate to do some remodeling.

Homeschooling Goes Mainstream

Homeschooling—once thought to be the province of diehard evangelicals, political radicals, and others with ideological reasons to steer clear of public education—is increasingly being embraced by the middle-class city-dwellers who are simply disappointed with the quality of urban schools and helped by the way new technologies are reducing the need for professional teachers. That’s the takeaway from a feature by Matthew Hennessey in the current issue of City Journal, a piece which argues that more and more of America’s 2 million homeschooled children are from urbanite families:

Like other homeschoolers these days, urbanites choose homeschooling for various reasons, though dissatisfaction with the quality and content of instruction at local public schools heads the list. “I got through public school, but it was never something I thought was an option for my children,” says Figueroa-Levin [a New York journalist]… She calls her local public school “awful,” but she’s not interested in moving to a more desirable school zone, as some New Yorkers with small children do. “We like where we live. We have a nice-size apartment. Sacrificing all that for a decent public school just doesn’t seem worth it,” she says. […]

The current crop of homeschoolers has one major advantage over the movement’s pioneers: modern technology has put all of history’s collected knowledge at their fingertips. No homeschooling parent need become an expert on differential equations or Newton’s Third Law of Motion. He or she can simply visit YouTube’s Khan Academy channel and find thousands of video lectures on these topics. Rosetta Stone, the well-known foreign-language software company, offers a specially tailored homeschool reading curriculum for just $99 per year. Wade’s children use a free website called Duolingo to practice Spanish. And many popular curriculum packages and distance-learning education programs provide Skype-based tutorials, online courses, and other learning supports.

As we’ve noted before, the rise of homeschooling is a portrait in miniature of the blue model’s collapse. Many of the parents Hennessey interviewed choose homeschooling because of the ongoing failure of a blue model institution: the bureaucratic, sclerotic public school system, dominated by teachers’ unions. Meanwhile, innovative, post-blue education-delivery models—online learning in particular—are providing a viable alternative for parents not content with simply tolerating the poor quality of a system desperately in need of reform. Similar trends are at work in other critical sectors of the economy, from healthcare to transportation to retirement benefits.

The changing demographics of homeschoolers may spill over into education politics in interesting ways. As Hennessey notes, homeschooling was once a critical culture war flashpoint, pitting rural evangelicals against urban liberals. Now that key Democratic constituencies—not just the middle-class urbanites Hennessey interviewed, but also African-Americans and Silicon Valley engineers—are opting out of the public school system, the political valence of the issue is sure to shift. Perhaps—hopefully—it will lead to a bipartisan consensus that our public education system is in need of major reforms in order to stay competitive.