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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, April 26, 2008
Health Insurance: What Do You Really Know? CNN was running a special this evening as part of their "Broken Government" series, and we were so unimpressed with it we turned it off. There seemed a lot of holes in their discussion that made me very skeptical that I was learning much. One of the claims that they made, based on the Himmelstein et al. study here, is that more than half of U.S. bankruptcies are caused by medical expenses--and they gave a couple of horrifying examples of families with a really sick newborn that ran through the lifetime cap on their coverage. (You didn't know that there was a lifetime cap? Look carefully. It is usually one million dollars in total care.) My first reaction to this was, "I know that these things happen, but it is hard to believe that this is a common thing." The Himmelstein study is worth reading. I notice several interesting points about it, some of which were either not mentioned by CNN, or which were given so little attention that I missed them: 1. This study is of "medical bankruptcy" which includes bankruptcies caused by illness that caused someone to be out of work--not necessarily just uncovered medical expenses: Under the rubric “Major Medical Bankruptcy” we included debtors who either (1) cited illness or injury as a specific reason for bankruptcy, or (2) reported uncovered medical bills exceeding $1,000 in the past years, or (3) lost at least two weeks of work-related income because of illness/injury, or (4) mortgaged a home to pay medical bills.2. Some of the "medical bankruptcies" are "medical" only in a sense that most Americans won't recognize: Our more inclusive category, “Any Medical Bankruptcy,” included debtors who cited any of the above, or addiction, or uncontrolled gambling, or birth, or the death of a family member.Well, yes, uncontrolled gambling or addiction can cause bankruptcy, and to the extent that an addiction is a medical problem, I guess you could call these "medical bankruptcies" but that's not what CNN wanted you to be thinking about, was it? Still, let's not exaggerate how much contributes. The "Major Medical Bankruptcy" group was 46.2% of the bankruptcies; this goes up to 54.5% when you add the "Any Medical Bankruptcy" category as well. 3. The extent to which medical expenses caused or contributed to the bankruptcy is based on self-reporting by those going bankrupt. How accurately are the bankrupts recognizing the actual cause, and how honestly are they reporting it? 4. Some of those who went bankrupt may have had these $700,000 medical bills, such as one of the families that CNN showed. But to the extent that medical bills contributed to these bankruptcies, it isn't clear how much the medical bills contributed. The "Major Medical Bankruptcy" category included those with "uncovered medical bills exceeding $1,000 in the past years." Look, $1,000 is a lot of money, and certainly, there are people who had $20,000 or $100,000 in medical bills. Bankruptcy makes perfect sense for many people under those conditions. But if someone goes bankrupt on $2,000 in uncovered medical bills, for almost anyone who has better than a minimum wage job, this has to be the straw that broke the camel's back. This can't be a significant factor in causing bankruptcy. I see from Exhibit 2 that 2% of bankruptcies had "mortgaged home to pay medical bills"--which is probably families that had really, really serious problems. They might well be the families with $700,000 medical bills that exceeded their health insurance, or they might be people who had no health insurance and something bad happened. 5. The report tells us in the summary (as CNN did) that many of those going bankrupt had medical insurance. But in the guts, it also tells us: A lapse in health insurance coverage during the two years before filing was a strong predictor of a medical cause of bankruptcy (Exhibit 3). Nearly four-tenths (38.4 percent) of debtors who had a “major medical bankruptcy” had experienced a lapse, compared with 27.1 percent of debtors with no medical cause (p < .0001).Exhibit 3 has one of those tables that is a bit confusing, but shows that 32% of bankrupts had no medical insurance when they filed, and 37.7% had a lapse in coverage in the preceding two years. This isn't surprising; if for any reason (loss of job, ran out of COBRA, couldn't afford to pay for health insurance, stupidly decided that you didn't need it) you were uninsured and ended up with a major medical expense, it would be unsurprising if you ended up going bankrupt. 6. How anyone could honestly read this study as proving that there was a major, widespread crisis of bankruptcy caused by medical bills alone, or even primarily, eludes me. As the paper points out: Debtors’ out-of-pocket medical costs were often below levels that are commonly labeled catastrophic. In the year prior to bankruptcy, out-of-pocket costs (excluding insurance premiums) averaged $3,686 (95 percent CI = $2,693, $4,679) (Exhibit 5). Presumably, such costs were often ruinous because of concomitant income loss or because the need for costly care persisted over several years. Out-of pocket costs since the onset of illness/injury averaged $11,854 (95 percent CI = $8,532, $15,175). Those with continuous insurance coverage paid $734 annually in premiums onNow, $11,854 over several years, for some people, would be a great burden. For the very poor, it would make sense to go bankrupt on that amount of money. We can see from the confidence interval that there would have been a small number of these bankrupts with bills that ran into the $100,000 area and above. But if large numbers of people with good jobs are going bankrupt because of uncovered medical bills of $3,686 per year, there's got to be more to the story. There is a real problem. But I am impressed how much this paper has been distorted as evidence that our health insurance problem is causing lots of people with good jobs to go into bankruptcy. Labels: health care Friday, April 25, 2008
Expelled Exposed The National Center for Science Education has a website up now called Expelled Exposed, claiming that Stein's movie doesn't do a very accurate job of discussing the subject. As I mentioned in my review, there was one case in which I had done a bit of reading, involving Professor Gonzalez's denial of tenure at Iowa State University. As I also mentioned, I felt that Stein might have done a more complete job by pointing out Gonzalez's failure to get tenure might have had something to do with his inability to get research grants to Iowa State. Nonetheless, the surprise that Stein sprung on the department chair about his email referring to "religious nutcases" was pretty devastating. (And which NCSE didn't seem to mention. I guess Stein isn't the only person leaving out rather significant details.) I should also mention that the NCSE also claims that perhaps Gonzalez's failure to get tenure was because, as stellar of a scientist as had been in his 20s, after he received his Ph.D., the volume of his published work in scholarly journals dropped. This raises several interesting possibilities: 1. That Gonzalez went from being a remarkable scientist to suddenly not all that good for no apparent reason. 2. That Gonzalez's decline in getting work published and obtaining research grants might have been been because he had gone off the reservation to ask serious philosophical questions that didn't fit with the conventional wisdom. Hmmm. I wonder which it could be? When it comes to how the NCSE website deals with a subject on which I have some expertise--racism and early 20th century America--well, they are at least out of their depth, and in some areas, engaging in some dishonest sleight of hand. (Your tax dollars at work.) Expelled Exposed claims: Expelled’s inflammatory implication that Darwin and the science of evolution “led to” eugenics, Nazis, and Stalinism is deeply offensive and detrimental to public discussion and understanding of science, religion, and history.It is indeed deeply offensive (to the NCSE) but it wasn't a "narrow group of Christians" who drew the connection of evolution to eugenics. Read University of Chicago Zoology Professor Horatio Hackett Newman's Readings in Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics (University of Chicago Press, 1921), starting at page 465 for a discussion of how governments have solved the problems of feeblemindedness by passing eugenics laws, and fear of how the inferior forms of humans were increasing in America. Starting on p. 475: 4. The Restriction of Undesirable Germ PlasmHere's another book, by Southwestern College Biology Professor William M. Goldsmith, The Laws of Life: Principles of Evolution, Heredity and Eugenics (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1922). Again, all three of these are brought together, and starting on page 398 is a chapter whose title alone tells you where this is going: "Moulding the Super-Man." The topics to be covered are also pretty typical of where this stuff was headed: Final "Evolution of Man"--A Broader View Necessary--Our Attitude--The Unfit Work an Injustice upon Society--Eugenic Responsiblity--Human Inheritance--The Jukes--The Edwards--the Kallikas--Relation of Degeneracy to the Community--Inequality of Men--Overproduction of Inferior--Limiting the Unfit--Sterilization...I could keep going, but this is the sort of racist trash also appears repeatedly in Democratic newspapers of the period 1916-23 that I have read while researching other topics, such as the Sacramento Bee, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Bee was quoting a prominent birth control advocate of the time about the dangers of the black race outreproducing the white race--and that was the reason why birth control had to be legal. The Chronicle article warned of the danger of "race suicide" if little (white) boys had to grow up in apartments instead of houses. Now, the NCSE points out that after World War II, prominent evolutionist often argued against eugenics. Well, sure. The smoke rising from the ovens put something of a damper on the party. But when you compare Stein's careful observation that Darwinism wasn't the only component that created Naziism with the NCSE's false claim that this connection of evolution to eugenics and Naziism is "deeply offensive and detrimental to public discussion and understanding of science, religion, and history"--they are either in way over their heads, or lying. If the NCSE is going to accuse Ben Stein of playing fast and loose with the truth, they better stop doing so themselves. Labels: intelligent design If HP Employees Were 10% of the Population... This hare-brained proposal would guarantee a Democratic victory in November. From April 24, 2008 NBC channel 11 in San Jose: There is a buzz in Republican political circles that John McCain could pick former Hewlett-Packard Chairwoman Carly Fiorina, 53, to be his vice presidential nominee.Oh yeah! I could see this! If McCain didn't survive his first term, Fiorina would, based on the HP experience:
And the bad news is: I don't dislike her anywhere near as much as many HP employees do. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates I Woke Up In A Parallel Universe The BBC is running articles about how much more civilized much of America is than Britain--in spite of being the land of guns. From April 22, 2008: On the anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting, all this will feel to some like a rather depressing, if predictable, American story. A story of an inability to get to grips with violence. This is a really important point. It wasn't so many years ago that British journalists were making fun of President Bush's daughters getting in trouble for underage drinking, acting like America's drinking laws were some sort of leftover from Puritanism, and we might start burning witches at any time. But the fact is that intoxication plays a major part in high violence rates. A lot of urban sophisticates make the most absurd excuses for public drunkenness--while railing about the evils of gun ownership. David Hardy at Arms and the Law links to this April 24, 2008 Chicago Tribune op-ed piece by a member of the editorial board: When a rash of gun murders takes place, it makes sense for the police to do one of two things: renew tactics that have been effective in the past at curbing homicides, or embrace ideas that have not been tried before. But those options don't appeal to Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis. What he proposes instead is a crackdown on assault weapons.Wait a moment! A whole herd of pigs just flew by my window! Labels: gun rights I Went Head To Head With My Opponent Last Night I cannot imagine him being foolish enough to debate me in any public forum. I showed up at the Elmore County Republican Central Committee meeting last night to introduce myself. So did Senator Corder. I picked three issues of concern:
I was pleased to see one of those in attendance ask, "Are you the Clayton Cramer?" He meant the historian--and he told me later that he has read everything that I have ever written on the subject of gun control. Ah, fame (even of the minor variety that I enjoy) has its virtues! Senator Corder emphasized how many generations his family has lived here. He talked about helping individuals do battle with the state bureaucracy using what he called his "magic telephone book" and his opening line for getting bureaucrats to listen, "This is Senator Tim Corder." This would be a fine speech to give to a bunch with no particular ideological interest in what government does--but Republican Party activists, not surprisingly, tend to care about issues--not just making the bureaucracy do its job. What startled me most of all--and in California, would probably have required Jack Bauer to torture an elected official into admitting--was when Corder told us about how much better off we are because the state hires his trucking company for various contracts. What really startled me, however, was when he told us about his trucks leaving one Transportation Department district and going into another in furtherance of some state contract--and some sort of problem came up. So he used his "magic telephone book", and an hour later, his trucks were again moving. Now, Corder emphasized that because of his willingness to use his official position in behalf of his private business interests, all of us as taxpayers saved a lot of money. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this. But I would regard this entire interaction of private business interests, state contracts, and leaning on a bureaucrat--even if the bureaucrat was in the wrong--as a serious conflict of interest. The audience asked a lot of useful questions that helped to clearly distinguish Senator Corder and myself. Concerning S.1381, the bill to allow concealed carry permit holders to carry on public university campuses, Senator Corder was very pleased that it didn't even get out of committee. I explained that: 1. It was an emotional reaction to the Virginia Tech tragedy, and wasn't the best solution--which is to solve the mental health problem. 2. As a short-term solution, I supported S.1381, because I have family who spend time on campus--and I want them safe. Allowing concealed carry permit holders to carry on campus makes them safer. 3. There is a very serious question as to whether the current ban on open carry on campus would survive a challenge, based on In re Brickey (Ida. 1902). Another question that came up was concerning student organizations. Some state university campuses apparently will not recognize or provide any funding to student organizations that are religious in nature. Others treat them like non-religious student organizations. Corder thought it was just fine to allow the university administration to continue this discriminatory policy. I pointed out that being public universities, they have an obligation under the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment to treat religious and non-religious organizations the same. Labels: Idaho politics Wednesday, April 23, 2008
I Believe This Today, That's For Sure This article from the April 23, 2008 Australian seems quite plausible today, as it is raining and hailing here--and we are a month into spring:
This is part of why the global warming crowd now is talking about "climate change" because "global warming" is pretty clearly not the case. "Climate change" is a great theme. If it is warming, it is because of carbon dioxide--we have to stop it. If it is cooling, it is because of carbon dioxide--we have to stop it. What it all comes down to is increasing taxation and control under the pretense of protecting the environment. Labels: global warming Campaigning As Educative Tool You know, even if you don't get elected, campaigning for public office is a way to educate people about important issues. (Or so you tell yourself, when you start to confront the likelihood that you aren't going to win.) I spent some time last night talking to representatives of the Idaho Education Association (the teachers' union). I was surprised that when I opened the conversation with my support for vouchers, they didn't seem horribly angry. I also used the opportunity to point out that in most industries, if a simple employer dominates the market, it is generally not good for the wages of workers--and this alone is a reason why public school teachers should be supportive of more private schools. I also spent a bit of time today talking to a reporter from the Idaho Statesman--I think quite a bit more time than she originally intended to spend. But I have such interesting stories to tell! And it was also a chance to discuss the destructive social consequences of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The reporter is young enough that she doesn't remember what big cities were like before we went down this path. I will be at the Elmore County Republican Central Committee meeting Thursday night. I wish that Boise County had a functional Republican party organization. Labels: deinstitutionalization, Idaho politics The Modern Castrati If you don't know about castrati, boys who were emasculated before puberty so that they could sing soprano parts, read here, and try not to get angry. Then read this account from World Net Daily, and say to yourself, "But that barbarism was long ago": I've previously linked to an article by the head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University medical school explaining why they stopped doing sex changes because it became apparent that what needed work wasn't genitals, but minds. I think it would be really interesting to do a detailed study of children (as young as 12) who are convinced that they are in the "wrong" bodies. Something tells me that you will find a lot of disrupted family structures, probably some sexual abuse, and a lot of other indications that these kids are in desperate need of help--but not a sex change, or messing with their hormones. These are the sort of stories that if the masses knew about them, they would be lighting their torches and sharpening their pitchforks for an assault on Dr. Frankenstein's castle. Labels: homosexuality Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Did This Cost-Cutting Save Any Money? I'm told that part of why Idaho Health & Welfare, about five years ago, adopted a much stricter interpretation of their current standards for Medicaid reimbursement of mental health services, was to get spending under control. You might criticize this as a skinflint approach--except that it seems not to have worked. From Budget: Mental Health and Substance Abuse in Idaho (2006), p. 3, we can see that the Medicaid portion of the mental health services budget rose from $59,388,281 in FY 2003 (actual) to $115,447,200 in FY 200y (estimated). That means Medicaid budget for mental health services almost doubled in a period of limited inflation and at most, a few percent growth in the state population. Huh? My guess is that the problem may be that by effectively cutting off mental health services in rural Idaho, this strict interpretation meant that a lot of people with mild mental health problems received no services--and by the time their problems became acute, requiring hospitalization, the costs were much higher. I'm a tightwad on government spending, but there are times that a short-term view of the problems is not only inhumane, it's more expensive. Labels: Idaho politics, mental illness Pay Scales For Teachers One of the Idaho Education Association's goals is to have the legislature mandate a minimum starting salary for teachers of $40,000 a year. Look, I do think that teachers are generally underappreciated and often underpaid. But here's a reality check. In Ada County (where the capital is located), and the median household income in 2004 was $50,754 per year, this would mean that a starting teacher would be making probably $10,000 a year more than the average worker (figuring that many but not all of those households have both husband and wife working). Okay, you could argue about this a bit I suppose; a lot of non-teachers here don't have college degrees--although a lot do. But many of those non-teachers have filthy, disgusting jobs that involve significant risk of injury, don't have health insurance through their employer, have no hope of tenure, and work twelve months of the year--not ten. There are a lot of counties in Idaho where this proposal makes no sense at all. In Elmore County, one of the two counties that make up my district, the median household income in 2004 was $37,148 per year. This would mean that starting teachers in Elmore County would be making almost twice what the average worker does. When you get to some of the more remote counties, like Madison County, the median household income drops to $32,569 per year. If starting teachers get paid twice what the average person earns (some of whom may have been working for twenty years), this is not going to make any friends for the IEA. Labels: Idaho politics Monday, April 21, 2008
AngryRenter.Com There are some people who are not at all happy about the prospect of the government bailing out either mortgage companies or irresponsible borrowers: people who rent, and who might otherwise be able to buy a house, if the government doesn't bail out the irresponsible. And they have a website. Art and the Grotesque My wife has a vague remembrance of reading something by Voltaire to the effect that when we lose sight of beauty, all that is left to art is the grotesque. Two examples, one warped, one truly grotesque if it is true. The squeamish might want to skip this one. From the April 21, 2008 Yale Daily News:
Another piece of "art"--more stupid than grotesque--comes from the August 18, 2006 Daily Telegraph--and definitely you don't want to click over to this, unless you want to see the "artist" naked with the dead pig:
For once, I can agree with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals about something: British taxpayers shouldn't be forced to fund this pretentious trash. Labels: abortion HR 5613: Huh? If you want to know how big and complicated public policy is, HR 5613 currently before Congress is a good example. I'm generally skeptical of federal spending on direct aid to the poor, for the simple reason that this is properly the job of the states. But the complexity of the Medicaid regulation changes that HR 5613 is trying to stop just makes my head spin. As near as I can figure out, Congress passed something called the Deficit Reduction Act of 2006, which was supposed to reduce Medicaid spending on certain programs. The claim that this leftish bunch makes is that the Administration's new regulations go far beyond Congressional intent. Some of these changes are very basic and important questions; others are fairly complex regulatory changes that certainly make a difference, but I am not finding any statements of costs or benefits:
And what, exactly, does this mean? If "outreach" means that we are paying someone to run around looking for low-income children who aren't currently insured, and making sure that they are insured, I cringe just a little--salaries are expensive, and if there isn't enough real work to do, bureaucrats are known for going and looking for ways to spend more money on whatever good deed they think will make their position secure. If it means making the information readily available to poor people so that they are aware that they are eligible for Medicaid, this doesn't bother me. Printing flyers, perhaps putting together a public service announcement, and persuading radio and TV stations to run it for free, isn't so expensive. And this is just one part of the Medicaid regulatory changes that HR 5613 is supposed to delay for a year. I fear that I would have to invest a lot of time and money in figuring out exactly what the proposed changes do. These are the kind of nitpicking details where you start to have to rely on people that you trust to tell you what is really going to happen--and this assumes that they are both honest, and genuinely knowledgeable about what is going to happen. The National Alliance on Mental Ill wants HR 5613 passed because there are a number of services for the low-income mentally ill that they think will be damaged by the regulations that are scheduled to take effect soon. That inclines me to think that whatever the intentions of these Medicaid regulation changes are, the effects will be bad for the mentally ill. This report from April 18, 2008 Medical News Daily (a British publication) indicates that HR 5613 enjoys remarkably bipartisan support--passing out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee 46-0. If this had passed on party lines, or if there were a number of votes against (on either side of the aisle), I would wonder if there might be a strong argument in favor of the proposed regulations, and against HR 5613. I find it hard to believe that every single Republican on that committee is a squishy liberal. Labels: health care Elitist, And Proud Of It! I'm always amused at how honest some Democrats are about their elitism. From Does a Little Obama 'Elitism' Go a Long Way in Politics? With: Joan Juliet Buck, Lesley Stahl, Liz Smith and Whoopi Goldberg LESLEY: Whoopi, I think the fear the Democrats have with this issue is not because he’s a person of color. It’s because the Republicans latch onto this exact kind of argument time and again and make it work for them. As with Adlai Stevenson, with Dukakis, with Kerry, with Gore …A few pages later: LIZ: Well, you know, there are a few elitist touches. I mean, Mrs. Kerry – formerly Mrs. Heinz – did go someplace, to one of those fast food restaurants. And when they offered her chili she said, "What’s chili?" That’s pretty high up there for being elitist.What's chili? Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Imagine if Restaurants Worked Like Public Schools I just finished filling in the Idaho Education Association's candidate questionnaire (a very good one, by the way, if a bit unintentionally self-revealing), and I found myself wondering: What is we had a public restaurant system similar to our public school system, that provided lunch and dinner to every Idaho resident who lived in that restaurant district, funded entirely from taxes? 1. No one would go hungry--especially the poor. 2. We could guarantee that everyone was served a nutritious and well-balanced meal. Now, a lot of people wouldn't eat their salad or vegetables, and some people might not eat enough of the broiled chicken, but at least they would have the opportunity. 3. I'm sure that the public restaurant system would provide at least one vegetarian entree. It might even (after lawsuits were filed by the ACLU) offer at least one kosher meal and one halal meal. But in many parts of Idaho, a lot of those specialty meals would be stored in freezers waiting for an Orthodox Jew or Muslim to show up. I suspect that they wouldn't be terribly appetizing by the time someone came to eat them. 4. Vegan meals? I rather doubt it. There's no Constitutional basis for demanding the government provide what a strong majority would regard as bizarre or unnecessary accommodations. 5. There would be a few kooks (or so some would call them) who would insist that their religion requires them to eat meals with their family in a private setting. Well, they would be free to do so. But there would be no reduction in your taxes that paid for the public restaurant system. You chose not to use the perfectly fine public system that is already in place. 6. Of course, being a public system, the restaurants would have very, very limited options on refusing service. I suppose that "no shoes, no shirt, no service" might survive court challenge, but someone who hadn't bathed in a month (and there are homeless people in that situation) would have just as much right to eat at the table next to you as anyone else. Much of the inappropriate behavior that would get you bounced out of a private restaurant would have to be tolerated--and the public restaurant workers wouldn't be happy about this, either. 7. Because only pretty gross incompetence or misconduct would get a public restaurant worker fired, some of the waiters would be surly, and completely unconcerned about whether they did their jobs right. Most of them would make a serious attempt at doing their jobs, of course--but seeing that you didn't get rewarded any better for doing more the minimum necessary would, over time, take away your incentive to work hard. 8. Private restaurants work hard at keeping costs under control as well as looking for new and interesting dishes to attract in customers--because they have competitors. The public restaurants would have effectively no competition--since you couldn't on a regular basis eat outside of your district. 9. If you weren't happy about the food or service provided in the public restaurant system, you would be, of course, free to go to private restaurants. You would still be paying taxes to support a public restaurant system that you didn't like or use. After all, this way we can be sure that no one goes hungry, no matter how poor they were. 10. If you suggested that this wasn't fair--that you shouldn't be required to pay for a system that you didn't want to use--indeed, might regard as violating your right of conscience--the Idaho Restaurant Workers Association would insist that the public shouldn't be forced to fund your weird restaurant choices. They would hunt around until they found a biker bar somewhere in the U.S. with swastikas on the walls and tell the public that this is where money would be spent in a voucher system. 11. Because most people couldn't afford to fund the public restaurant system and either buy their own groceries or eat out very often in private restaurants, the private restaurant market would be highly distorted. It would have a few places that catered to the very wealthy, or it would have a lot of places that provided meals for those who felt that the public restaurant system was failing them. Consequently, the private market would be overwhelmingly dominated by kosher, halal, vegetarian, and vegan restaurants. Not surprisingly, many of those who were not happy with the public system would not be particularly enthused about these other choices. 12. The shortage of funding, because most people were already paying for the public system, would mean that private restaurants that weren't for the wealthy would have continual struggles to stay afloat financially. The pay for workers in the private restaurants would probably be lower than it was for the public system employees, and often, private restaurant workers would be doing so because they saw what they were doing as a mission: to provide members of their faith/eating belief system with an alternative to the public system. 13. Because the public restaurant system was effectively a monopoly (with 95% of all meals served being ultimately paid for by the state government), wages for workers would be lower than in a free market system--but the Idaho Restaurant Workers Association would simply refuse to believe that working for a monopoly system was bad for their wages--and they would then point to the lower wages in the private restaurant industry as proof this, with no awareness that there was a significant market distorting effect caused by the monopoly. Okay, I've had enough fun with this analogy. Like most analogies, it isn't perfect. I'm not proposing that we scrap public education--only provide a voucher system to provide more choices. There are definitely parents out there who, if they had to pay for education for their kids, either couldn't afford it, or would put a higher priority on beers, cigarettes, and meth. But let's not exaggerate this problem. It costs somewhere between $600 and $2400 a year to put basic foodstuffs on the table on the table for a child. A private school tuition right now costs about $3600 to $5000 a year (depending on the school). There are parents who would simply neglect their children's education, if the government didn't provide for it free of charge. There are parents who do neglect their children's need for food--and the government doesn't run a public restaurant system. That's why we have laws about child neglect--and they are needed. Over the years, I have met very, very few parents who didn't care at all about whether their children received an education. Nearly all parents care some, and many care a lot. There are parents who, without question, would make poor decisions about what sort of education their children should receive--just like there are parents who keep the house stuffed with potato chips, cookies, and soft drinks, producing the current epidemic of obese kids. Still, I've met a lot of fat parents with fat kids who still cared about getting their kids a decent education. I can't recall ever running into a family where the parents had healthy, properly nourished kids but who didn't care if their kids were getting a good education. Labels: public education How Affirmative Action Hurts Blacks It is not surprising that affirmative action works to the detriment of whites and Asians (who are no longer racial minorities, when it comes to affirmative action). But this recent report from the April 21, 2008 Inside Higher Education reveals that what Thomas Sowell has repeatedly written about--how affirmative action hurts blacks--is still the case: The article puts the entire discussion in terms of the failure of colleges to make sure that black students receive enough assistance to graduate. But why do black students need all this extra assistance? Even at historically black colleges (many of them public institutions that were originally set up by Southern states that didn't want black students at the white colleges), there is a big problem with the more competitive institutions: The study briefly explores trends in graduation rates at historically black colleges, where average rates for all institutions are low, but where there is a split between institutions with competitive admissions (which tend to have high rates) and other institutions, which tend to have low rates.Why? And what does this have to do with affirmative action? A lot of the elite universities desperately want black students to attend. At the same time, blacks are disproportionately concentrated in some of the worst public school systems: Los Angeles, D.C., New York City, Chicago. Many of the graduates of these often hellhole high schools who are college bound have been inadequately prepared for the demands of Harvard, or Yale, or UC Berkeley. So what happens to students who might have able to survive the demands of UC Berkeley, but get lured into Harvard by extraordinary scholarships? Or what about the student whose grades and test scores would have put him in the middle of the class at San Jose State, but instead goes to UC Berkeley? He is competing with students (white, Asian, and black) who were admitted without any special treatment, and whose SAT scores may average 200-300 points higher, because their K-12 education was markedly superior. High dropout rates are inevitable. Is it better for a black kid from an inferior inner city school system to drop out of Harvard or Stanford, or to graduate from UCLA or San Jose State? College administrators can feel good about themselves for admitting students under affirmative action who aren't ready for the rigors of their institution. But I rather doubt that it is making the students who drop out feel good about themselves. Labels: public education Barack Obama's Associates It just keeps getting better and better. RedState points to this video of Larry Lessig, one of Obama's advisors on technology policy, where he runs this video of a very effeminate Jesus stripping down to his loincloth while singing the Gloria Gaynor song, "I Will Survive" before getting run over by a bus. Lessig admits that some people actually are offended by it, but doesn't have any idea why. "I just don't get it." I look forward to Lessig doing something similar involving Mohammed. Or would that be dangerous? Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Obama's Lying Again Patterrico's Pontifications discusses Obama's involvement with the Joyce Foundation, the major funder of gun control efforts in the U.S. I (and many others) have also blogged about Obama's previous involvement with the Joyce Foundation--while claiming that he believes that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. Patterico has managed to combined a number of quotes from Obama in which he claims that the Joyce Foundation grants were only trying to promote "dialogue" about reasonable gun control. If Obama really believes this, then he and his fellow board members are not very bright. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, gun rights Sunday, April 20, 2008
Intelligent Design and the Pursuit of Science I had a friendly and thought-provoking conversation with a reader, an economist, who seems to misunderstand the reason why there are scientists asking the questions that are called "Intelligent Design." Yes, Newton was a religious man, and yes, he noticed there were flaws in the current naturalistic explanations in astronomy. What was his response? Did he say perhaps we should look for nonnaturalistic explanations? That we should look for theistic causes beyond the natural ones (such as God purposely intervening in the motion of the planets to cause them to behave differently than they should have naturally). Thank God (and I mean that literally) that he did not. What a disaster for science if he had. Understand what theistic science means in the context of intelligent design theory. It is not a belief that the natural laws that govern biology were created by God. It is a belief that natural laws do not explain biology, so the idea of natural laws is to be dumped in favor of explaining the details by appeal to a supernatural agency. This bears no resemblence to the working philosophy of Newton and Boyle. My response is this. If intelligent design advocates were saying, "Don't bother trying to understand anything--it's all God's handiwork, and we have no reason to try" he would have a valid point. But looking over the list of scholarly papers published by people like Michael Behe and Scott Minnich suggests that they have hardly abandoned the pursuit of science in an orthodox manner. They are merely saying, "You know, some of what we are seeing is unlikely to be a blind process. Let's keep that possibility open for discussion--especially since there are some serious problems figuring out how some of these components got here by the blind evolutionary process that we have all been assuming up to now." Intelligent Design is not a return to medievalism. It is saying that the current theory, built on methodological naturalism, has some significant holes in it. As I mentioned a few weeks back, even orthodox biologists seem to be aware that the current theory has some significant flaws. As I also mentioned a few weeks back, the time available from sterilizing heat to the first surviving microfossils is somewhere between 300 and 500 million years--short enough that a blind, random process for the formation of life from inorganic materials seems implausibly short. Labels: intelligent design |
