Jay P. Greene's Blog

It is time once again to (dis)honor the recipient of the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award.  This year we had an exceptionally strong set of nominees, perhaps because difficult times reveal the worst (as well as the best) in us.

We had four nominees to consider: Bruce Aylward, nominated by Greg, Charles Lieber, nominated by me, Nancy Gibbs, nominated by Matt, and Mark DiRocco, nominated by Jason.  While they are all very (un)worthy nominees, our (dis)honoree this year is Mark DiRocco.

While Nancy Gibbs surely did a dis-service to journalism by awarding lousy reporting at the Arizona Republic, journalism is already so beaten down and discredited that it hardly needs our tap dancing on its grave. Will the last reader of the Arizona Republic please turn off the lights on their way out?

Aylward and Lieber were particularly strong contenders given their sycophancy for a murderous, oppressive regime.  But that’s precisely why I decided not to choose them.  While both Aylward and Lieber were excellent examples of PLDDs, their service to a BSDD made their actions too menacing for a our little award.

Especially in these troubling times I thought we needed a Higgy winner who was more familiar and less menacing.  Mark DiRocco’s callous treatment of students as mere revenue units for the schools he represents by seeking to deny Pennsylvania’s children access to existing online services offered by charter schools is just the sort of edu-blob activity we are accustomed to seeing.  It is like the comfort food of PLDD behavior that is exactly the kind of Higgy we need this year.

If you’ve been carbo-loading a bit too much to appreciate the comfort food metaphor, I’d suggest that DiRocco is the Goldilocks of Higgy nominees.  He is neither so weak and irrelevant as a journalism professor, like Gibbs, nor so scary as servants of an authoritarian regime, like Aylward and Lieber.  This year DiRocco is just right.

Anyhoo, DiRocco joins past winners, Kosoko Jackson, John Wiley Bryant, Plato, Chris Christie, Jonathan Gruber, Paul G. Kirk, and the inaugural winner, Pascal Monnet.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a review of a new book that looks like a must-read.  The central argument of the book is that economists have wandered into offering solutions on every type of policy problem.  Economists have become the new priests of our secular age and we are inclined to consult them as the ancients might have consulted the Oracle of Delphi.  They read their entrails and give us answers, but as the reviews says, we should be wary of seeking the wisdom of economists:

The main advice to emerge from this book is: Don’t ask an economist. Economics has claimed for itself the right to address health policy and many other issues outside its usual orbits. “Radical Uncertainty” reminds us how inappropriate that is. Chemists, plumbers and doctors identify problems within their subject areas, then develop tools with which to solve them. Economists appear unbidden on any doorstep they please with a box of mostly useless tools in search of problems….

There’s a place for those tools, but economics habitually overreaches. Modern economists assume that whatever outcome their models predict must be axiomatically rational. When human beings fail to act according to these predictions, it is taken as a failure of the people, not the model.

This insulting assumption, Messrs. Kay and King point out, is at the heart of microeconomics’ behavioral turn and the proliferation of “nudge” quackery in policy-making circles.

The problem is that almost every policy decision has to be made in the midst of “fundamental uncertainties” about the basic facts that the economists’ models require.  The tools of economists were derived from probability theory that was developed to gain an edge in gambling.  As the review says:

Card games are “small worlds,” in a phrase from the mid-20th-century economist Jimmie Savage that the authors use throughout. The rules are well-defined, all possible outcomes known, the inputs fully quantifiable and the games run repeatedly.

None of that is true for a “large-world” event such as a pandemic or a financial crisis. Decisions must be made before basic facts, such as a disease’s rate of transmission or what proportion of the infected develop symptoms, are understood. Meanwhile politicians no longer seem to know what questions they want answered. Probability can tell you how likely you are to win a hand of blackjack because you know what “winning” means. But should we define winning against Covid-19 as the minimization of infection? Or merely slowing the flow of new cases into our hospitals—and if so, to what rate?

Unlike with blackjack, we’re dealt only one hand. The terrible truth is that every time a politician makes a decision, families might lose a parent or child, or be cast into an economic tailspin from which they may never recover. Faced with such radical uncertainty, “real households, real businesses and real governments do not optimize; they cope.”

These fundamental uncertainties aren’t unique to a pandemic, although the stakes are unusually high. Writing before the new coronavirus, Messrs. Kay and King find plenty of other examples. Corporate-strategy documents, they note, are designed to lend a false air of probabilistic precision to what is at best a guess about the market. Economists measure the economic impact of public-works projects by feeding invented numbers into faulty models, deriving outputs that enter the public realm with an undeserved aura of certainty.

There is an alternative and historically common way to solving policy problems — politics.  In Failure Up Close, Mike McShane and I argue that the kinds of solutions economists offer to education problems fail so often because these approaches typically refuse to consider politics.  The review makes the same point:

The authors argue instead for a return to a narrative form of decision-making that pretends to less precision and offers more scope for human intuition. Lloyd’s of London operated in such a way for centuries, we are told, setting premiums to insure against unquantifiable risks—such as the likelihood that a rare art collection might be stolen—through the hunches of individual human underwriters.

Politicians appear to be taking this approach to Covid-19. Britain’s early, relatively laissez-faire approach didn’t respond adequately to the intuition of voters worried about a fatally overstretched health service; a lockdown ensued, justified by only one of several available models. President Trump’s tug-of-war with himself over reopening the U.S. economy by Easter can be read charitably as an attempt to take the narrative temperature of the American public.

This approach makes use of a powerful tool economists despise—politics—to settle on a decision the public finds tolerable.

The review also notes that one of the other harmful effects of the overreach of economists is a bossy inclination to design optimal solutions for everything.  He could have included nudging students into college as another example:

Alas, another fruitful solution to decision-making is largely absent from the book: not making policy at all.

This may not be possible or desirable in special circumstances such as a global pandemic, but most things our governments do aren’t that special. Must they really nudge us toward optimal soda consumption via taxation, or manage the economy’s growth and contraction through the manipulation of interest rates, when they don’t really know what constitutes “optimal” in either case?

If you’re radically uncertain about what to do, doing nothing is often the best option.

The good news is that I think many people, including elite decision-makers, have been learning through hard experience just how useless many economists are in effectively addressing policy problems.  If economists are the priests of our secular age, their cult is fading.

My nominee for this year’s Higgy follows on the same theme as Greg’s nominee.  For China to be the BSDD that people are increasingly recognizing it to be, it requires the complicity and active assistance of PLDDs.  Just as the Soviets needed accomplices like the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss to supply them with information to fuel their global ambitions, China has recruited its own cadre of willing stooges.  Exhibit A of these stooges is Charles Lieber, the recently indicted chair of the Chemistry Department at Harvard.

It wasn’t enough that Lieber was at the top of his field, serving as the head of the Chemistry Department at an Ivy League institution, holding an endowed professorship that likely paid him several hundred thousand dollars.  He needed more.  So he accepted an offer from the Chinese as part of their Thousand Talents Plan to be paid as a professor at a university in, of all places, Wuhan.  According to the Wall Street Journal:

As part of the Thousand Talents program, Wuhan University of Technology gave Mr. Lieber more than $1.5 million to set up a research lab in China, according to the complaint.

The school also agreed to pay him a $50,000 monthly salary and offered about $150,000 in annual living expenses for “significant periods” from 2012 to 2017, it said.

In exchange, Mr. Lieber was required to work for WUT at least nine months a year by “declaring international cooperation projects, cultivating young teachers and Ph.D. students, organizing international conference[s], applying for patents and publishing articles in the name of” the Chinese school, the complaint said.

So what’s the problem with this?  Well, Lieber’s work has also been supported by significant funding from various U.S. government agencies, including the Office of Naval Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Institutes of Health. Those agencies understandably require researchers to disclose foreign funding to avoid national security risks and conflicts of interests.  Lieber is alleged to have failed to disclose his Chinese support to his US government funders as well as his primary employer, Harvard.  When investigators asked him directly about this support, Lieber is accused of lying to them and concealing his Chinese funding, which would be a crime.

The Chinese motivation for the Thousand Talents program is fairly obvious.  They are essentially engaging in national security and industrial espionage by paying US researchers a fraction of what the US government pays them to share insights derived from that US funded research.  In addition, if American researchers conceal their foreign pay, the Chinese are collecting kompromat that could be used later if they want leverage over US researchers to perform other illicit tasks for them.  Lastly, the Chinese are buying powerful and influential friends in high status positions who might be able to advance Chinese talking points and propaganda.

More puzzling is what Lieber’s motivation would be for doing this.  An adjunct appointment at Wuhan University of Technology could hardly enhance the professional status of the head of Harvard’s Chemistry Department.  Of course, Lieber might be attracted by the millions he could make from the Chinese, but that is probably not sufficient given how many opportunities someone like Lieber has to make money from American universities and companies.  In addition to the money, Lieber and previous cohorts of willing stooges have often been motivated by the PLDD belief that sharing information with foreign powers is actually helping the world.  They can tell themselves that the Chinese and US should be friends and that friendship is not helped by keeping secrets from each other. They can say that they are helping the world by advancing science through the sharing of knowledge.

Some other researchers and media outlets have repeated these rationalizations.  For example the NPR coverage of Lieber’s indictment notes:

These kinds of cases are not always straightforward, especially when fundamental research is involved. In spring 2015, Xi Xiaoxing, a physicist at Temple University in Philadelphia, was arrested and accused of sharing sensitive technology with his collaborators in China.

It later emerged that he never did. What’s more, he says, everything he did share was already public, because the findings of basic research aren’t secret. They’re published in scientific journals.

“Academic espionage is a contradiction,” Xi says. “There’s nothing to steal, you can just sit there and read your paper.”

Before you get too moved by these defenses, you should remember that Lieber was paid to a large extent IN CASH. As the Wall Street Journal reports: “his contact at Wuhan discussed how Mr. Lieber would be paid, with some of the funds from Wuhan to be deposited for him in a Chinese bank account and some provided in cash. ‘Our university has put your salary in your…[bank] card and we will help you change the cash for you when you come to Wuhan,’ the Wuhan contact wrote in one January 2017 message.”

Famous scientists tend not to be paid in cash and with foreign bank cards for their research when that work is above board.  And they tend not to lie to their employer and federal investigators when that work is clean.  Lieber must have known that what he was doing was dirty.  Self-delusion is not that strong.  And the Chinese were not paying famous scientists in cash because of their love of science.  They knew what they were buying.

When the plague under which we currently suffer is lifted, I expect that we will find ourselves in a new Cold War with China.  And Lieber will likely be remembered as one of the early traitors to his country in that struggle.  No PLDD delusions of sharing knowledge to promote mutual understanding, peace, and science will rescue him. For that, Charles Lieber is worthy of The Higgy.

Some researchers and journalists have become very excited about a new set of studies that claim to find a causal relationship between increasing school spending and improving student outcomes.  These folks acknowledge that the vast majority of earlier research found no relationship between additional resources and stronger results, but that research was purely observational.  Perhaps school systems with weaker outcomes tend to get a larger share of increased spending, creating the false impression that more money doesn’t help.  That is, perhaps bad outcomes often cause more money, not the other way around.

There is a new wave of research that claims to find the causal relationship between school spending and student outcomes and those new results are much more positive.  The problem is that the new research pretty clearly falls short of having strong causal research designs.  Instead, the new research just seems to be substituting different non-causal methods with a different potential direction of bias for the old ones.

The new “causal” studies generally come in two types — regression discontinuity (RD) studies of bond referenda and instrumental variable (IV) analyses of court-ordered spending increases.  While RD and IV designs can produce results that approximate a randomized experiment and can be thought of as causal, the RD and IV studies in this new literature generally fail to meet the requirements for those designs to effectively approximate randomized experiments.  That is, the new “causal” research on school spending is not really causal.

To illustrate the problem with the use of RD to study bond referenda, let’s look at the study that was just published in the Journal of Public Economics (JPE), a very high-status journal. A working paper version of this study that is not behind a pay wall can also be found here. The idea of this RD, like others in the new school spending literature, is that bond referenda that barely pass and those that barely fail can be treated as approximating a randomized experiment.  That is, there is a large element of luck in whether a bond barely passes or not, so by chance some schools get extra money and others do not.  If those that get that extra money by luck produce better student outcomes over time than those that don’t get the extra money by chance, then we can say that money — and not other factors — caused the change in outcomes.

The JPE study, like most of the other RD studies in this new literature, falls short of approximating a randomized experiment in two ways.  First, we can only view RD results as causal if the set of observations examined is sufficiently narrow that we can plausibly think that it is effectively chance whether the treatment is received or not.  But the JPE study defines bond referenda as “near the threshold” for passing if they are withing 20 percentage points of the percent required for passage of the referendum.  That is, if 50% is needed to pass a referendum, the JPE study would define the election as “near the threshold” if the bond received between 30% and 70% of the vote.  This bandwidth is so wide that it includes almost two-thirds of all bond referenda in the states they examine.  To call this “near the threshold” is misleading.  And it is simply implausible to think of any outcome between receiving 30% and 70% of the vote as a matter of luck.

Second, we can only view RD results as causal if actors have no control over whether they fall on one side or another of the threshold.  In the case of bond referenda that requirement is clearly violated.  Districts choose whether and when to hold a referendum and they do so based on their estimated likelihood of prevailing.  In addition, districts try to have a finger on the pulse of the campaign and can alter the effort by them and their allies to improve the chances of victory.  In sum, whether districts win or lose referenda is partially a function of their political competence and resources, which are qualities that the researchers cannot observe or control and yet are likely to be associated with changes in student outcomes over time.

The IV studies in this new literature are no better at approximating randomized experiments.  For IV research designs to produce causal results, they need to have an exogenous instrument — something that predicts whether schools get more money or not, but which is uncorrelated theoretically and empirically with later student outcomes.  While the details vary across study, the general approach of the IV studies in this literature is to treat court-ordered spending increases as exogneous.  That is, they have to believe that legislatively adopted spending increases, which past studies primarily relied upon, risk reverse causation, but court-ordered spending increases are fundamentally different.  Court-ordered spending has to be thought of as manna from heaven, dropping on schools as if at random.  At the very least we have to believe that court-ordered spending differs from the regularly legislative kind in that it has nothing to do with factors that contribute to improved student outcomes.

It is clear that court-ordered spending increases are not exogneous and are not fundamentally different from the regular legislative kind.  Courts are political actors, just like legislatures, and whether and when the courts order spending increases is at least partially a function of a broader political conviction in a state that more resources are available and should be devoted to schools.  That conviction is just as likely to be associated with future improvement in student outcomes if it is expressed by the courts as if it is expressed by the legislature.

Both RD and IV studies in this new literature attempt to justify that their efforts are causal with empirical claims about the similarity of treatment and control groups before spending is increased.  But they can only compare on observable qualities, which is precisely the same thing that prior observational studies do.  These studies need to be able to justify theoretically that their approaches approximate random assignment, but they cannot do so persuasively.  Whether bond referenda pass or fail, especially by large margins, is not random.  And whether and when courts order spending increases is also not random — at least no more or less so than when legislatures do it.

If these new RD and IV studies cannot persuasively argue that their approach approximates randomization, then their results are not more causal than the prior observational literature that showed no relationship between spending increases and improved student outcomes.  The promoters of this new school spending research are right to note the flaws of earlier studies, but they are insufficiently aware of flaws in the new research as well.

Given the causal weakness of both literatures, we should probably take a step back and see if either better conforms with our non-rigorous observation of the world.  As Rick Hanushek has noted, if the new research is right in its causal claims about more money improving outcomes, why have huge spending increases over decades not been associated with the kinds of improvements the “causal” research claims to find?

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced that it was investigating Harvard and Yale Universities for receiving at least $6.5 billion from foreign governments without properly disclosing and receiving approvals.  This follows on the heels of several arrests of prestigious academics, including the chair of the chemistry department at Harvard, for receiving payments from foreign governments even as the U.S. government funded their research and prohibited these foreign ties.  U.S. authorities are attempting to block efforts by China, Iran, Russia, and others to steal U.S. research secrets or otherwise obtain the benefits of U.S. funded research on the cheap.

It dawned on me that I hadn’t heard anything about the Chinese, Iranians, or Russians attempting to steal our education policy secrets.  I checked with my sources (of whom I have none) deep within the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) to find out why investigations were being announced involving chemistry and computer science, but not education policy research.  The highly classified plot I discovered was that DOE was declining to investigate the stealing of education policy secrets because those secrets were being slipped to foreign governments by our own double-agents.  The plan was to bring down China, Iran, and Russia by tricking them into adopting our latest education policy ideas.

As it turns out, the education reform movement is actually an elaborate front organization designed to lure foreign governments into seeking our education policy insights and adopting them.  “It’s not as if we can get education reform successfully implemented in the U.S.,” the head of the Common Core Coalition confided to me.  “Common Core was a ruse to see if we could fool the Chinese, Iranians, and Russians into imitating it.  And given their penchant for centralized control, it just might work!”

Everything is now beginning to make sense.  It’s as if the scales have fallen from my eyes.  “Portfolio management!” the Chief Learning Officer of the Metro Fund laughed. ‘Haven’t you wondered why we can’t manage to get the idea to stick just about anywhere?  It’s because we’re not trying. Denver? We had to make it look real, but thank goodness we lost the election and pulled the plug on it.  We’ve let things go on a bit too long in New Orleans, but transferring control back to the district should fix that soon enough.  But those Chinese, Iranian, and Russian agents have no idea.  They think we’re serious when we say that all schools sectors should be managed by a single authority.”

“All of those papers and professional trainings on regulating school discipline, bathroom use, and unconscious bias have been part of an elaborate hoax,” admitted the director of Harvard’s Center for Equitable Education for Everybody (CE3).  “If my chemistry colleagues hadn’t blown it, the Chinese, Iranians, and Russians would have never suspected what we’ve been up to.  But now they have to wonder why other departments at the university are being investigated when we are not.”

A statement from the Chinese education authorities, suggests that they have discovered the plot. It reads: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on China the mediocre educational performance that reforms promote today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”

More on these shocking revelations as they develop…

If you’d like to see an inspiring example of the power and purpose of education, watch the documentary series College Behind Bars on PBS (available streaming from the PBS app).  For almost 20 years, Bard College has been running the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), offering AA and BA degrees to men and women incarcerated in New York.  The program is not especially geared for prisoners, with a focus on basic and vocational skills, other than the fact that it occurs in prison.  BPI is college — real college.  From the clips we see, the content and pedagogy are more rigorous than what I’ve seen in most college classrooms.

There is much to be learned from this series, including about the nature and purpose of incarceration, the meaning of losing one’s liberty, and the social and personal forces that lead so many young men to prison.  But the most important lesson I take is about the true purpose of education, which ultimately revolves around human dignity and purpose in a civilized society.  Without meaning, dignity, and civilization, vocational skills have little benefit.

It’s strange that it requires extreme circumstances for us to grasp the core purpose of many activities.  Only when we see education in prison, do we really understand what education is.  Similarly, 60 Minutes recently aired a two-part segment on music that was written and performed in German death camps.  What is the true purpose of music and art?  We gain greater insight by seeing what art does for people in the most horrible circumstances.

Also watch this extra segment on the story of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who survived because she played cello in an orchestra the Nazis organized to provide them with entertainment and to calm and deceive people as they entered the camps to go to their deaths.  When Lasker-Wallfisch notes that these mass-murderers were cultured and “were not un-educated,” the interviewer asks her how she reconciles that.  She replies, “I don’t.”  Education and rational explanation can foster civilization but clearly also has its limits.

Rick Hess and I have a piece on National Review making the case, once again, that an ed reform movement that consists almost entirely of Democrats is doomed to fail and may help explain our lost decade of progress on NAEP results.

Some points to emphasize:

— We repeat our observation that the ed reform movement consists almost entirely of Democrats these days, but we note that this is dramatically different from 20 years ago. Back then, when we look at a similar sample of campaign contributions from employees at ed reform organizations, we see a partisan split that is closer to 50-50.

— We do not know and do not really care about who is to blame for this severe partisan imbalance. Our main goal in this piece is to get people to recognize how the current absence of Republicans in the movement is harming its political success.

— If you are not willing to set aside some tangential issues and compromise on others, you aren’t really seeking to advance education reform policy — you are choosing to lose politically for virtue-signaling. That’s a fine choice and some compromises may be too unpalatable to make, but be aware of what you are sacrificing when you do this.

I just discovered Joe Pera Talks With You, a series of short films appearing on Adult Swim, and I can already declare that it is the best thing currently on TV. As Joe himself says, “It’s not the Sopranos,” which I think is the whole point.  Instead, it is sweet and amazingly funny in a dry, northern Midwest style. Watching these shorts fits perfectly with our recent theme on JPGB of trying to find and emphasize the good, like Rice Krispie Treats or the publication of Blood Heir.

Since today is the Sunday after Halloween and the perfect time to go for a fall drive, I urge you to watch Joe Pera Takes You on a Fall Drive. After extolling the virtues of his 2001 Buick Park Avenue automobile, Joe learns that you place 1/16 of your soul in a Jack-O-Lantern when you carve it. To regenerate that portion of his soul, he goes for a fall drive to give his pumpkin a proper Michigan UP final resting place. Since WordPress will not let me embed videos from Adult Swim, I urge you to click on the hyperlink above to watch the entire episode, But if you need to see a clip of it right now, here you go:

In the episode, Joe Pera Reads You the Church Announcements, Joe can’t help but tell his Church about the wonder of hearing The Who’s Baba O’Riley. Despite being the choir teacher at the local school, Joe heard The Who for the first time Thursday night and hasn’t slept since. If this doesn’t capture the joy of discovering and sharing a song you love, I don’t know what does.  Again, I can’t embed the whole episode, but you can see it by clicking on the link above.  And here’s a taste:

Well, we are headed off on a drive for this beautiful fall Sunday after Halloween.  Enjoy Joe Pera.  And if you have any trouble falling asleep, watch Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep.

We had a thin set of nominees for this year’s Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  I nominated Chad Kroeger and JT Parr, who speak during public input periods during local government meetings to reveal the impotence of public input — whether as part of government fora or on social media. Greg nominated Bob Fletcher, who heroically saved farms for Japanese Americans who had been sent to internment camps during World War II.  Sensing that the field was small, Greg added at the last minute Mildred Day, the inventor of the Rice Krispie Treat.

Perhaps our shortage of Al Award nominees is a reflection of a glum mood that has gripped public discourse of late, making it difficult to think of how the human condition is being improved. This is precisely why Mildred Day is the person we need to recognize with this year’s Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  In the fine tradition of Al Copeland himself, Day made the human condition better by giving us a delicious treat, the Rice Krispie Treat.  Those treats aren’t just wonderful because of their gooey while also crunchy sweetness. Rice Krispie Treats are also so easy to make that they are often among the first cooking projects that parents do with their children. Parents connecting with their children over something yummy is just about the best thing.

Chad and JT are amusing in the fine tradition of Al honorees Ken M, Fasi Zaka, and Lazlo Toth. But their goal is to mock, which while necessary, may contribute further to the sour popular mood.  Bob Fletcher is certainly admirable in the fine tradition of Al recipient, Wim Nottroth.  But right now we could use more of a sweet reward than a harsh reminder of the need to stand up to evil, as important as that reminder is.

So thank you, Mildred Day. As you celebrate her selection as the Al Copeland Humanitarian, I hope you are enjoying some candy from yesterday’s haul and perhaps adding a Rice Krispie Treat or two.

For this year’s Al Copeland Humanitarian Award I would like to nominate Chad Kroeger and JT Parr. Chad and JT take advantage of the public comment sessions that virtually all local governments offer to express their views.  And like the 2015 Al winner, Ken M, Chad and JT show us exactly how important those opportunities for public comment really are. In the video above they speak to the LA City Council in defense of house parties.  They note all of the ways that house parties had helped them, with JT observing: “I could play beer pong and compete with real integrity. In short, I fulfilled my potential.” And then sounding like an economist (with about the same level of influence over policy), JT warns that there are “externalities” associated with banning house parties, such as the loss of bonding, emphasizing, “America needs bonding.”

In this second video, Chad and JT ask the City Council of Laguna Beach to “boke” their “shmole.” As Chad explains, a shmole is “someone with a good heart who kinda sucks.” They claim that one of the members of their squad, Kevin, is a shmole and the city needs to help them boke him, or remove him from their crew. But they don’t wan’t Kevin to go “homie-less,” so they want the city to enact a shmole relocation program and adopt Kevin to rehabilitate him. Chad and JT estimate that this program would cost about $75,000 per shmole, which could be paid by increasing taxes on their parents’ houses.

In this third video, Chad and JT propose to the Manhattan Beach City Council that they rename their wastewater plant “The Britney Spears ‘Toxic’ Water Center.” Chad mentions that he almost went to a Britney Spears concert when he was 14 but his Dad said, “No. You have to do math.” JT then sings the song “Toxic” to the council.

In our modern age in which leading academics waste countless hours sending messages of 280 characters to each other in “an effort to democratize access to knowledge,” or boast about being a “subtweet aficionado,” Chad and JT reveal this activity for what it really is — a world in which everyone is on the stage and no one is in the audience and where all forms of expertise and authority are degraded.  People active in Edu-Twitter and Econ-Twitter may imagine that they are shaping the world because they have thousands or even tens of thousands of followers, but remember that Chad and JT’s videos have been viewed well over a million times. Chad and JT have no more influence over local government policy than academic Twitter has over public policy. And by wasting so much energy on social media, academics place themselves on the same level as people like Chad and JT who have no shortage of proposals, opinions, and even evidence such as a a large graph with “metrics” proving that Kevin is a shmole.

But Chad and JT don’t just reveal the silliness that has gripped much of academia, they also reveal the phoniness of democratic input in public policymaking.  Governments create public comment opportunities to give people the illusion that they have control over government policy.  In actuality, public influence over policymaking has always been indirect and mostly channeled through the activities of organized interests.  This is not a bad thing to be lamented.  It is simply a reality to be accepted. The Voice of the People as expressed on social media or in public comment times is more about catharsis than it is about control.

If people are going to waste their time on social media or in public comment periods, it might as well be amusing rather than the self-important and over-earnest stuff typically found in academic Twitter or local government meetings. For taking this useless activity and making it entertaining, Chad and JT have significantly improved the human condition and therefore are worthy of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.