The Way of the Future Sighting in Yuma

August 13, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Arizona Charter School Association has calculated student learning gains in grades 3-8 for every district and charter school in the state and posted the results online. Interestingly the same school came top in both math and reading- Carpe Diem E-Learning in Yuma Arizona. They not only came in first, it was by a pretty wide margin.

So, what’s the secret sauce? They let you know right on the school webpage:

Our academic program is a “hybrid” program consisting of on-site teacher-facilitators (coaches) and computer-assisted instruction (CAI) utilizing a computer-based learning and management system. Our program offers an extensive online library of interactive instructional courseware, providing learners and teachers with access to thousands of hours of self-paced, mastery-based instruction.

Our program considers individual differences in ability, knowledge, interests, goals, contexts and learning styles. Our instructional resources and strategies give our “coaches” the power to effectively tailor their instructional practices, accommodating the individual needs of the learner with the goal of achieving student mastery.

In the Carpe Diem Collegiate High School and Middle School (CDCHS), we believe that all students should have a high quality experience and technology-based education designed to help them be successful today, tomorrow and in the future.  What is “success?” At Carpe Diem, success means the student must demonstrate appropriate character and content proficiency (learning mastery), not just course completion.

Hybrid model mixing classroom instruction and technology delivered content. Teacher really serving as a guide on the side rather than a sage on a stage, only in a context where is finally makes sense. Sound familar?

Clayton Christensen has predicted that as a disruptive technology the day would come, after of years of occupying niches here and there, steadily growing like the mice at the feet of the dinosaurs, when people would realize that online learning represents a superior technology to Jurassic schools.  After reaching this tipping point, Christensen sees a rapid rise in online learning.

Terry Moe and John Chubb also see a bright future for e-learning, albeit one a bit more constrained by politics. Moe and Chubb see a chance to substitute technology for labor, providing the opportunity to provide better education for less money. Needless to say, this leads to opposition from the education unions, but Moe and Chubb see technology subtly but surely eroding the power of the unions.

Two of the most obvious possible advantages of online learning: self-paced schooling and required mastery of content to advance, both of which are featured at Carpe Diem.  I’ll be keeping a close eye on Carpe Diem’s progress, but producing the state’s largest gains in a relatively low-income area certainly has my attention.

5 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The Moral Case for Capitalism in CRB

August 12, 2009

Monopoly - Pennybags

He’s not just ineffective. He’s a thief.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The summer issue of the Claremont Review of Books, which just went live for subscribers, contains my essay on the moral case for capitalism. Some articles will be made public one at a time over the next few weeks; I’ll be sure to post here if they make mine available.

Here’s a free sample to motivate you subscribers to head over there and check it out:

Some time last fall, the debate over bank stabilization metastasized into a frontal assault on the principles of capitalism itself. Demagogues whose policies were largely to blame for the crisis trotted themselves out as saviors who would deliver us from the depredations of Wall Street greed. Flushed with victory at the polls, they set to work putting whole sectors of the economy under government control.

During those crucial months, the public heard little counterargument. Capitalism’s defenders in academia, journalism, and think tanks went strangely mute, right at the moment their voices could have made a real difference. A short delay might have been excusable—all of us needed time to absorb and understand an extreme breakdown in financial markets that struck with breakneck speed. However, as the months rolled on and the threat of a socialist resurgence became more real, and still the self-appointed defenders of capitalism remained silent, it became clear enough that many of them were actually suffering a deeper crisis of confidence. By the time they finally started finding their voices, it was too late; the turn to Big Government was a fait accompli.

At the same time, some of capitalism’s traditional political allies began defecting. Social conservative opinion leaders, especially evangelicals, have been shifting leftward on economics for some time. It is now common to hear even the most naïve and undigested liberal clichés circulated among evangelicals as though they were profound discoveries. Savvy socialists like Jim Wallis, who have learned how to dress up their materialistic economic reductionism in religious language, have become big draws on evangelical campuses. Last year, evangelical voters lined up behind Mike Huckabee, whose populist proposals made economic conservatives apoplectic. And, of course, socially conservative Catholics remain deeply ambivalent about capitalism—as exemplified in the latest papal encyclical on the subject.

The diffidence of capitalist intellectuals and the disaffection of their social conservative allies are not two different problems. They are two sides of the same problem—a crisis in capitalism’s moral philosophy.

4 Comments | economics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Never Going to Give Your Teen Spirit Up

August 12, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

This is <sniff> b*e*a*u*t*i*f*u*l

3 Comments | random pop culture | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Are Schools Prepared for the Flu?

August 11, 2009

Just because the current influenza epidemic has been relatively mild doesn’t mean that it will continue to be so.  If you want to read something scary, check out this paper by noted flu researcher, John M. Barry.  Barry is a distinguished scholar at the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research and author of the award-winning book on the 1918 flu pandemic, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History .

In the new paper, Barry writes:

The novel H1N1 virus [the current swine flu] seems thus far to be following the pattern of the first three pandemics, and it seems highly likely that it will return in full flower. If the virus is fully adapted to and efficient at infecting humans, this would occur soon, possibly during the influenza season in the southern hemisphere or possibly a few months later in the northern hemisphere. The 1918 and 1957 viruses both exploded in September and October in the northern hemisphere, even though this is not the influenza season….

The most disturbing pieces of information are two:

First, unlike seasonal influenza viruses, novel H1N1 seems to have the ability to bind to cells deep in the lung, which H5N1 does and which the 1918 virus could do.

Second, molecular biology has provided is that, according to scientists at CDC and elsewhere, “genetic markers predictive of adaptation to humans are not currently present in the [H1N1] viruses, suggesting previously unrecognized determinants could be responsible for transmission.” This suggests two things: first, this virus may have other things to teach us; second, we do not know the whole story of how influenza becomes transmissible from human to human, so our monitoring of H5N1 for these markers is incomplete.

Novel H1N1 also lacks genetic markers for virulence identified in the 1918 virus and is expected to remain a mild virus, but this information about transmissibility has unsettling implications.

H5N1 continues to infect and kill people, and Robert Webster, one of the most respected virologists in the world, has expressed concern about a further reassortment of novel H1N1 with H5N1. This is not so far-fetched. A recent laboratory study in which ferrets (the usual animal model for influenza studies) were coinfected with H5N1 and the seasonal H3N2 virus found that a new reassortant virus with genes from both was produced 9 percent of the time.This reassortant was likely much milder than H5N1 itself. (H5N1 is virulent because it binds only to receptors deep inside the lung; other influenza viruses bind to receptors, usually in the upper respiratory tract; the reassortants all were found in the upper respiratory tract.) But given the lethality of H5N1, a reassortant that includes it is frightening. Assuming H1N1 matures to full pandemic status and begins to infect 20 to 40 percent of the population, reassortment with H5N1 is a threat.

Let me translate — the current swine flu, called novel H1N1, is easily transmitted but relatively mild.  The same was true in the first waves of past pandemics.  But if there is a reassortment, a mixing, of H1N1 with the more lethal but less transmissible avian flu, H5N1, we are in for big trouble.  Laboratory experiments with ferrets suggest that the two might mix to combine the transmissibility of one with the lethality of the other. 

Don’t be fooled by the mild first wave.  The mixing could take place in a second or third season, as it did in 1918.

If this does happen we will have all sorts of things to worry about, but one of them is what we do about education.  Despite headlines declaring Swine Flu Should Not Close Most Schools, Federal Officials Say, we may well have to close large numbers of schools.  If that happens do we have contingency plans prepared?  Do we have plans to provide education even if large numbers of students have to stay at home?  Will we have procedures for using phone and internet technologies to disseminate assignments and instruction?

I’m willing to bet that fewer than 10 of the 10,000 school districts in the country have workable emergency plans ready for a deadly flu pandemic.  Just look at the school districts around New Orleans.  It’s not as if school districts all along the Gulf of Mexico should be surprised that a hurricane might hit and close school for several weeks.  It’s likely to happen at least with some districts on a fairly regular basis.  And yet none of them had workable plans for how to educate students when the schools closed.  They just relied on sending many of those students to other cities outside of the impacted area or leaving them to wander the streets.

But what will happen when schools all over the country are closing because of a deadly flu pandemic?  We won’t just be able to send the kids to some other, unaffected city.  Let’s hope and pray that it won’t happen, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be prepared in case it does.

18 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses

August 9, 2009

The new book from Rick Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses, is a remarkably comprehensive and accessible review of K-12 education reform strategies.  It’s a must-read for education policymakers, advocates, and students — at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.  Even experienced researchers will find this to be an essential reference, given its broad sweep and extensive citations.

The book basically makes four arguments.  First it establishes how important K-12 educational achievement really is to economic success and how far we are lagging our economic competitors in this area.  Second, it demonstrates the dominance and utter failure of input-oriented reform strategies, including across-the-board spending increases and class-size reductions.  Third, it describes how the court system has perpetuated failed input-reform strategies after having bought intellectually dishonest methods of calculating how much spending schools really need.  And fourth, it makes the case for reform strategies that involve “performance-based funding,” including merit pay, accountability systems, and choice.

None of these arguments is original to this book.  But to the extent that others have made these arguments, they have drawn heavily on Rick Hanushek’s research.  In this book you get to hear it directly from the source and you get to hear it all so persuasively and completely.

If I have any complaint about the book it is that they are too restrained in their criticisms of the methods by which adequate school spending has been determined and the “researchers” who have developed and profited from those methods.  These fraudulent analyses have justified court decisions ordering billions of dollars to be taken from taxpayers and blown ineffectively in schools.  And the quacks promoting these methods have made millions of dollars in consulting fees in the process.

Those methods include the “professional judgment approach,” which essentially consists of gathering a group of educators and asking them how much money they think they would need to provide an “adequate” education,  Naturally, they need flying saucers, ponies, and a laser tag arena to ensure an adequate education. 

Another method is the “evidence-based approach,” which selectively reads the research literature to identify what it claims are effective educational practices.  It then sums the cost of those practices while paying no attention to how many are really necessary for an adequate education or whether any of them are really cost-effective.

There is also the “successful schools approach,” which looks at how much money a typical successful school spends and calls for all schools to spend at least that much.  This of course ignores the fact that many successful schools spend less than the typical amount and are still successful.  One would have thought it impossible for them to be successful with less money than that deemed necessary to succeed. 

And lastly, there is the “cost-function approach.”  This approach takes the conventional finding that higher spending, controlling for other factors, has little to no relationship with student achievement, and then turns that finding on its head.  It does this by switching  the dependent variable from student achievement to cost.  The question then becomes: how much each unit of achievement contributes to school costs.  Switching the dependent variable does nothing to change the lack of relationship between spending and achievement.  If you hide behind enough statistical mumbo-jumbo you can hope that the courts won’t notice that there is still virtually no relationship between spending and achievement controlling for other factors.

The Hanushek and Lindseth book lays all of this out (see especially chapter 7), but they are remarkably restrained in denouncing these approaches and the people who cynically profit from them.  I don’t think we should be so restrained.  The promoters of this snake oil are often university professors with sterling national reputations.  They’ve cashed in those reputations to market obviously flawed methods.  We shouldn’t let them do this without paying a significant price in their reputation.

The University of Southern California’s Larry Picus, and the University of Wisconsin’s Allan Odden, are both past presidents of the well-respected American Education Finance Association.  They shouldn’t be able to sell the “evidence-based approach” to 5 states for somewhere around $3 million without people pointing and laughing when they show up at conferences.

I know that Rick Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth are too professional and scholarly to call these folks frauds, but I’m not sure what else one could honestly call them.  Rick comes close in his Education Next article on these school funding adequacy consultants, entitled, “The Confidence Men.”  But in this book,perhaps with the tempered emotions of his co-author,  he adopts a more restrained tone.  Perhaps this is all for the best because the book maintains the kind of scholarly temperament that strengthens its persuasiveness to those who would be more skeptical. 

This has been a great year for education reform books.  Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses joins Terry Moe and John Chubb’s Liberating Learning, released earlier this summer, as members of the canon of essential education reform works.

4 Comments | methodology, school accountability, school funding | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

New Study on Florida Tax Credit Scholarships

August 6, 2009

FL survey table

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Today the Friedman Foundation releases a new study I co-authored with Christian D’Andrea on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program. You may recall that program as the subject of last month’s rush to judgment.

At the top of this post you can see what the parents participating in the program report about the services they previously received in public schools, and the services they are now receiving in the school choice program. The study conducted a survey of over 800 families randomly selected from the entire population participating in the program, excluding only those who had no prior public school experience (because their children entered the program in kindergarten).

The numbers tell the story. Public schools didn’t deliver for these kids, and school choice does – in spades.

Obviously this doesn’t answer all questions about the program. Indeed, as the first empirical study ever completed on a tax-credit scholarship program (that is, the first to empirically measure the outcomes of such a program measured against a relevant standard of comparison), it hardly could. We all look forward to the completion of the official evaluation when it’s ready. Until then, however, we have to take the information we have. And, if I do say so, I think this is some pretty important information.

Here’s the executive summary:

This study examines the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, one of the nation’s largest school choice programs. It is the first ever completed empirical evaluation of a tax-credit scholarship program, a type of program that creates school choice through the tax code. Earlier reports, including a recent one on the Florida program, have not drawn comparisons between the educational results of public schools and tax-credit scholarships; this study is therefore the first step in evaluating the performance of this type of school choice.

The Florida program provides a tax credit on corporate income taxes for donations to scholarship-funding organizations, which use the funding to provide K-12 private school scholarships to low-income students. Over 23,000 Florida students are attending private schools this year using these scholarships. Similar programs exist in Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

Studying a tax-credit scholarship program using traditional empirical techniques presents a number of methodological challenges. To overcome these difficulties, the study used a telephone survey conducted by Marketing Informatics to interview 808 participating parents whose children attended public schools before entering the program. It asked them to compare the educational services they received in public and private schools.

The results provide the first ever direct comparison between the education participants received when they were in Florida public schools and the education they receive in the school choice program.

Key findings include:

• Participating parents report that they receive dramatically better educational services from their current private schools than they previously received in public schools.

• 80 percent are “very satisfied” with the academic progress their children are making in their current private schools, compared to 4 percent in their previous public schools.

• 80 percent are “very satisfied” with the individual attention their children now receive, compared to 4 percent in public schools.

• 76 percent are “very satisfied” with the teacher quality in their current schools, compared to 7 percent in public schools.

• 76 percent are “very satisfied” with their schools’ responsiveness to their needs, compared to 4 percent in public schools.

• 62 percent are “very satisfied” with the student behavior in their current schools, compared to 3 percent in public schools.

• Most participating parents were dissatisfied with their public school experiences on most measurements, and are overwhelmingly satisfied with their current private schools.

• 58 percent had been “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the academic progress their children were making in public school, compared to 4 percent in their current private schools.

• 64 percent had been “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the individual attention their children received in public schools, compared to 3 percent in their current schools.

• 44 percent had been “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with teacher quality in public schools, compared to 3 percent in their current schools.

• 59 percent had been “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with school responsiveness in public schools, compared to 3 percent in their current schools.

• 62 percent had been “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with student behavior in public schools, compared with 5 percent in their current schools.

• Asked to rate their schools on a scale from one to „„ ten, 94 percent of participants gave their current private schools at least a seven, and 54 percent gave them a ten. Only 18 percent of parents rated their public schools seven or higher, and just 2 percent rated them at the highest level.

• Of the 128 parents whose children are not likely to be in the program again next year, 81 percent said that dissatisfaction with the program played no role at all in their decision, and 100 percent – all 128 of them – said the program should continue to be available for others even though they were not likely to use it again next year themselves.

5 Comments | research reports, tax-credit scholarships | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

AZ Newspaper Lets Rip on Tax Credits

August 6, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In the climax of the Branagh film Dead Again the protagonist struggles with the villain over a pair of scissors. The winner is all but certain to use them to knife the loser to death. Losing control of the scissors, the villain (played by Derek Jacobi) says in classic British understatement “I shall be very interested to see what happens next.”

The East Valley Tribune has a three part series titled Rigged Privilege on the Arizona tax credit system.  At the time of this writing, they are only through parts one and two.

A little background. In 1997, the Arizona legislature created the nation’s first scholarship tax-credit law. Donors were allowed to make a $500 donation to a non-profit group, which could then give scholarships for children. State oversight in the bill was limited to some reporting. The law specified that scholarship organizations had to give scholarships to more than one school, and that donors could not make a donation for the benefit of their own child. The law allows 10% of funds to be spent on administration.

The bill had been means-tested, but the sponsor reluctantly dropped the means test during the process. The bill had almost no support from Democrats, and the last vote needed to put the bill over the top agreed to support it only if it did not contain a means test. Over the years, the maximum amount that could be donated for a married couple filing jointly has been raised to parity at $1,000. Arizona lawmakers created a corporate credit in 2006 which included a means test.

Last year the credit raised about $55 million dollars.  For a bit of perspective, that is about 10% of the annual operating budget of Arizona’s largest school district. The credit created 28,234 scholarships last year. With more than ten times the money, the state’s largest school district serves less than three times as many students as the tax credit. 

Sound like a bargain so far? Don’t answer yet! This is not a program with a lottery, and thus it does not lend itself to a high quality test score evaluation with a proper control group. The Goldwater Institute has however surveyed Arizona public and private high school students and found substantially higher levels of student satisfaction, perceptions of academic rigor and school safety, and higher levels of political tolerance among private school students (forthcoming). The credit in short produces a better education at a lower cost according to the students.

A number of organizations employ means test for students. Even those that do not are aiding some as yet uncounted number of low-income families. I have personally met students whose academic careers and lives were changed by the opportunity that this program created.

Having said all of that, the EVT details what happens with a program containing minimal oversight and ultimately having no one, in either the private or public sphere, with the authority to police the program: abuse.

I encourage you to read the article for yourself. One of the stories focused on a scholarship group who somehow raised money for a few years but failed to provide any scholarships (the law requires you to spend 90% of your funds on scholarships). Federal law prohibits designating a beneficiary for a charitable donation, for obvious reasons. Some scholarship groups have engaged in “recommendations” for donations, and have appeared to engineer donation swaps among parents. Grey area material, at best.

Groups maintaining accounts for individual students seems like a bright-line violation of federal tax law. I don’t yet understand the workings of this “tax credit for fetuses” business, but let’s just say for now that it seems like a pretty clear perversion of the intent of the law, even if it is legal, which it may not be.

So I’m inclined to think that the Arizona tax credit system could use a clean up. Opponents of parental choice have predictably seized upon this report as proof that the whole idea of tax credits is some evil corporate plot to destroy Western civilization, etc. Such people could use some Valium sprinkled in their coffee. In the big picture, the tax credit is providing higher quality education opportunities than average at a dramatically lower cost.

Does the program need a referee with the power to throw a flag and assess a penalty, even eject a player from the game? Yes. The absence of such a referee is basically not only inviting, but begging for abuse.  Should lawmakers means test the program? It depends on your perspective, but I’d say no, or rather, only conditionally yes. I would readily agree to a means test if we can do the same for public schools. The average scholarship in this program is in the neighborhood of $2,000. Average public school spending in the state is just south of $10,000. As long as we are handing out $10,000 to the children of North Scottsdale millionaires, I can’t see a reasonable argument to deny them $2,000 instead to save the rest of us some money.

There are better ways to address equity concerns than a means test. When I worked at the Alliance for School Choice, we developed a set of model bills in cooperation with the Friedman Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council. In our tax credit bill, we included a requirement that scholarship organizations give a percentage of their funds to free and reduced lunch eligible children equal to the state average. Around half the children in Arizona public schools are free and reduced lunch eligible, and under this provision, STOs would have to give about half of their dollars raised to free and reduced lunch eligible students.

Groups would be free to do more than this (I serve on the board of a group which only gives scholarships to free and reduced lunch children) and such a requirement would obviously need to be phased in order to avoid serious disruption. Half the kids in Arizona public schools are free and reduced lunch eligible, but I wouldn’t count on them getting half the total K-12 money. Adoption of such a provision would likely make the tax credit more focused on equity than the public school system.

Carrie Lips Lukas, writing for the Goldwater Institute in 2003. called for a series of reforms. Last year, I fundamentally revamp the system by creating a personal use credit and means testing the scholarship credits at the free and reduced lunch level. This would expand parental choice, eliminate swapping, and create a universal system of choice with an advantage for the poor (who could benefit from both credits). Scholarship credits would still be vital, but would be purely charitable in nature.

When presented with this type of information, the first instinct of some will be to deny it, to hunker down, to accuse our enemies of far greater misdeeds, or to otherwise try to put lipstick on a pig. Good luck with that.  It is blindingly obvious to me that Arizona’s tax credit is system is a good program overall that suffers from specific weaknesses that can and must be addressed.  Otherwise, writing articles like this one will become the journalistic equivalent of using a shot gun to shoot fish in a bucket.

Leave a Comment » | tax-credit scholarships | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Have Fun Storming the Castle!

August 6, 2009

Miracle Max & Gilda

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Checker Finn, just returned from a vacation during which he apparently read something about the Constitutional Convention, writes on NRO today that “we need a revolutionary refounding” in education. Reformers should direct their efforts toward scrapping the existing education system entirely and creating a new one from scratch.

Think it’ll work? It would take a miracle.

“Can we afford not to try?” he asks at the end. Well, in fact, yes.

Checker either does or does not want reformers to divert effort and energy away from goals that are more gradual, more incremental – in other words, more achievable. If he does, he’s urging us to sabatoge efforts that achieve significant tangible results, in order to join him on a fool’s errand with no chance of success. If he doesn’t, he’s wasting our time with a lot of pointless hot air.

Unless, of course, the Fordham Institute has a holocaust cloak.

But if it does, why didn’t he list that among their assets in the first place?

3 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Cash for Crest

August 6, 2009

As Congress scrambles to add a couple billion more to the “cash for clunkers” program, the DC punditocracy sees the program as a sign that government programs are turning the economy around.  Seizing the positive moment, President Obama flew to Indiana to decalre that the economic tide is turning thanks to his efforts and to promise more government programs to spur economic activity.

Who knows if the economy is really turning or how robust a recovery will be?  But whatever progress does occur has nothing to do with cash for clunkers or other stimulus spending. 

Yes, giant government subsidies for new car purchases have led to many more new car sales.  But that doesn’t mean that the program has made a net contribution to economic activity.  All that the program did was divert economic activity from one area to another or from one time to another.  The increase in new car sales comes at the expense of used car sales, new car sales in the future, and the purchase of other goods and services.  There is no free lunch.

If we offered giant government subsidies for anything, we would see more purchases of that thing, but that doesn’t mean that the subsidies made a net contribution to economic activity.

Just yesterday I noticed that Procter and Gamble reported an 18% drop in profits from an 11% drop in sales.  Maybe we need a government program to spark more sales for P&G.  The government could offer “cash for Crest,” P&G’s toothpaste brand.  If the government threw a couple billion dollars of subsidies at toothpaste sales, I’m sure we’d see an explosion in toothpaste purchases.  But if the government did so, all we would be doing is shifting consumption to toothpaste away from other current or future consumption.

The Wall Street Journal has proposed the proper solution to this problem.  How about if we have a $4,500 subsidy for everything?  Of course, the WSJ correctly notes that this is “crackpot economics.”  But that somehow doesn’t stop Obama or the punditocracy from declaring economic victory for government planning.

4 Comments | economics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Welfareism + Unionism + Greenism = Hilarity

August 5, 2009

Smart Car tipping

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Netherlands’ extremely restrictive labor laws (destroying entry-level jobs) and overgenerous welfare state have given Amsterdam a large population of young people who have nothing to do with their lives but find some way to make their own entertainment. Meanwhile, fanatical greenism has subsidized an explosion of those tiny little Smart Cars parked on Amsterdam’s city streets, many of which just happen to be adjacent to the city’s numerous canals.

Result: Smart Car Tipping.

Welcome to the worker’s paradise!

HT Mickey Kaus

1 Comment | economics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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