Democracy Almost Broke Out

So the technocrats win yet again and the Greek people find their future in the hands of the mumble-brained thus and sos who got them in the mess in the first place. Hurray. By the way, if you haven't had the chance to read Neoliberal Hegemony you really should

Here in Wisconsin: God Help Us Edition

Via we learn that Scott Walker is an authoritarian nut job:

"What we're doing here, I think, is progressive. It's innovative. It's reform that leads the country, and we're showing there's a better way by sharing in that sacrifice with all of us in government," he said.

Because nothing says shared sacrifice like union busting and pay cuts to the workers of the world while extending tax cuts to the Galtian job creators toward whom we ought all of us be more reverential.

His notion of leadership seems a bit, let's call it, flawed:

"People, I believe, in times of crisis want leadership," he said. "They want leaders who identify the problem, identify a solution and then act on it. That's what we did." 

Personally, I think people in times of crisis or non-crisis want leaders who work to find a correct solution to a problem, as opposed to a flawed, false, and dangerous putting-out-the-fire-with-gasoline nonsense like this.
 
What Walker and Co are doing -- if you think about it -- amounts to punishing the innocent victims of the Wall Street crooks for the economic damage done by the Wall Street crooks twice, first by baling out the banks and then by destroying their livelihoods because bailing everybody out after years of tax cuts left us "broke."

Which leads us back to Walker's heart to heart with Koch:

I pulled out a, a picture of Ronald Regan and I said you know this may seem a little melodramatic but 30 years ago Ronald Regan whose 100th birthday we just celebrated the day before um had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers and uh I said to me that moment was more important than just for labor relations and or even the federal budget, that was the first crack in the Berlin Wall and the fall of Communism because from that point forward the soviets and the communists knew that Ronald Regan wasn’t a pushover and uh, I said this may not have as broad a world implications but in Wisconsin’s history—little did I know how big it would be nationally, in Wisconsin’s history, I said, this is our moment, this is our time to change the course of history and this is why it’s so important that they were all there. I had a cabinet meeting this morning and I reminded them of that. I said for those who thought I was being melodramatic, you now know it was purely putting it in the right context.

Leaving aside the seriously deranged understanding of history, the obvious question is: who is Walker's enemy here?  Given what he has done and what he is planing on doing, the answer is workers and people in general. What's nice about this is at last the Neoliberal strategy is out of the bag.  We've known for some time that the Neoconservative policy was to bomb anything that looked like it might at some point look cross eyed at them.  Now we know that their domestic buddies the Neoliberals want to, metaphorically for now, bomb the working classes back into the  stone age.

How Much Technology

It's fair to ask how much technology do I think we ought to use.  The right amount is the answer.  Technology ought to improve working condition without endangering jobs because, after all, the purpose of society is to provide the greatest good for the greatest number not the most money to the fewest doodlebugs.

So, for example, I once worked in bulk mail.  When I started we had these truly awful machines that used printer paper with the holes punched in the sides and a guillotine to cut the paper into rows and then a knife to cut the rows into individual labels which then had to have glue stuck on the back of them which then were glued on to the envelope, catalog, or what have you and then went to a conveyor belt where somebody scanned the labels and organized the letters into stacks of at least 10, I think it was, mailing by full zip, first three, or state as they whizzed along. Then the letters got tied into a bundle and thrown into a filthy mail bag. It was a crap job.  The glue didn't work or the machine would jam and eat up a bunch of labels or you buried trying to sort, although some folks were really good at it.  At some point they brought in inkjet machines that sprayed the label on the mailing and organized the mail by full, three, and state by stopping between the correct number of pieces so that on the conveyor belt a gap appeared.  Productivity went up, the job got a lot easier, no one was fired, in fact, they created two new position because of the need to format the mailing lists on the computer.

This is bad technological innovation:



Why?  Because at some point the greater efficiency and lower costs will led to all robot warehouses and, given the crappy job creating skills of the unfettered market, no jobs for the humans displaced by the robots.  Now, obviously, getting rid of all the people is a fine idea if you cannot think past the end of your nose.
 

As I Was Saying

An alert reader, while demanding anonymity, alertly alerts me to this fine blog post

Being a mild-tempered person, I'm surprised to find myself in a state of almost constant rage at the extent to which public discourse has been overtaken by the language of commerce: that disgusting phrase "UK plc", the way that words like passenger, pupil, citizen are replaced by "client" and "customer", the constant reiteration of the notion that business is "the real world" (with the implication that the business of government - running schools, hospitals, armies, rescuing abused children, locking up criminals - is mere froth). I was alarmed to notice, in yesterday's Financial Times, the new Westfield shopping centre at Stratford referred to as the "gateway" to the 2012 Olympic Games: evidently, the plan is that visitors' dominant impression of the London Olympics will be of a great shopping opportunity. 

To which I say: Amen.

Empiricism

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Dental hygienists held about 174,100 jobs in 2008. Because multiple job holding is common in this field, the number of jobs exceeds the number of hygienists.

And the

[e]mployment of dental hygienists is expected to grow 36 percent through 2018, which is much faster than the average for all occupations. This projected growth ranks dental hygienists among the fastest growing occupations, in response to increasing demand for dental care and more use of hygienists.

And the prospects look good because

[o]lder dentists, who have been less likely to employ dental hygienists, are leaving the occupation and will be replaced by recent graduates, who are more likely to employ one or more hygienists. In addition, as dentists' workloads increase, they are expected to hire more hygienists to perform preventive dental care, such as cleaning, so that they may devote their own time to more complex procedures.

And the

[m]edian annual wages of dental hygienists were $66,570 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $55,220 and $78,990. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $44,180, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $91,470.

If only there were more competition the oppressed d.h.s' wages would rise and the "consumers'," which is to say patients but if we think about the world without the filter of economized language the neo-Liberal project of dehumanizing society collapses, costs would lower because, to repeat myself, more equals more which means lower because, shut up that's why.

Other Conversations Not Taking Place

Recently, Robert Farley complained about the dearth of "progressive" theories and theorists of issues military. This contra-factual claim led me to this guy, which led me to this post from this post, which contains these pictures of a green and pleasant land:

made barren and peaceful:

by the neo-Liberal consensus, and from the last post which makes the point that a "progressive" doctrine of all things military is, much like a progressive doctrine of all things, civil, social, and economic are, to insist that we stop killing folks for no good reason and think about people as something 

more than material goods maximizing automatons. If we destroy their homes and then rebuild one with, say, with more room and running water, then not only should be grateful (the imperialist mindset), but will be grateful (the COIN mindset). If we occupy their country and destroy their local institutions, but somehow marginally raise their standard of living, they will thank us for it. It is both a morally bankrupt approach and delusional.[1]

Which is all another way of saying, to those centrist neo-Liberals adamant in their refusal to speak the hippies to their left, you're doing it wrong.

[1] By the way, want to know what a COIN success story looks like? Well, the second picture but in more details see here (subscription needed).  Shorter: kill everybody and use the army to sit on the few that you might have missed. Happy New Year.

Insider Out and Outsiders In

Josh Marshall justifying his site's repeated discussions of one of the least important politicians in America:

This is actually a real blind spot for liberals in general -- the idea that things that are crazy or tawdry or just outrageous are really best ignored. Don't give them more attention. You're just giving them what they want. Or maybe it's not so practical and utilitarian. Maybe, they say, it's just beneath us. Focus on the important stuff.

So he pays attention to Palin because despite her marginal status, limited following, and lack of all importance, she is a force among a minority of doodlebugs.

Jon Chait, for similar reason, no doubt, spends a lot of time discussion Sarah Palin. However, he proudly remarks on his ability to ignore/punch hippies:

I'll cop to a couple things. First, I'm not a left-winger. I don't agree with the left about very much. If you're looking for genuine left-wing thought, this is not the blog for you.

Second, I don't spend a whole lot of time discussing left-wing thought because my interest in ideas is primarily, though not completely, in proportion to their influence on American politics. There's room for bringing in ideas that have little or no impact at the moment, but I don't do much of that.

Leaving aside that his opponents to the left aren't hippies, Chait's point is that that leftish ideas play no important role in American political life, sort of like how the neo-Liberal war mongers insisted that millions, if not more, of citizens protesting the decision to invade Iraq didn't really matter because of Socialism and puppets; whereas the least popular politician in America who has no ideas matters because, after all, the lack of media spot lights cannot kill marginal ideas.


Matthew Yglesias on ignoring the left:

I recognize that many people disagree with [my] agenda, and that many of those who disagree with it think of themselves as “to the left” of my view. But I simply deny that there are positions that are more genuinely egalitarian than my own. I really and sincerely believe that liberalism is the best way to advance the interests of the underprivileged and to make the world a better place. I offer “further left” people the (unreturned) courtesy of not questioning the sincerity of their belief that they have some better solutions, but I think they’re mistaken. 

And on neo-Liberalism, which

 is one of these terms that was invented by its critics so I hesitate to embrace it though I recognize that the shoe fits to a considerable extent. I’d say it’s liberalism, a view recognizably derived from the thinking of JS Mill and Pigou and Keynes and Maury “Freedom Plus Groceries” Maverick and all the rest.

Last point first.  If Yglesias doesn't know what neo-Liberalism means, he is unfit to discuss the current political scene in these United States, long may her best medicine be laughter.  If he wants to know, here's a good place to start; if that is too long, here's an interview.

Second to last point second.  "really and sincerely believe" based on what?  Real and sincere belief? When considering the basis for his real and sincere beliefs consider his war on barbers. We have had, I repeat, over 30 years of neo-Liberal policies and they have had the exact opposite result of that predicted. The long development of a liberal democratic and capitalist system that pre-dated the last worst crisis of capitalism have already shown that 19th century Liberalism was insufficient. Here is a discussion of the development and failures of Liberalism from a position more egalitarian and to Yglesias' left.

Some folks deny that there is a problem or more precisely that folk denies that being ignored by Yglesias is a problem.  There is a larger point here and it has to do with 1848.  The then Liberals refused to forge a tactical or strategic alliance with the then Radicals and the then Conservative and the then Reactionaries were able to recover, reload, and put down the revolutions through military aid. While the Liberals did get a sort of watered down version of constitutionalism they ceded political leadership back to the Conservatives and Reactionaries and were on the way to being a party that represented ever fewer citizens.

My point is for all you "centrist" neo-Liberals out there, your allies lie on the left and it makes sense to make compromises with them. The Conservatives aren't going to give even yet half a loaf.

Missing the Point

I mentioned that there has been a bit of a kerfuffle concerning the neo-Liberal, but  somehow left, paying no attention to the left left.  In a post over to Rortybomb, someone short hands the criticism as

[c]ontra Freddie, If you want left economics writing great stuff that is relevant to the current discussion there’s plenty to choose from; I’d recommend adding his blog to your rss feeder.

What Freddie actually argued is that no one from the neo-Liberal alleged left pays any attention to arguments from their left. Both Yglesias and Jon Chait agreed. This is a very important point and question.  The answers, I thought, were revealing and I hope to have something more to say directly.  So all six of you can wait with baited breath.

Missing the Point: Right Wing Talking Points

Concerning the riots in Tunisia and nearby Algeria, Andrew Sullivan reposts, so one assumes he approves, some one demanding that the Right take a more active interest in the democracy now elements of the riots.  The problem here is that the Right has decided that all unrest now has to do with economics.  Fox, for example, insists that the riots are primarily about unemployment instead of about the corrupt, incompetent, and undemocratic political system. While it is certainly true that Tunisia's economy stinks, the demand for President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali's, in office since 1987, immediate resignation and his announcement of not running in the next election is more than evidence of economic dissatisfaction but rather of a desire for better leadership.  The economy may be a proximate and necessary cause but it is unlikely to be sufficient.

Why are Fox and others on the Right emphasizing the economic and ignoring the desire for democracy? One reason might be the Glenn Beck theory of Soros' revolution. One other might be that they have been casting all unrest, whether in Greece or England, as evidence of the economic losers petulance at the neo-Liberal belt tightening serious politicians.

In other words, rather than admit that the social and political unrest is evidence of wide-spread dissatisfaction with a political class that under the guise of protecting the children from debt are, in fact, gutting education, health, and so forth, while ensuring that the rich continue to prosper.  The complaints, my argument is, reflect a rejection of neo-Liberal policies not because of some immediate economic problem but because the neo-Liberal solutions have been tried and found wanting and, whatismore, the neo-Liberal solutions cause immediate harm to the majority of any nation's citizenry without the benefit of improvement further down the line.

Or, in any event, that's how it seems to me.

The Last 30 Years Don't Count

Stephen Spuriel over to the NRO's Corner asserts

Keynesians, you had your turn at bat. You whiffed. It’s time to try something else.

Yeah, two years of successfully staving off the worst results of 30 years of Neoliberal nihilism while working to overcome the entrenched pro-rich folks distortions is proof that the neo-Keynesian policies gradually enacted haven't worked.

In England

Education reform and market-based solutions in England lead the Con/Lib government to try and

cut about 80 percent of the current $6.2 billion it pays annually for university teaching, and about $1.6 billion from the $6.4 billion it provides for research. 

This latest battle against education leads universities and colleges

[i]n anticipation of further cuts, many are beginning to lay off instructors, reduce the number of classes and shut down departments. Some instructors and researchers, dismayed by how little money they are being offered and worried about future financing, have abandoned Britain for more lucrative offers at universities abroad.

What does that mean as a practical matter? This:

Middlesex University said last spring that it intended to close its philosophy department. Cardiff University in Wales announced proposals to reduce the teaching staff in its modern languages department to 10 people, from 22. King’s College London said it would abolish its chair in paleography, the study of ancient handwriting — the only such post in Britain. (After an international outcry, it proposed creating a new position in “paleography and manuscript studies” that would be “fully funded from philanthropic monies.”)

 That's right cut funding so that you can have fewer educated citizens and a state-sponsored brain drain.  What is the cause of all this?  Folks like a Mr. Browne, who used to work for that paragon of private enterprise BP, whose

report also proposes withdrawing government support completely from subjects in the arts and humanities and concentrating it in areas he believes contribute more to the economy, like science and engineering.

Vote for Walker and he can do the same to the UW.

Too Few Choices

For the longest time, Conservatives and Neoliberals have argued for more testing and greater choice, through charter schools and vouchers.  Recent studies suggest that none of this works. When confronted with these facts of the matter, the intellectually honest thing to do would be stop rooting from them.  Ross Douthat, however, thinks the thing to is repeat old and discredited canards, "incompetent teachers" cause low performance among students, and double down on choice, vouchers, and other even yet more idiotic solutions, "fund students" and allow the magic of the market place to sort it all out. About one sensible point made in this column is that testing doesn't provide the evidence necessary to find the answer to the question "is our children learning," which comes because testing delegitimatizes Douthat's preferred solution: choice. 

When it comes to education reform, Conservatives really do suffer from a dearth of choice.

Glibertarians

Tyler Cowen writes concerning the fire department kerfuffle:

They wouldn't even let him pay up ex post.  David notes that this is a government-run fire department and thus the story is not much of a moral reductio on the market.  Arguably a private company would behave the same way, sometimes, but it 's odd to claim that government failure reminds you market failure is possible and so let's damn the market.  By the way, markets do pretty well at setting up schemes with a penalty for late payment; that's how my mortgage works.

The reason this failure by a state agency is used as a "moral reductio on the market" is that the state agency was acting like a for profit enterprise when it collected subscriptions for service, instead of acting like a state agency funded by an equitable tax on all those who potentially need protection from fire.

It is odd for proponents of smaller states and market solutions for the provision of social goods to insist that the results of smaller states and market solutions for the provisions of social goods aren't the fault of smaller states and market solutions for the provision of social goods. Kind of like the Dilemma of Franklin's Pickle, if you are too blinkered by your idealization of smaller states and market solutions for the provision of social goods that you can't see that smaller states and market solution for the provision of social goods leads to having your house burn down when you haven't paid the subscription,  idealization of your argument has blinded you to the the implication of your argument.

Let's call this one the Glibertarian Conundrum.

Free Riders

Everybody in the known universe has weighed in on the case of

Gene Cranick, a rurual homeowner in Obion County, Tennessee. Cranick hadn’t forked over $75 for the subscription fire protection service offered to the county’s rural residents, so when firefighters came out to the scene, they just stood there, with their equipment on the trucks, while Cranick’s house burned to the ground.

And, as is often the case, various morons have tried to defend fire departments not putting out fires because of a failure to pay 75 dollars on the grounds of glibertarian nonsense, I'd just like to remind the world, who might think we Americans have lost our minds, that a truly great American once argued that

Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation, "Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it." What is the transaction that goes on? I don't want $15--I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.

He then went on to win WWII over the objections of right wing nut jobs who hated democracy. Were he alive today and were he confronted with the stupidity of a fire department on the scene refusing to put out a fire and, it seems, allowing dogs and a cat to die, his response is easy to imagine. That anyone anywhere defends the fire department's failure to act is a condemnation of their commitment to real America.

UPDATE:
Read the whole of the link for FDR. It really very good.

Hating on Progress

There is only so much oil in the world.  One method of moving forward is to create a reliable transportation system that eschews cars. Republicans reject trains because? Shut up, that's why. The way we do things is unsustainable.  We need to do something different.  But we won't because?  Shut up, that's why.  What are Republicans positive policies?  They have none, other than cut taxes, services, etc.  It is really beyond belief.

Jonah Goldberg Still Dumb

Recently, Goldberg attempts to make sense of the relationship between Liberalism and the failure of American Education.  He claims that

[i]n 2008-2009, the  District of Columbia spent $1.3 billion dollars on 45,858 students. That is slightly less than the entire GDP of Belize. In 2007, 8 percent of DC eighth graders were able to do math at the eighth grade level. Clearly what’s needed is more money!

According to this

 the DC Public Schools gross budget for fiscal year 2008 as of October 1, 2007

was $949,087,062. Goldberg doesn't provide a link for his claim so  maybe there is another number out there, but he appears to have misplaced a decimal or so.

He continues

Yes, yes, the horrid state of American education is an American problem, and to that extent we’re all to blame in some abstract sort of way. But is there another major area of American public policy that is more screwed up and more completely the fault of one ideological side? 

 In 1980 Milwaukee began an experiment with charter schools, vouchers and all that right wing gobbledygook. The system created redundant schools, drained funding from the public schools, and more generally, sought to use market-based reforms to fix something that isn't a market.  The net result? Vouchers and the rest don't work.  How many school districts have had to deal with this kind of nonsense day after day? How much of the Conservative rage about education has funneled itself into this specific set of policy prescriptions? All of it.  The news that vouchers et alia didn't work led long timer supporter, Diane Ravich, of vouchers and similar reforms to conclude that these kinds of reforms don't work and are actually undermining successful reform efforts.

Ravich also argues that

Teachers feel, with justification, that they are being scapegoated and blamed whenever test scores don't go up. My book appeared at a time when there was only one narrative about school reform, which privileged the views of businessmen, lawyers, politicians, foundation executives, and government officials who are imposing their ideas without regard to the wisdom and experience of those who must implement them.

While Goldberg frets that 

[i]n the last few presidential elections I’ve heard more from Democrats — by far — complaining about leaky school roofs, cracking paint, and the need for more computers in the classroom than I’ve heard about the fact it’s easier to find and train a brontosaurus than it is to fire a horrible teacher.

It really is all the teachers fault and we need more market based solutions.

He then fumes that

I’m sure not that many people follow the DC education controversy, but in a nutshell: Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his reelection bid in large part because he tried, through Michelle Rhee the education chancellor, to fix the schools over the objections of the teachers’ unions. Fenty’s opponent and the liberal black establishment turned it into a racial issue (surprise!) and now education reform in DC is seriously in doubt. 

Rhee's favored solution was firing teachers.  The Teacher's Union, indeed any union, has as one of its main priorities protecting its members from being fired.  Goldberg seems not to have paid attention to the past 30 years of American history, during which the lessons of PATCO went unlearned by "centrists" while movement conservatives sought to destroy more unions, deregulate more industries, and, in the end, succeeded in screwing up the country.

He concludes with anguished cry over the unfairness of it all.  Because  if

you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask “Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?” After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.
Largely because of the Iraq war,  Katrina and Bush’s unpopularity,  a host of liberal intellectuals pronounced conservatism to be dead. The decrepit state of American education is a far more sweeping, profound and lasting indictment of the very heart of liberalism and yet the response from everyone is “Let’s give these guys another try!”

Actually, no. The problems we face today are  the result of the Neoliberal, Reaganite, Glibbertarian, and Thatcherite crap that has dominated policy making for the past 30 years. Starve the state of revenue, destroy unions, blame workers, traduce the state's ability to do what it has been doing successfully for since at least 1933, and deregulate.  What has this led to?  Look out your window.

In a sign of their seriousness about tackling education reform, when a recent study came out that showed that Head Start made little or no difference in academic achievement, Conservative demanded its immediate dismantlement and used as a stick to beat the stupid Liberals and the Liberal Liberalness.  Of course, they missed the fact that individuals who had the pleasure of Head Start did better by other measure, time in jail, etc, than their peers who did not benefit.


Can we all do better in the process of continuing to reform our educational system?  Yes we can.  Does this require jettisoning Neoliberal, Reaganite, Glibbertarian, and Thatcherite critiques of a by and large successful system?  Yes, it does.  We cannot afford to let these flying monkeys back into power. No, we can't

And as a bonus, remember that Yglesias wants the same market-based, Olive-Gardenesque reforms and thinks that firing teachers is the first step to nirvana.  It ain't.


UPDATE:
Goldberg's claim about 8% is in error.  In their self assessment DC schools have a 48% in "elementary math" on a nationally administered test they have, for 2008-09, 11%.  They did, it's true, have 8% on the nation test in 2007-08, but they improved their scores.

Remember "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance"

Aha

Via TPM come this is which an outraged Fox newsbot feels the pain of those making over 350,000 per year only hang onto .50 per 1.00 over 350,000, which isn't true but still means that if you get to phenomenally rich and have your garbage picked up.  Plus taxes are socialism and being the first into the trough is merit.

Reverse Keynesianism

Keynes once quipped "when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Yglesias engages in a bit of reverse Keynesiansim in his steadfast defense of using market-based reforms on problems that have nothing to do with the market. Unlike the profit and loss calculations that drive Olive Garden, continuing to improve our educational systems requires thinking about in non-economic ways. The other day, Yglesias remarked that

Linda Pearlstein summarizes a pretty good new controlled study from Vanderbilt University that tested the idea that offering teachers bonuses of up to $15,000 could improve student outcomes. The results—nope

Leaving aside how well situated Yglesias is to judge the goodness of the survey, he seems, at least partially to accept that the study has made claims about merit pay and incentives untenable. For example, he insist that  he

 never really liked the term “merit pay” or the rhetoric around it. The right way to think about teacher compensation, I think, is this. You could have a system in which all teachers are paid the same amount. But we don’t have that system. Instead we have a system where veteran teachers are paid much more than novice teachers, and teachers with master’s degrees are paid more than teachers without master’s degrees. We could switch this to a system where teachers whose kids do much worse than average on value-added measures get fired , and teachers whose kids to much better than average get paid more than average teachers.

Value added?  Does he mean improved on some outcome assessment measures that acurately capture how much students are learning and how well teachers are teaching?  But lets be clear here, his ideal system is not "merit pay" or punishing "bad" teachers it is, rather, paying good teachers more and firing bad teachers, which is like totally different, somehow. Because he is, at least dimly, aware that the system he just described is identical to merit pay and incentive systems, he has to deny that paying "better" teachers more while firing "bad" teachers might be creating

an “incentive” as simply [a means] to ensure that the best teachers aren’t tempted to leave the profession while the worst teachers are encouraged to do so.

Because

[i]f you want to do something through a bonus/incentive mechanism, what would make sense is to offer teachers extra money to take on challenging assignments in high poverty schools.

See?  Paying more and punishing more aren't merit based incentive systems, which don't work, but rather incentives are things that reward risk taking.

Later that same day, Yglesias trys to rename merit pay incentive systems when he explains that

for my part when I talk about differentiated compensation for teachers, this is what I have in mind. Yes, reduce barriers to getting rid of teachers who do much worse than average. But also offer the best performers substantially more money than teachers currently get. That means the best teachers will keep teaching and also that a wider range of people will consider teaching as a possible career choice.

See, offering good teachers an incentive through higher pay is wholly different that offering teachers incentives through bonuses.  And, I'm sure, that the attempt to "reduce barriers" will in no way require weakening teacher's unions.

If the facts change and your proposed solution remains the same, you might be an ideologue .

Now This is Interesting.

Via ThinkProgess, we learn that

Following instructions from President George W. Bush to develop an updated war plan for Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered CENTCOM Commander Gen. Tommy Franks in November 2001 to initiate planning for the “decapitation” of the Iraqi government and the empowerment of a “Provisional Government” to take its place.

From those documents released today, we find that our hardworking planners conclude that "unlike Afghanistan, it is important to have ideas about who would rule" Iraq after the invasion. Leaving aside the obvious question of why  Afghanistan didn't require consideration, one also wonders what happened to the plan for figuring out who should rule Iraq.

[Edited for clarity}

Thoughtful Critique

After  rehashing a brief blog post on, among other things, a documentary about education that, for all Yeglesias knows, either does or doesn't improperly compare Finnish students to American students, Yglesias pivots to with a now patented

That said, this kind of thing can be taken too far.

What is being taken to far?  Reading blog posts? Making inapt comparison? Running down the teaching profession? Concern about syntax? Making informed critiques of badly thought out arguments about education reform?

There’s a newish library branch in my neighborhood that’s quite nice looking. I don’t think anyone expects its existence to transform the radically transform the educational experience of children living in the area.

No, of course not.  All kids have access to the computers, books, research material, low-cost or free enrichment programs, magazines, professional aid in finding books that libraries provide.  Well maybe one or two don't.  I betcha that the none of the parents of the kids will  benefit from the various programs the library runs for adult literacy, aiding non-native speakers of English improve their language skills, that tiny fraction of adults without computer skills gain them, or whatever other unnecessary public goods libraries provide their patrons.

And I bet reasonable people could disagree as to whether or not it made any real sense to build the library in the first place. But the library is there nonetheless, and the city is running it.

Damn it, if only the reasonable people who stood on either side of the issue had the opportunity to discuss the library it might not even be there to not provide the unneeded benefits to kids and adults.  Instead, the busybodies downtown crammed the library down his throat and then they have the temerity to run the damn thing; run it right into the ground, I bet.

So given that the city is running the library, we should try to run the library well. From the little things to the big things to the things that are core to the library’s function (deciding which books to stock) to the things that are peripheral (cleaning the floors in the bathroom) it all makes some kind of difference.

Yeah, hear that downtown busybodies no more reductions in funding due to Neoliberal, Reaganite, and Glibertarian tax policies.  Hire a janitor or two.  Oh and as by the way, I betcha that all those fancy rules and regulations about who is and who isn't a librarian are just to protect the librarian industry from fair competition.

And for any given quantity of resources allocated to the library, we should be doing our best to ensure that those resources are well spent. Whether or not there are other problems in the community that it’s beyond the capacity of the library to overcome, the public is still well within its rights to demand that the library be the best library it can be.

Yes, yes they are right to demand that. Although, as seems obvious from Yglesias' tone here, the state will screw it up because of, no doubt, its ignorance of market forces.

And that’s the real issue here. It’s great for skeptics about this or that proposed reform to how public schools operate to challenge the ideas on the merits. But the idea that it’s somehow unfair to be pressing for a more optimal allocation of resources is the flipside of destructive libertarian nihilism about the possibility of better-managed public agencies. And it actually makes less sense. If you want to argue (as I think liberals do) that it’s worth investing money in public schools, then you have to accept the corollary that the quality of the schools is important independently from other social issues.

Hear that Strawmen Liberals  whose voices ring in the confines of Yglesias' brain pan?  If you want to fix things stop just throwing money at things and start being more respectful of arguments for educational reform that hinge on turning schools into Olive Gardens.

Or get with the technology gurus, like Bill Gates who predicts that

Five years from now on the Web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university."
A year at a university costs an average $50,000, the Microsoft founder and Harvard dropout said last month. The Web can deliver the same quality education for $2,000.

 Don't just sit back and point to all the non-Harvards where education is cheaper or worry about who or what will be giving the lecture, hint: Robots, or what canned lectures might mean to the future of education:

Or point out that in any number of classrooms all across this land of waving wheat hard-working teachers, administrators, professors, and others are working to improve education through theory and praxis.  Be respectful, damn it.

He starts off with someone else's informed critique of a program for educational reform and then sternly warns of the dangers of spending on social goods without the stern discipline of market forces, and concludes that people who are concerned about educational reform need to be more knowledgeably when they criticize educational reform. See how it all hangs together?  I don't either.