Bleg
A number of people have recommended getting tailored clothes while in Vietnam. Does anyone have a recommendation for a specific tailor in Hanoi?
« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 »
October 2007 Archives
October 31, 2007
A commenter asks
. . . but don't I support paying for poor people to get medical care?
Sort of, yes, but it's complicated, and looks absolutely nothing like what Ezra wants, which is a system that covers 95% of Americans while perhaps 5% pay extra for private care. My idea about helping the poor get medical care is more about helping them enter the private system, not exit it. If I were in charge, the government share of healthcare would shrink, not rise--I'd provide more for some kids and poor workers, but a lot less for old people.
Reminder
Every single time I write about health insurance, commenters and emailers flock to tell me that I wouldn't feel this way if I, or anyone I know, had been sick and uninsured.
I'm afraid the empirical evidence indicates that you're wrong. I was uninsured, with asthma and an autoimmune disease, for years as a freelancer. I was then, if anything, more opposed to national health insurance than I am now. If I were blocked from knowing, through a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, whether or not I would be uninsured for the rest of my life, I would still be opposed to nationalizing health care. 95% of the time when this accusation is made, I know a lot more about being sick and uninsured than my accuser. Don't criticize until you've walked a mile in my Medicaid mill . . .
It's the system, man
I was reading Matt Zeitlin on Social Security, a post in which he says:
The real problem with her argument is that Obama’s rhetoric on Social Security buys into a particular frame — that social security reform is an urgent agenda item — that really serves two purposes: One, to find a large “crises” that the David Broders of the world can blame on both parties and two, to create an enviroment where conservative proposals to destroy Social Security will become acceptable (Garance collected some great quotes to this effect).
This echoes the accusation that I want to "Destroy the public school system". There's an implication that conservatives have no reasons for this--just a wanton desire to destroy anything good, especially if it goes against their weird, talismanic belief in the markets.
Forgive me if I suggest that this itself implies a weird, talismanic belief in the superiority of the status quo. A lot of the articles I read from the left simply assume that the school system, or the social security is worthy of defense.
But I come neither to praise public programs, nor to bury them. To me, the programs are a means to an end: educating all of America's children, keeping the old and weak from starving. The question is, do they do a good job at reaching these ends, and at what cost?
If I were designing a system to serve these ends from scratch, would they look anything like the current system? No, obviously, because I'm a libertarian; my solution would look a lot like a means-tested voucher. But even a liberal trying to put together a school system or a retirement program would be very unlikely to design anything even remotely like what we have today. So why are they so hysterical about "destroying the system"? I'm interested in the people it serves, not the bureaucracy and the buildings.
Will Wilkinson explains it all to you
A peek into the shadowy world of libertarian think tanks:
Stogsdill is an underrated innovator. He was, by the way, demonstrating what happens when grandiosely interventionist foreign policy attempts to prop up puppet regimes. For my part, last week I had a functioning Rawlsekianism going strong inside a Mount Rushmore snow globe.
No, I can't explain. Just read the whole thing.
Tarzan confused
Tyler Cowen sums up what a lot of us are feeling right now:
The housing sector is down twenty percent and the price of oil is flirting with $90 a barrel, maybe $100 to come. Yet the quarterly growth rate was just reported at 3.9%:The economy expanded faster than expected in the third quarter, led by a surge in consumer spending and exports, the government reported today.It is wrong to think we have turned the corner, but it is also wrong to think the doomsayers understand what is going on.
I have been expecting a recession for several quarters now. So far, I have been consistently wrong.
Politically, I think this is going to make things very interesting. I presume a Democrat will be elected in 2008. The longer we go without a recession now, the more likely it is that whatever Democrat we elect will have a deep recession during their presidency, something that hasn't happened to them since Carter. Cactus may think the Democrats have some magic economic mojo, but I'm betting on the business cycle. Don't get me wrong--we've still got a year to go, and I think it's more likely that Bush will catch the end of the current expansion than his successor.
The next term is going to be pretty interesting, in terms of watching what wonks say about presidential impacts on the economy. If Bush doesn't end up with a recession on his watch, the next person in office will almost certainly catch a nasty twofer: a deepening hole opening up in the budget due to entitlements, and a recession that will make any such problems desperately worse. I expect a neat (and amusing) flip between Democrats proclaiming that deficits don't matter, and anyway, the president has limited power over the economy; and Republicans righteously screaming about fiscal responsibility.
No exit
Ezra says that my position on exit from the public school system makes no sense:
Her argument, in a nutshell, is, "Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don't." What? Since when do libertarians think making something cost money is the same as prohibiting you to do it? Poor kids can exit the system. They just need to become rich kids. But does Megan apply this theory widely? Does she agree that the Federal Government should pay for all Americans to have health insurance from any insurer, either public or private, that they want, at least until Aetna begins working better? Because if she does, then I've massively misunderstood her writing up till this point. If she doesn't, however, then her constant screech of hypocrite throughout this argument makes no sense -- particularly given that she has awesome, employer-funded insurance, while all millions of Americans are trapped on the individual market.
But this . . . makes no sense.
We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day. Affluent parents get to choose which system they participate in; poor parents don't. I think poor kids also have a right to exit the schools if they aren't--as they are not--getting a decent education.
The critique also fails because the fact that I think (as I do) that the government should buy education for those who cannot does not mean that I think it should buy every other good out there. There are many goods that poor people can't afford to buy. Some of them we think of as basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to secure for themselves, like food and housing. Some of them are not basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to buy, like BMWs. As a society, we've decided that education is one of those goods, and I wholeheartedly agree. That's why, when the government system doesn't work, I think it has an obligation to provide those without means a way to exit the system, just as when the local county mental hospital has a fire, the government has an absolute moral obligation to put the patients somewhere else rather than forcing them to squat in the ruins because they're planning a big new building that will be available no later than 2031.
But that doesn't mean I think the government needs to allow us to exit from every system that is less than ideal. I can only buy pants at about four stores in America, and that's a damn shame, but it doesn't cry out to heaven for (government imposed) justice. The fact that Ezra believes that universal health insurance is also a good the government should supply does not impose on me the need to agree with him--and indeed, as I've said at unfortunate length, I don't. The "gotcha" only works if I really, secretly, in my heart of hearts, think healthcare is in the same class of goods as education. The notion that deep down, libertarians really know that liberals are right is widespread, but guys, I swear: honest, way down deep, in the uttermost depths of our souls, we really do think your ideas about domestic social programs are dead wrong.
What's even weirder--and Ezra is not the first person to bring this up--is that Medicaid works on my model, not theirs. Medicaid recipients meet the income barrier, and then they go to any doctor who will take their Medicaid card. No one forces them to go to the nearest doctor, or asks them to apply to the doctor lottery. That's what the NHS does, and almost everyone in the liberal health care policy establishment, including, IIRC, Ezra, agrees that it is a really bad system for providing health care. At least, I think that's what they believe, because every time the NHS comes up, they rush to assure me that when we have national health insurance, it won't be some crappy, government-run system like the NHS; it'll be like France where you get to (wait for it) choose your doctor and have the government pay. It's almost like the government was giving you a voucher or something.
What I want to know from Ezra, and other liberal policy wonks who support a France-type system is: why is education special? I have a model for what goods the government should buy versus what goods the government should actually provide directly; it has to do with geography, non-excludability, and transaction costs. But what is your model for saying that education is in a special class of goods that are rival and excludable, have ordinary levels of transaction costs, and yet nonetheless need to be provided directly by the government? Any of the problems that distinguish education from other goods, like inelastic demand, information asymmetries, and performance measurement difficulties, apply to health care as well, perhaps more so. So why do you want healthcare by la Sécurité sociale, but education by the NHS?
Happy Halloween
You wan to be really frightened? Watch two physicist prove--scientifically--that ghosts don't obey known physical laws.
October 30, 2007
I recently came across a cable channel devoted specially to older viewers. Now I can't find it. Anyone know what it is?
This one's for Freddie and Kate
I lied: I have to respond. I didn't call you hypocrites. You do not, as far as I know, have children.
I reserve the charge of hypocrite for parents who have moved to good school districts, but "support public schooling" by voting against vouchers. The rest of you, I think are wrong, but perfectly fine, moral, upstanding human beings. 'Kay?
Addenda
I don't. Care. About. The. Teachers.
I don't dislike them. Nor do I like them. I don't care whether they are, or are not, represented by a union. I think they should be paid more, not because they're lovely, special people, but because I hope that would let us attract and retain a higher caliber of teacher.
I care about educating the kids. Once we have done that, we can turn to arguments about the teachers. Until then, paeans to what great people public school teachers are are just completely irrelevant. The janitors are probably great guys too, but the school is not there for their benefit. If it made the kids better off to fire them all tomorow, I'd happily sign the order to do so. I mean, I'd feel bad for them. But not enough to keep them employed at the expense of educating the kids.
Nor am I interested in vouchers because I'm trying to prove a point. If the public schools in inner cities were managing to educate more than a handful of the students, this would be somewhere on my list of priorities around "privatizing the post office". The existence of public schools qua public schools simply doesn't interest me. The only goal I am interested in discussing is educating the kids. Any other goals, people, or ideology attached to the school system are stunningly uninteresting until that primary purpose has been met.
Suburban parents exit the system for three very good reasons: one, the system is completely broken. Two, they don't have the faintest clue how to fix it--by which I mean, actually make any significant part of the system function normally. Three, it is not the job of the child to fix the system. It is our job to provide him an education. He should be expected to remain in the system only if the system can do that; otherwise, he has a right to get educated elsewhere while we try to fix it. And if we can't help everyone, then at least as many as possible should be so aided.
Now I'm done talking about vouchers. Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don't. My model of voucher beliefs predicts that people will get angry at me when I challenge their beliefs without changing their minds, and indeed, they are right. And myself, I'm too angry on the subject to do much good. The people saying that they want details before they'll commit: look, obviously design matters. If you concede the right of exit, I'm happy to debate details. But until you do, it's a waste of time.
Back to morality
I know, I'm flogging a dead horse. Fly, Flicka! Fly, damn you!
It boils down the fact that I think either exit is the proper moral response to a failing system, or it isn't. It can't be good for some people, but not for others.
Many people trying to convince me that suburban liberal parents against vouchers are not gigantic, honking hypocrites, are groping towards an economic concept. Conceding that they think the school environment does make a difference (otherwise they wouldn't have moved to a good district), they say that it's okay to pull your kid out of a system that's failing, because unless other parents stay, yours won't do any good. But its still okay to bar those who cannot afford to escape on their own means from using government means to do so, because the system will collapse.
Let me give you a word for the concept you're expressing: economists (and other sorts of social scientists) call it a collective action problem. It's a problem that arises when we can all be made better off by doing something, but only if we all do it at once. If only some people participate, the system breaks down.
One classic example is casual Fridays. Say you work at a competitive workplace where everyone tries to dress up as much as possible in order to impress their superiors. Everyone would be better off if the uniform were converted downwards into something cheaper and more comfortable. But without some means of enforcement, some brown-noser will show up in a suit to get an edge, and pretty soon we'll all be back in suits and ties. (Or in my case--eek!--panty hose).
There are a variety of ways that have been explored to overcome these problems; the general solution is management fiat, combined with shunning those who violate the code. Fiat is generally the easiest (which is not to say the best) solution to the problem.
Voucher opponents are essentially saying, "It's a collective action problem. I bow to the inevitable, even though I don't like it."
And actually, I agree: it is a collective action problem, and moreover, one that is not reasonably amenable to fiat. I see no way, unless education radically changes, to keep schools from being fairly geographically concentrated. Nor any way to force yuppies to stay put when they spawn. After the other parents have left, you are entitled to leave to.
Here's the thing, though: collective action problems rarely have partial solutions. If exit is the correct solution for players 1-55, it is also the correct solution for players 56-200. Once you have committed to exit, you are committing to the fact that other players will either follow, or suffer terribly. Having conceded that exit is the best thing for your child, you imply that it is also the best action for every other player. Moreover, as the person near the head of the queue, your exit is much more damaging to the system than the exit of the 100th player. You exited because you could, not because you had a moral right to; the 100th player has a much greater moral right to exit than you do.
Saying that it is moral for you to exit the system, while denying exit to the 100th player, is the economic equivalent of "might makes right". You have no greater moral right to exit than that 100th player; in fact, considerably less of one. You merely have the economic means.
And that's something that liberals are supposed to fight.
This worries you because . . . ?
Kevin Drum, who is opposed to vouchers, says of my post:
. . . it somehow fails to address the single biggest problem with school vouchers: oversight. If you're going to receive taxpayer dollars, then you have to agree to taxpayer oversight. That means that NCLB applies to you. It means that minimum state curriculum requirements apply to you. It means that teacher union rules apply to you. It means you have a lot less authority to pick and choose which kids you're willing to accept. And, yes, it means you can't use taxpayer money to proselytize for whichever religion your board of directors happens to favor. Like it or not, that's a no-no for public funds, especially when kids are involved.But as near as I can tell, this is anathema to people who run private schools. They won't accept any oversight, let alone the level of oversight that's inevitable with any widespread voucher program. Taxpayers simply aren't willing to shower money on anything that calls itself a school without having some say in how the money is used. And rightly so.
Roughly speaking, this is why I tentatively favor charter schools but not voucher schemes. Charter schools allow for experimentation, which is good, but also accept state oversight. I don't really see how things can work any other way.
For one thing, if this is in fact true, then what do voucher opponents have to worry about? No one will accept the vouchers? Problem solved: the public schools will be saved!
For another, the state regulations are part of the problem with the schools, and no, it is not necessary to port them all over, which I agree would make vouchers useless. You can set basic curricular requirements and test kids to see how many are making the cut (and how far they've come since the previous year) without, for example, importing the ludicrous credentialing system most schools currently use, or the 97 layers of administration. We manage to pay college tuitions just fine without deciding who can teach what subject and how.
For third, Kevin seems to be under the misimpression that you cannot use federal dollars to get prosletyzed. The many students attending our nations' christian colleges on federal student loans and Pell grants would be very surprised to hear that. You can use federal education dollars to study anything you want, including, AFAIK, for the ministry. The federal government, it seems, will not only pay to get you prosleytized, it will pay to teach you how to do it to others, provided only that the payment is viewpoint neutral: i.e., you, not the government, decide what you want to study. There's very clear case law on this from the Supreme Court.
And weirdly, the taxpayer has done all of these things, even though Kevin says they won't. If Kevin, a taxpayer, were to join us in advocating for vouchers, perhaps more taxpayers would see their way clear to doing so again at the secondary level.
I agree it's an uphill fight . . . but it's clearly not impossible, because we've already done it.
Ultimately, one can't say better than this
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing bread."
Stealing bread at least arguably protects the poor right now however invisibly . . . widespread theft would destroy the system that creates bread for them to steal (and the rest of us to eat).
But the minds of our nation's poor children are already starving.
Okay, this is funny
In an earlier thread, MEH asks:
Maybe I missed the Memo, but what does the IRA have to do with 9/11?
John Thacker gives the correct answer:
There was a (false, sadly) hope that the experience of actual terrorism in NYC might make some of the Hibernian fools realize that it's not so romantic when it hits home, however nice it sounds to struggle against perfidious Albion across the Atlantic.
But Paul Zmrisek gives an answer that is better than correct:
The Irish joined forces with the Jews to carry out 9/11. Haven't you heard of the dread Roth IRA?
Puns are the lowest form of humor. But that didn't stop me from laughing.
I should add . . .
I think that the argument that we need to carefully shepherd the poor through life is not only kind of creepy, it's also contributing to the fact that we need to shepherd the poor through life. People dependent on the system don't get good at behaving like middle class people--paying their bills on time, etc. Instead they develop a lot of skills at dealing with government bureaucracy (or they give up). Once the gas has been turned off a few times, one generally learns to pay the bill rather than go without heat. What one learns from bureaucracy, on the other hand, is that the world is a capricious yet rule-bound place where you are either powerless against the system, or looking for a way to cheat it.
The poor are not children, except for the ones who are actual children
As libertarians go, I'm close-ish to a "left libertarian"; among other things, I think there's a role for government in guaranteeing a decent life for the needy, and intervening to right environmental problems that stem from unpriced negative externalities.
So what's different from liberalism? To the extent that the problems of the poor are inadequate money, I think that we should solve this problem by . . . giving them money. Not giving them food, shelter, or health care; just giving them money, and letting them decide what they want to buy. If they want to eat cornmeal mush for a month while watching cable television, let 'em. I think the government's job is to make sure people have the ingredients of a decent life, not to tell them what that decent life is.
(Health care is complicated, because there's a free rider problem and some pretty huge cost variance; I'll deal with that in a different post. But as a principle, I want to make sure that people can afford the stuff I think constitutes the bare minimum of a decent existence; I do not want to march them down to the store and make sure they buy it.)
Will the poor make bad decisions? Yup. Most poor people have already made a lot of bad decisions about things like schooling and childbearing; they'll probably make more. But they're not children; they're adults. It is not the government's job to make sure that they make good decisions. If someone is so impaired that they need the government deciding what kind of consumer goods they should buy, then they certainly shouldn't live on their own, much less vote; they should be placed in a group home or an institution where they can be properly supervised.
It's not as if poor people are the only kind of people who make bad decisions . . . I could regale you with some personal horror stories, starting with majoring in English, and moving on through the belly button ring to last night's attempt, while working late in an office near no restaurants, to substitute 14 flaxseed oil capsules for dinner. But had a government official stepped in to tell me that I really shouldn't waste years of my life on a guy who wasn't any good for me . . . well, shotguns are illegal everywhere I've lived, but that's the proper response to any government that fannies about dispensing such advice.
The government is really very good at distributing cash, with only the normal deadweight loss attendant on taxation. But it is an abysmal dispenser of advice on how to live your life, which is why the Declaration of Independance promises not happiness, but only the space to pursue same. I'm very open to arguments that private charity can't cover the cash needs of the poor, but I'll pit a private institution against the government in the "better living through social work" game any day of the week, and twice on the last day of the month.
Obviously, I'm against most forms of government help for adults, but is there anything as creepy as the notion that the government is supposed to improve you? If I want to be improved, I'll take on the project myself, thank you very much, and I extend people who are short of cash the respect of believing that they are probably much like myself in this regard. Either help them, or don't; there are valid arguments on both sides. But don't badger them to death.
These nannying arguments always make me think of one particularly bitter New York night, seeing a woman in a fur coat sweep past a homeless man braving the subzero weather in a sweatshirt. Figuring that no matter what he had done to himself or others, he didn't deserve to be left out on a night like this, I gave him five bucks on my way into the deli. Therein, the fur-coat lady said to me "He'll just spend it on drugs, you know."
It is one of the few times that I, whose middle name is "L'esprit d'escalier", have ever managed to muster a snappy comeback line on time. "I hope so," I responded, "because personally, if I were out there tonight, I would want some serious drugs."
In the case of kids, I'm game for a little more supervision; I'm happy to mandate vouchers for schooling and health care to make sure that they get some of each, and I'm willing to make those contingent on meeting some basic set of criteria. (Don't get too excited, liberals; I'm talking "Teaches reading, math, and a science class that includes evolution", not "Employs only union teachers with education degrees and a ream of useless certifications".) But I am left cold by the notion that we have to keep poor parents from having any say in the lives of their kids. If the kids are that badly off, pull them out of the home (indeed, adoption by more affluent families is the only broad remedy that is actually demonstrably effective at improving the lives of poor children, a remedy whose effectiveness is matched only by its utter repugnance).
If you are not going to do this, and thank God we aren't, do them and their parents the service of believing that even poorer, darker skinned people with a variety of social and economic problems love their kids every bit as much as you love yours--and certainly a lot more than you love theirs.
Local knowledge
I am Irish American, as I think I may have mentioned (and if I didn't, I imagine the name gave it away). I have spent a decent amount of time in the Irish-American community (think Irish dance lessons and traditional music performances), and my family has certainly spent much more.
As you may know, Irish people have a certain disdain for Irish Americans and their romantic conception of a largely imaginary Emerald Isle. Irish Americans who talk about Ireland are frequently derided as ignoramuses who know little about the actual Ireland, and operate under the delusion that their heritage, or perhaps their gene, qualify them to opine on it. Fair 'nough; I love me some cable knit sweaters, but frankly even I'm a little sick of all the "Celtic and Irish Handicraft" outlets springing up like shamrocks after an Irish rain in the malls of America.
I was, however, a little taken aback to experience the reverse phenomenon when discussing, with an Irishman in a bar, the fact that some Irish Americans still supported the IRA even after 9/11, a fact that I find more than a little shameful. Of course, I come from perhaps the only Irish American family in the world that gives money to the SDLP. But I digress.
But that's so 1990's, he said. Everything's different now. You don't know what you're talking about. This roughly echoes something Kieran Healy said when I posted on the subject several months ago.
Indeed, much has changed in Ireland. But we weren't discussing Ireland. We were discussing America. And I know a lot more about being a third-or-more generation Irish person in American than he, or Mr Healy does. Nonetheless, I went back and checked with other sources in the Irish American community.
Yup, indeed, donation to the IRA continued long after 9/11, with an explicitly martial tone to the solicitations.
Now I'm trying to figure out who's got the mote, and who's got the beam. God bless the Irish . . . no one else will.
Marching for meters
One thing that should be noted about the DC cab market is that the zone system is byzantine and opaque, to the vast enrichment of the cabbies. I happen to live three steps north of U Street, which is the dividing line between zone one and zone two; I spend a lot of time doing elaborate kabuki rituals with the cabbies, who invariably try to drop me on whichever side of the street takes me into a second zone. My mission--and I always choose to accept it--is to force them to drop me on the zone-minimizing street side, without acknowledging that they are trying to cheat me.
Cabbies also charge an additional full fare for multiple stops, making it completely pointless to ride share, and otherwise take the average consumer for all he is worth. Cabs cost here twice or more what they cost in New York for all but a handful of special journeys--funnily enough, the ones that are frequently taken by congressmen and their staffers.
It's very clearly a system set up to help a semi-organized interest groups rook the tourists at the expense of the locals; but as more affluent and politically active people who take a lot of cabs move into the district, this was bound to change. So I'm not surprised that the cabbies are complaining; only that they have settled on the big cab companies as the source of their complaint with the meter system.
Frankly, I'm not terribly sympathetic. They can damn well cheat tourists by accidentally taking them from Capitol Hill to the Mall via the Beltway, like all the other cab drivers have to. What makes them think they're so special, anyway?
Consumer culture
For most people, a lot of their beliefs are consumption goods. The irrational clustering of political beliefs--there is no logical reason that one's views on abortion should be so tightly correlated with one's view on business regulation or nationalized health care--indicate that there is a very strong social component to the formation of allegedly principled beliefs. The anger with which opposing views are met, and the in-group/out-group social dynamic of most political debate, suggest that for most of us, fitting in with our friends and feeling good about ourselves are at least as strong a component of belief formation as careful reasoning from first principles.
In most areas I'm okay with this (I'd better be; I have no reason to believe that I'm any better than anyone else on this score). But there are some areas in which I don't think it's okay, and the views held by wealthy suburbanites about vouchers are one of those areas. They are consuming a view of themselves as caring about a common public system that is the opposite of the truth; the gap between their kids schooling experience, and the experience of a kid growing up in Watts, is much much larger than the gap between their kids school, and Groton. They have demonstrated by their own choices that they think school choice is extremely important. They then proclaim that it doesn't work for poor kids, or that poor kids need to stay where they are for the sake of the system. They are consuming a view of themselves as egalitarians at a very cheap price . . . to them. The cost to the kids, unfortunately, it having their whole lives blighted.
That they proclaim to be doing this out of care for the communities that their exit (from the schools, the tax base, and the economic life of the city) is crushing, sends me over the edge.
Moreover, this is a good that they would not consume if there were any price at all to holding it. If being against vouchers meant their kid losing 30 points on their SATs, they'd do a 180.
Empirically, I may be wrong; vouchers may not work. But we know that the current system isn't working. And poor kids should not bear the burden of making affluent liberals feel better about themselves.
Another question about DC cab drivers
How come all the stories in the media feature cabbies opposed to the metering system, but all the cab drivers that I have talked to, and that Mr Brian Beutler informs me he has talked to, are not against it? Our sample size, of course, is something like n=6. But I'm not sure I know anyone who's met a cabby opposed to the meters.
October 29, 2007
Yeah, I don't know either
Why do the DC cab drivers think that metering is a prelude to domination of the market by big companies? Matt wants to know. So do I. It doesn't seem to make sense, but they probably know their market a lot better than I do. Anyone have any idea?
What else is there to say?
Ezra Klein posts an interesting graph showing that cost increases, not demographics, will the biggest factor in pushing up Medicare spending to unsustainable levels.
This is why we need a government funded system, modeled along France's, that can control these costs. If we don't get a comprehensive government program to provide healthcare for the elderly, their medical care could well bankrupt the nation.
Let me put this another way, Part II
In re: Britons travelling abroad for health care. UHC, or single payer, or whatever you want to call it, advocates are promising that we can have awesome health care at lower cost by switching to their model. No tradeoffs! Rationing is just a lie by conservative health care opponents who hate poor people! Look at Europe!
If this were actually true, the number of Europeans seeking health care abroad, other than cosmetic procedures, should be zero. If the health care is really every bit as good as what's available on the private market, they shouldn't turn to the private market. Americans seeking lower-cost health care abroad does not invalidate the market model; seeking lower cost alternatives through trade is a venerable free-market tradition. On the other hand, Europeans paying their own hard-earned cash in order to exit a system which allegedly provides exactly the same thing, for free, poses a problem for national health care advocates.
Let me put this another way
How many educated people who:
a) Oppose vouchers
b) Have children who do not attend inner city public schools
would still oppose vouchers if they were the only way to get their child out of an inner city public school? How many of them would accept that their child had to be left in that school because the systemic effects of allowing their child to exit that repulsive school would be dreadful?
Respectfully, I believe the answer is "null set".
Opposing school vouchers is, for basically every single person who does so, a completely costless belief. You get the pleasure of "supporting public education"; someone else's kid, whom you will thankfully never meet, loses their future.
Obviously, this is not exactly a unique phenomenon; most people are more sympathetic to policies whose costs they don't bear. But at least most of the libertarian policy wonks I know have endured extended periods without health insurance. Find me the parents who oppose vouchers when it's their own child who has no exit.
Random question of the day
What's the Facebook protocol for dealing with someone with whom you were only Facebook friends because they were dating one of your friends, after they break up with your friend? Assume that it wasn't a particularly horrendous breakup (in which case an ostentatious de-friending might be in order), but you're certain you'll never see them again, and don't want them cluttering up an already cluttered Facebook page.
Yes, I am feeling about 12 today. Work with me.
Huh?
Andrew points to an article showing that 70,000 British people a year fly abroad to get basic life-saving procedures such as hip replacements, heart bypasses, and dentistry.
Ezra responds that 100,000 Americans go abroad for plastic surgery a year! And untold numbers more are going for non-cosmetic procedures. This would be a more devastating critique if
a) Britain were not one-fifth the size of America
b) we had hard figures on how many people in America were seeking procedures abroad that are normally provided in a timely manner by national health systems
Ezra also claims that Americans are creating the industry; Britons are just free riding. Beg pardon, but if Americans were going abroad en masse for dentistry, I'm pretty sure that Hungary wouldn't be their first destination.
But the weirdest thing is that he seems to think that low-cost free market care is an indictment of the free market. And yet, this subtly undercuts the argument that Ezra et al. consistently make: health care in Europe is cheaper than health care in America; health care in Europe is paid for by the government; ergo, if America had health care like Europe's, it would be cheaper.
Let me try my own version: privately provided health care in Bangkok is very, very cheap, much cheaper than publicly provided health care in Europe. Ergo, Europe should privatise health care.
The liberal instantly recognizes that this is ludicrous: cost structures in Europe are much different from cost structures in Bangkok. But the same is true of America and Europe.
Health care systems suffer from Baumol's cost disease: it's a labor-intensive service that doesn't offer huge scope for gains in labor productivity. The number of hours it takes to manufacture a car is consistently falling, but the number of hours it takes to perform doctor's visits is roughly the same as it has always been. As a society gets richer, in order to attract workers, the labor intensive service has to pay competitive wages with the sectors where productivity is rising rapidly; that means that costs for labor-intensive services rise faster than the general price level.
Bangkok's doctors are so cheap because a doctor making a modest wage by British standards can have an enormous house and a flock of servants to take care of him, putting him in the very top echelon of Thai earners. Nurses too, can make an American pittance and still live very well. As Bangkok gets richer, the servants and the gigantic house will not be so affordable--and neither will the health care.
Likewise, America is richer than Europe; it therefore has to pay its doctors, nurses, etc. more. (A doctor in France makes about what a moderately experienced RN makes here.) Also, health systems held down wages in previous periods, which is much easier to do than inducing everyone to take a 75% pay cut now. If we did slash wages by that much, workers would exit the public system in droves, immediately destroying it. We literally cannot get there from here.
Campaign woes
For journalists, anyway. By travel troubles last week prompted me to remark that I haven't been on an on-time flight in at least a year (though to be sure, I don't fly very often.) My colleague Marc Ambinder responded that this is making it much harder to be a campaign journalist than it used to be. Journalists covering the presidential campaign can basically expect to spend most of the next 52 weeks on the road; the worse flying gets, the worse their lives become. If presidential candidates want to cast themselves in a sympathetic light, they should come up with a plan to reduce the congestion at a few key hubs, particularly JFK, that make listed departure times such a cruel joke.
You know, I never really understood why making the trains run on time was so important for Mussolini, but after last week, I can understand how that became one of fascism's main selling points*.
* The first person who suggests that this is an endorsement of fascism gets sent back to fourth grade for remedial reading class.
Vouching for vouchers
Forgive me--I'm about to get testy again--but this thread on 11D really does seem to me to showcase in stunning technocolor the moral bankruptcy of voucher opponents who have pulled their own kids out of failing inner city schools. They have no good answer for why their choice is morally worthy, but vouchers are horrifying; their response to the deep need of kids in failing schools is a slightly gussied up version of "screw you, I've got mine." Their children's future, you see, is an infinitely precious resource that trumps their principles of distributional justice and community solidarity, but they cannot imagine putting the futures of poorer, darker skinned children ahead of sacred principles such as "Thou shalt not allow children to attend schools run by the Catholic Church" and "Supporting the public schools (even when they suck)". I could do a better job arguing against school vouchers.
Indeed, I shall, though of course largely for the purpose of illustrating why I find these arguments unconvincing:
1) Vouchers don't work This is the best argument against school vouchers. But it's still not very strong. For one thing, the studies that show this are small, and often funded by the teacher's unions. For another, the worst those studies purport to show is that vouchers don't make a difference in educational outcomes; the parents are still happier, and the vouchers cost less than the existing school system.
However, it's also not really all that clear that the vouchers had no effect; one effect school choice seems to have is that it forces schools that want to keep their doors open to improve.
But most tellingly, this argument is incompatible with removing your own children from failing schools. Either the school makes a difference, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, why are you moving to the suburbs in search of a better school district for your kids?
It is indeed true that poor kids have a huge number of problems that are resistant to change; even relocating the whole family to the suburbs seems to have little to no impact on outcomes. Vouchers are no panacea, and they may not work at all. But we know that what we're doing now isn't working, and moreover, hasn't worked for going on fifty years. Unless you've got compelling evidence that your plan will overcome all the barriers that have doomed urban school reform for decades, and actually succeed in educating more children (rather than enriching the lives of teachers, administrators, and curriculum salesmen, who certainly have been helped by the many failed educational overhauls), why not let a thousand points of light bloom?
2) Voucher advocates are total hypocrites too, because why don't they start private vouchers, huh? Bet you never thought of that! Actually, we did, my love, and thanks for giving me an opening to plug the Children's Scholarship Fund, my charity of choice. If you support vouchers, you should be supporting their amazing work.
3) The community doesn't want vouchers. Awesome. Then the community won't take vouchers, and you'll win by default. If what you mean is that some people claiming to speak for the community, want other people who are members of that community not to be able to have vouchers, then I'm less than interested in your argument.
4) Vouchers are a subsidy to rich people. Then means test them, by all means. Anyone who makes more than $100K a year can't have them.
5) Vouchers destroy the public school system So? Having a public school system seems like a dumb goal to me, but even assuming that the very existence of such a system is somehow a worthy thing to aim for, surely it's achievement should be a second-order priority. The primary goal, it seems to me, should be educating America's children to reach their fullest potential; after that goal has been achieved, we can turn our attention to things like having teacher's unions and public schools.
There's something very odd about the way that a lot of people treat health care and schooling--as if they were special, magical goods that can only be provided by the government. Yes, these are vital goods that people are ill-equipped to evaluate. But food, shelter, and clothing are even more vital, yet few of us believe that this means we should all get our produce from giant collective farms, or move into public housing projects. We recognize that the way to ensure that everyone has what they need is to give them the money to buy it . . . and, arguably, to have building codes, the FDA, the USDA, and so forth to ensure that consumers are protected from hidden dangers.
Why don't we want to have giant collective farms? After all, the government could realize marvelous economies of scale and huge cost savings from its enormous purchasing power. The administrative costs would fall too--after all, almost all of the money you pay for food goes, not to the farmer, but to the various middlemen who purchase, process, store, ship, and distribute it. We could probably cut our national food bill in half!
Somehow, we recognize the factors in production of food and clothing that make the government a less attractive provider than the market. And even most of the left has recognized that Section 8 vouchers are better than housing projects--they didn't yank people out of poverty, or magically solve all the problems attendant upon being poor, but they did improve peoples' lives by giving them some of the control over where they live that the rest of us enjoy as of right.
But honestly, there's no reason that vouchers will destroy the public school system provided that the public school system is doing a decent job of educating our kids. This argument sounds to me like an implicit confession that public schools can't compete with private ones.
6) There aren't enough private schools Right. Do you realize that in 1995, not a single iPod had been manufactured? That must mean that the iPod I am currently holding in my hand doesn't actually exist! I'm living a lie . . .
The fact that there are not now enough private schools to educate kids doesn't mean that there won't be, if we offer to pay private schools to educate kids.
7) Public education is vital to creating a common identity as American citizens I would find this a slightly more compelling argument if it weren't made mostly by people who live in affluent communities where their fellow citizens are strongly discouraged from moving by zoning and other ordinances that bar the construction of cheap housing. You think some kid growing up in East New York, looking at the crumbling walls as an inexperienced teacher fumbles the lesson plan, thinks to himself "But at least I share a common identity with the kids in Bronxville's public school system whose cars I will someday have the privilege of parking"?
Actually, this makes me think that a lot of the opposition to vouchers is about that affluent suburbanite's need to maintain the delusion that they care about inner city public schools. Memo to suburban voucher opponents who "support public education": you're already sending your kid to private school. You're just confused because your tuition fees came bundled with granite countertops and hardwood floors.
8) Vouchers don't make things any better; they just give the appearance of working by pulling the successful away from the unsuccessful, in the process dooming the latter to failure As I said before, you can't have it both ways. Either the school environment matters--in which case, this argument is false--or they don't matter, in which case it can't harm the unsuccessful kids to lose the successful ones.
Or perhaps you think peer effects are the only thing that matters--in which case, we should close the damn schools and let the kids go to work, where at least they'll get some money in exchange for not learning much.
And morally, as I said in my earlier post, unless you have chosen to live in the inner city and allow your kids to bring up the tone of the place, you have no [expletive deleted] right to say that someone else's kids should be left in a failing school for the benefit of a third set of kids.
9) I don't want my tax dollars used to pay for religious education Waaaaaaah. The fundamentalist down the block doesn't want his tax dollars used to pay for teaching evolution. I don't want my tax dollars used for 97% of the things my tax dollars are used for; welcome to representative democracy. And in Catholic schools, where most of the vouchers would be used, the religious education is voluntary; lots of non-Catholic kids go there without being proselytized. If this bothers you that much, we can discuss requiring schools that accept vouchers to make religious education optional. But let's go back to why we're debating this policy in the first place: the kids. This is about the kids, right? And which is worse: that junior might hear, once a week, some sort of religious message which, to judge by the people I know who went to parochial school, has a fairly dim chance of sticking; or that junior won't be able to read and write and will spend the rest of his life moving heavy things from one place to another?
10) Vouchers wouldn't pay the tuition at a top-notch private school Okay, I went to the school that is now vying with Matt Yglesias' alma mater for the title of "Most expensive private school in New York City". It gave me a terrific education, better than that received by any of the kids from expensive suburban public schools with whom I went to college. But talk about making the perfect the enemy of the good! A private school doesn't need to be Groton in order to make it worthwhile sending needy kids there; it just needs to be better than the hell-hole they currently attend. And frankly, that's a really, really low bar. There are a lot of kids for whom a trip to Chuck E. Cheese would be safer and more educational than a day at their district school. I could just as easily turn around and use this argument to prove that we oughtn't to have public schools unless every last one can be Dallas's Talented and Gifted magnet school.
11) There's no way to assure the quality of private schools Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Seriously? The problem with private schools is that they can't match the same level of quality we've come to expect from our urban public school system? And what else have you learned in your visit to our planet?
Plus ca change . . .
Terry Teachout writes:
My mother's life, in short, is a bridge between two profoundly, almost unimaginably different worlds. A child of the Great Depression, she was raised on a farm and baptized in a river, and has lived long enough to watch me talk on a computer screen, though she's never owned a computer of her own. Cake mixes and air conditioning are more her speed. The most recent inventions of any significance that she embraced wholeheartedly were the answering machine, the ATM, and the VCR. (She has a DVD player but never uses it.)I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art. For now I seem to be staying fairly open to new things--my experience as a blogger suggests as much--but I have yet to send my first text message, nor does my somewhat superannuated cellphone contain a digital camera. On the increasingly rare occasions when I feel the need to take a picture of something, I buy a disposable film camera, the postmodern equivalent of a Brownie, at the corner drugstore.
I'm not sure he doesn't have it backwards. Right now, I remain an avid consumer of new art and new technology . . . I just installed my first NAS this weekend. But music is the most pervasive form of art that most people consume, and most people I know stop listening to new music in their late twenties or early thirties, long before they're done buying DVD players and flat panel televisions. They do consume new books and new movies, but their patience with new styles seems to evaporate. And most people prefer the relentlessly unvarying style of Thomas Kinkade to a trip through the MOMA.
October 28, 2007
Incidentally
If anyone from Banana Republic happens to be reading this, God bless you for the tall sweaters. For the first time in my life, I am typing in a women's sweater that does not leave 2 or 3 inches of wrist flapping in the wind. And any other clothing manufacturers who want to think about expanding their lines of tall offerings into more of their sweaters, jackets, and t-shirts . . . well, tall women have higher earnings than average, is all I'm saying. I am prepared to become a slavishly loyal consumer of any store that will allow me to walk into their store and buy any piece of clothing I want without worrying about inseams, sleeves, or waists that fall somewhere around my upper ribcage. Just something to think about.
Department of tall studies
Finally, we get our due.
This takes my thoughts off in two unrelated directions. First, it reminds me of someone . . . I can't remember who . . . telling me that he'd just seen a bakery in New York titled "Bonjour Croissant", which had encouraged him to consider migrating to Paris and opening a diner called "Hello, toast!". I wish I could remember who it was . . . but I do remember that it came in response to the cunning bit of Franglais titling I had just espied, a (mercifully short-lived) restaurant on the Upper West Side called, I kid you not, "Avec un Petit Buerre". We talk a lot in this country about compulsory licensing of guns, but it seems to me that we might better focus on preventing the abuse of French-English dictionaries.
On a completely unrelated note, last night I was talking to a friend who is himself 6'4 or 6'5, who was nonetheless surprised to hear that for a woman, hitting 6'2 at the age of 11 kind of, well, sucks. I'd just read a story about human growth hormone treatments for short kids, which in passing alleged that 1/3 of the parents of very tall girls (5'11 expected height or higher) are offered estrogen to stunt their growth. He found this shocking. I found it shocking, but understandable. After all, it's such hell to be a tall girl.
"Really," said he, as if it were an immensely surprising revelation.
My first instinct was to ask what planet he had grown up on, but others seemed to share his surprise. I suppose I had thought that the drawbacks were obvious--particularly when I was growing up, when tall girls had a choice between wearing men's clothing, or looking as if they'd suddenly outgrown everything they were wearing. All the tall women I know slouch ferociously, and I'm told that we're much more prone to eating disorders--hardly surprising, given the nicknames that kids apply to tall, heavy girls. Not that "Beanstalk" and "Mosquito" were huge improvements. And I have only recently come to terms with the fact that for the rest of my life, no matter how I dress or how long I wear my hair, someone will call me "Sir" at least once a week.
Now I like being tall. But then . . . spending six years as the tallest person in her school is not a fate I would gladly wish on anyone, particularly not the person I loved most in the world. The thing seems so obvious to me that I still find it hard to believe that it wasn't equally obvious to everyone else. The private hells of adolescence are surprisingly private.
Blast from the past
I'm watching the Republican presidential debate. Or at least, keeping an eye on the bastards. This is the sort of thing tht makes Mark Kleiman complain that Rudy seems to be running for "Sadist-in-Chief. Which, incidentally, naturally reminded me of Mark Steyn's still-hilarious take on Kerry's stance on the death penalty:
The senator's opposed to the death penalty. Fair enough. A lot of folks have a visceral revulsion at the principle of state execution. But whoa, hang on, no, that's not it. He's not some milksop Dukakis type. Mr. Kerry's opposed to the death penalty because it's too wimpy. "Putting somebody to sleep on a gurney" isn't cruel enough for Mr. Kerry's tastes. Keep him in jail watching cable TV decade after decade. "That is tough, my friend," says Mr. Kerry, not like dying, which -- in case he hasn't mentioned it this soundbite -- is something he knows a lot about: Only gutless pansy types let these killers off easy by sending 'em to Old Sparky. This is Mr. Kerry's answer to compassionate conservatism: sadistic liberalism.
October 27, 2007
Ivy madness
Why is it so much fun to hate Ivy Leaguers? In part, because they (well, we*) can often be so hateable. For years, I toyed with the idea of offering a prize to the first Harvard grad I met who did not, in the first ten minutes of conversation, manage to work that fact into the conversation somehow. ("I see you're eating a bagel there. You know, when I was in school in Boston, I liked to eat bagels . . . ").
I guess I did offer a prize, of sorts; we dated for years.
And don't get me started on the people from Harvard Business School, who, unbeknownst to themselves, were the source of untold hilarity at each and every summer internship program, as they strove to reassure us that they thought that our MBA program was every bit as good as Harvard, honestly.
But really, who cares? As far as I can tell, an Ivy league degree is at best a modest boost. One of my roommates from Penn was, when last heard of, still working at the library and mooching off other peoples' weed. On the other hand, few of the smartest and most talented people I know have Ivy League degrees; it seems to be a better indicator of where you started out than where you'll end up.
The weirdest thing to me about Washington is that this snobbery--and the inevitable reverse snobbery--are more prevalent than in any other city I've lived in. Friends who went to state schools tell astonishing stories of pervasive, yet casual, slights on their school and the people who went there. You would think that a city dominated by politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists would have more of the common touch, but apparently just the reverse.
*There is no way to write this without being accused of parading my Ivy League degree. I'm going ahead anyway.