Looking Abroad for Hope

November 5, 2008

hope

HT despair.com. Looking for a Christmas idea to suit the new reality? Why not a despair.com gift certificate – “For the person who has everything, but still isn’t happy.”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Looking around for something to give me hope this morning, I find the best place to turn (for today, at least) is outside the U.S. Specifically, I turn to the recently released study in Education Next by Martin West and Ludger Woessmann finding that around the world, private school enrollment is associated with improved educational outcomes in both public and private schools, as well as lower costs.

Well-informed education wonks will say, “duh.” A large body of empirical research has long since shown, consistently, that competition improves both public school and private school outcomes here in the U.S., while lowering costs. And the U.S. has long been far, far behind the rest of the world in its largely idiosyncratic, and entirely irrational, belief that there’s somthing magical about a government school monopoly.

And private school enrollment is an imperfect proxy for competition. It’s OK to use it when it’s the best you’ve got. I’ve overseen production of some studies at the Friedman Foundation that used it this way, and I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t think the method were acceptable. However, that said, it should be remembered that some “private schools” are more private than others. In many countries, private school curricula are controlled – sometimes almost totally so – by government. And the barriers to entry for private schools that aren’t part of a government-favored “private” school system can be extraordinary.

That said, this is yet another piece of important evidence pointing to the value of competition in education, recently affirmed (in the context of charter schools, but still) by Barack Obama. Who I understand is about to resign his Senate seat – I guess all those scandals and embarrasing Chicago machine connections the MSM kept refusing to cover finally caught up with him.

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Posted by Greg Forster

PJM on Candidates’ Education Flip-Flops

November 3, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Over the weekend Pajamas Media carried my column on how Obama and Palin have flip-flopped on education:

Suppose I told you Candidate A has supported rigorous academic standards, has stood up to the teachers’ unions — even been booed by them at their convention — and proclaimed the free-market principles that schools should compete for students and better teachers should get higher salaries. On the other hand, Candidate B says that competition hurts schools, that kids should be taught a radical left-wing civics curriculum, that we should throw more money at teachers’ unions — excuse me, at schools — and that rigorous academic standards should be replaced with the unions’ old lower-the-bar favorite, “portfolio assessment.”

Candidate A is Barack Obama. So is Candidate B.

Meanwhile, Candidate C has made an alliance with the teachers’ unions, opposed school choice, thrown money at the unions — excuse me, at schools — and even helped undermine a badly needed reform of bloated union pensions. On the other hand, Candidate D has broken with the teachers’ unions, demanded that schools should have to compete for students, and endorsed the most radical federal education reform agenda ever proposed by a national candidate, including a national school choice program for all disabled students.

Candidate C is Sarah Palin. So is Candidate D.

Important disclaimer:

None of this implies anything about the overall merits of any of these candidates. One can love a candidate overall while hating his or her stand on education, and vice versa.

1 Comment | competitive effects, money myth, politics, school accountability, social promotion, special ed, teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Even I Agree – This Is a Bribe

October 22, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Last month I got into a little back-and-forth with Fordham’s Liam Julian after we simultaneously published columns about the practice of financially rewarding students for good performance – mine for and his against.

Well, as a token of goodwill, here’s a form of “performance pay” for students that even I will agree is an impermissible bribe. Baylor has been caught paying students for good SAT scores. The catch: it’s paying them to go back and retake the SAT after they’ve gained admission, so that the statistical profile of incoming freshmen at Baylor will look better.

“I think we goofed on that,” said a spokesman. Gosh, do ya think?

What’s the difference between rewarding student excellence and bribing students? In our exchange last month, Julian tried to outline what he thought was the difference between a legitimate “reward” and an illegitimate “bribe.” I wasn’t buying his definition but offered no alternative of my own (I had been using the word “bribe,” in sarcastic scare quotes, to refer to financial rewards for student performance, so I wasn’t in a good position to make the distinction systematically). I’ll take a crack at it now, and to make things even more fun I’ll add a third category.

I understand a “reward” to be an incentive for a certain activity that arises organically from the nature of the activity itself. An Olympic runner is not “greedy” and “mercenary” for wanting to win the race; victory is the reward for (i.e. the natural fulfillment or fruition of) athletic excellence. Nor is he necessarily greedy for wanting to win a shiny gold medal and stand on the top level of the victor’s podium and thrill to the cheers of the crowd, because the medal and the podium and the cheering are rightly taken as tokens and recognitions of his victory – he can desire them not for their own sake, but as embodiments of the victory. (Of course he may also desire them for their own sake, to gratify his vanity, which is wrong – but that is his fault, not theirs. They remain the natural and proper “rewards” of his excellence even if he doesn’t desire them as such.)

Note that while we usually use the word “reward” only in the context of good behavior, in this sense a “reward” can attach just as easily to bad behavior as to good. For example, those who behave greedily sometimes end up making money as a result, but we don’t call this a “bribe” as such. It’s just the natrual result of his behavior. This is what the New Testament means when it repeatedly emphasizes that those who sin “have already recieved their reward.”

On the other hand, we can provide incentives for behavior that do not arise organically from the nature of the behavior itself. Here I see two categories.

If the act of providing the incentive does not change the nature of the behavior itself, we call that simply “pay.” Managing a business, or laying pipe, or providing heath care, or teaching (or blogging about education reform) is not a different activity simply because one recieves a salary to do it, which is why the salary is called “pay” rather than a bribe. And note that, just as with “rewards” for bad behavior, there is also “pay” for bad behavior; we don’t speak of mobsters “bribing” hit men to kill people.

Whereas if providing the incentive changes the nature of the activity, that incentive is a bribe. Signing a contract with a vendor, supporting a change to government policy, or (in the Baylor case) retaking the SAT becomes a different kind of activity when you’re doing it for money as opposed to when you’re doing it for the right reasons. The corporate officer who steers contracts to a vendor who is giving him kickbacks is not engaged in business for his company, but rather defrauding it. The politician who supports a bill because he’s getting paid under the table is not serving his constituents, but oppressing and exploiting them. And the Baylor student who retakes the SAT because the school pays him is not seeking educational excellence, but collaborating in fraud.

As C.S. Lewis once put it, a man who marries a woman for money is mercenary, but a man who marries a woman because he loves her is not, even though in both cases he is “getting what he wants” by marrying her; marriage is the natural fulfilment of love but it is not the natural fulfilment of acquisitiveness, and marrying someone out of acquisitiveness changes the nature of the act (or so some of us believe).

(One potential weakness of my definition of a “bribe” is that the word implies moral turpitude, and it’s concievable there may be incentives for an activity that change the nature of the activity without creating moral turpitude. I can’t think of any off the top of my head, though. But if there are any such incentives, we would need a different word for them.)

The question before us, then, is whether paying students to learn changes the nature of the activity of learning. I think the answer is no, for the reasons I stated in my Pajamas Media column:

These days, if a child asks why he should care about doing well in school, what kind of answer does he get? He gets the same answer from every source: from parents, teachers, and school administrators; from movies and TV shows; from public service announcements, social service programs, and do-gooder philanthropies; from celebrities, athletes, and actors; from supporters and opponents of education reform; from everybody.

The answer is always some version of: you need to do well in school in order to have prosperity later in life.

Well, if you scrape away the sanctimony, what is this but a “bribe” on a colossal scale? Why is it vulgar and horrible to tell kids that if they pass their APs they’ll get a $500 check, but noble and uplifting to tell kids that if they pass their APs they’ll be able to get a better job five years from now?

Let’s quit kidding ourselves that it’s somehow shocking that somebody would come up with the idea of paying students to do well in school. For at least a decade, money is more or less the only motive we’ve been offering students to do well in school. We’ve just been insisting that the payoff has to come later in life. But morally, the timeline doesn’t make a difference. If it’s OK to pay someone five years from now to do something today, then it’s OK to pay him today, too.

If learning isn’t learning when the student is motivated by his own material well-being, then there probably is no such thing as learning and never has been.

Not that I think that’s the only motive students have, or should have:

Now, as it happens, I would prefer that the cash motive not be the only reason we offer kids to do well in school. I think our culture has been remiss in emphasizing education as an opportunity to become a better person, both morally (through character formation, a concern that the government school system seems to have largely dropped or subordinated, though private schools make it a top concern) and developmentally (because those who learn more and develop their capacities more fully have richer, more blessed lives).

But I also think that denying the presence of a strong financial motive in education is a fool’s errand. Kids will always care about how their education impacts their material well-being. And so they should — looking after one’s own material well-being is a good and natural concern.

Moreover, kids aren’t fully able to appreciate the moral and developmental motives for education until well after their education is complete. The 30-year-old, looking back, may well say, “If I hadn’t worked hard in school and had such great teachers, my personal character and my capacity for a fully human life would have been infinitely poorer.” But try explaining that to a ten-year-old.

Concern for one’s own material well-being is one of the natural motives for education, always has been, and always will be. Admitting this doesn’t negate the other motives.

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Posted by Greg Forster

New Evidence Against the Bailout

October 22, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

As the evidence piles up, I’m moving closer to abandoning my studied neutrality on the bailout and joining Jay and Matt in opposing it. I still lack the expertise to evaluate the claims that there’s a credit panic, that markets behave irrationally during a panic, that panics turn into crashes, and that it is possible for government to prevent the crash by acting as a sort of substitute rational investor during a panic. But whether or not government intervention can counteract a panic, it’s looking more and more like that isn’t what’s happening.

Today’s datum? GM is buying Chrysler partly so that it will be considered “too big to fail.” (HT Jonah Goldberg)

Since I first saw this in The Corner, I’ve been meaning to post it, but haven’t gotten around to it. Glad I waited – now I can also direct you to America’s MVC (most valuable columnist), Holman Jenkins, whose Wall Street Journal column this morning discusses the case.

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

Memo to Gadfly: History Failure Is a Historical Problem

October 21, 2008

“Okay, Mr. Hancock, if you’re so smart, how many of the freedoms protected in the Magna Carta can YOU name?”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The new Gadfly includes a guest editorial lamenting that our students don’t know civics, history, geography, etc. The editorial claims social studies is being “squeezed out” by accountability programs and that we should be “reinserting history and related subjects back into the curriculum.”

All this assumes that the failure of public schools to teach social studies effectively and the resulting colossal student ignorance of civics is a new phenomenon. Otherwise, the claim that social studies is being “squeezed out” and the call to “reinsert” it would make no sense.

But in fact this is not a new phenomenon. The catastrophic failure of social studies education in public schools is a subject with a long history. So what does that do to the story that social studies is being “squeezed out”?

Let me be clear: if I thought it were true that social studies was being squeezed out, but I also thought this would result in a change to our 70% national graduation rate (50% urban) and rampant illiteracy and innumeracy even among those who “graudate,” I would consider that a price well worth paying – and I say that as a social scientist. But the evidence that social studies is being squeezed out is not in fact convincing.

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Posted by Greg Forster

Pass the Popcorn: All-Time Great Summer Movies

October 16, 2008

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(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Inspired by Matt’s “all time best bad movie” contest, I decided to ask readers to cast their votes on the all-time great summer movies. And, like any good political science geek, I planned to use multiple voting systems. I was going to provide a slate of nominees and ask people to post a list of which nominated movies they thought were among the all-time great summer movies, in order of greatness. Then I was going to count up which movie got the most #1 votes, which movie got the most total votes, and which movie got the most votes if the votes were weighted based on where they fell on people’s lists.

But once I had compiled my list of nominees, I thought: why put it up for a vote? Excellence is not subject to democracy. So instead of being a list of nominees, this is just my list of the all-time great summer movies. (Since excellence is very much subject to freedom of speech even if it isn’t subject to democracy, you are very welcome to post your comments and your own lists!)

My list was selected by the following highly scientific process:

1) There was no such thing as a “summer movie” in the way we now think about that term before the 1980s or so. I chose 1980 as the cutoff date by a highly scientific process of noticing that it was divisible by both four and ten.

2) The definition of “summer” has changed over time. I chose May 1 to September 1 as my cutoff dates by a highly scientific process of deciding that I’m willing to stretch into May, but not April or September. I have manfully resisted the temptation to include as “honorary” summer movies the many excellent films with non-summer release dates (e.g. The Incredibles, November 5, 2004; Serenity, September 30, 2005; Casino Royale, November 17, 2006).

3) I examined the lists of movies first released in the US between May 1 and September 1 in every year from 1980 forward (that’s why God made IMDB) and chose the best nominees, selecting them by the highly scientific standard of whether or not I thought they were plausbile candidates for being an all-time great summer movie. After 2001 the IMDB lists get too long (they include not only the rapidly expanding straight-to-video market, but also a lot of miscellaneous media like video games) so for 2002 to 2008 I switched to using the list of the top 100 grossing movies and then seeing which of the plausible candidates was released in the summer. The dropoff in nominees after 2002 may be due to this methodology change, but I’m inclined to think not; rather while the quality of movies in general has not (I think) gone down, the rate of production for all-time great summer movies has.

After prolonged, highly scientific consideration, I decided to exclude small-budget comedies, even the major classics, on grounds that a movie needs a big budget to be a “summer movie.” Exceptions were made where I felt that a movie was striving for a big-budget, summer-movie “feel” even if the budget wasn’t actually big (e.g. the many big-name guest stars and over-the-top musical numbers in The Blues Brothers make it feel like a summer movie even though it probably didn’t cost summer-movie money; I got a similarly “summery” vibe from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).

Likewise, dramas with a strongly “gritty” and/or “realistic” tone (e.g. Untouchables, June 3, 1987; Unforgiven, August 7, 1992; 28 Days Later, June 27, 2003) and movies intended to be accessible to younger children (e.g. E.T., June 11, 1982; Labyrinth, June 27, 1986; Finding Nemo, May 30, 2003) were excluded as not fitting the genre.

On the other hand, I strove to include movies that we might not immediately think of as “summer movies,” but which, upon reflection, might be considered within that category. And I did make allowances where I felt that a franchise was “owed” a place on the list, as you’ll see from my comments.

The Empire Strikes Back

May 21, 1980

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From Leia’s anguished confession as Han goes into the carbonite to Luke’s heroic-cum-suicidal showdown with the Dark Lord, this movie was a high point not only for the franchise, but for science fiction generally and for film generally.

The Blues Brothers

June 20, 1980

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It’s big, it’s in your face, it has musical numbers and a finale where a SWAT team storms the building – it’s a summer movie. For me the most memorable line is during that final sequence when the police are closing in as the brothers are about to make the orphanage’s mortgage payment, and a police dispatcher, in a totally calm, monotone nasal voice, says: “The use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of the Blues brothers has been approved.”

Raiders of the Lost Ark

June 21, 1981

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In film as in all other occupations, the first step to doing great work is to do what you love. Spielberg loved 1930s cliffhanger serials and knew them well enough to bring them up to date, preserving what made them great in their own time while translating them into the (vastly superior) narrative idiom of modern film.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

June 4, 1982

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On this list, The Wrath of Khan stands as representative of the Star Trek franchise, not all of which were summer movies, but which cumulatively deserve representation. (Group rights are no good in politics but they have their place in “all-time greatest” lists.) But it’s convenient that one of the best of the series happens to have been a summer movie (two of them, actually – Insurrection was released in summer as well). Do you recognize the graphic above? The Kobayashi Maru is so widely referenced among sci-fi geeks that it’s a cliche, but there’s a reason it resonates so widely; it’s one of the best (in the sense of most fitting and most revealing) character backstories on film.

WarGames

June 3, 1983

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Remember this? Laugh if you will, but I think there’s a reason everyone from my generation remembers this movie. Has there ever been a more tense opening scene? “Turn your key, sir. TURN YOUR KEY.”

Krull

July 29, 1983

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Also in the “laugh if you will” department, this odd but oddly gripping sci-fi/fantasy hybrid stretched your imagination. If you could get past the “Huh?” factor, the film clearly knows how to tap into the vein of epic drama even with a story that doesn’t follow the standard genre conventions.

Ghost Busters

June 8, 1984

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What makes this movie so surpassingly great is that all the little things are consistently right. You remember all the really great moments, of course, but think about some of the ones you don’t usually remember, like Annie Potts trying to handle the sudden surge of business (“I’ve quit better jobs than this.” [Picks up the phone] “Ghostbusters! Whaddaya want!”). These fully-drawn characters are why the movie succeeds when it reaches for something more than just comedy – like near the end, when the boys crawl back out of the broken street and the crowd goes wild, chanting “Ghost busters!” “Ghost busters!” and Venkman brags, “That’s all right, we can take it. We can take it. They wanna play rough!” It’s not a gag; it’s played straight, as heroism, offered for our admiration. And it works.

Back to the Future

July 3, 1985

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Behold the man, Christopher Lloyd. He’s spent decades doing nothing but crap, yet for just a couple of brief, shining moments, he was brilliant – so brilliant that no amount of subsequently produced crap can ever move us to regret his career.

Top Gun

May 16, 1986

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Yes, the silliness quotient is getting a little high here. But this is the movie that set the standard for macho cool. (“We were inverted.”) And as Harvey Mansfield has recently demonstrated, machismo is not in itself a silly thing; in a dangerous world, the culture of machismo is serious business.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

June 11, 1986

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Contains just enough “bigness” (the parade, “Save Ferris” on the stadium’s electronic billboard) and summer-ness to bump up from the “comedy” category to the “summer movie” category in my mind. The city itself is as much a character as Ferris and Cameron. Sure, it lacks the drama and epic scope of most summer movies, but Ferris himself is larger than life – more primal force than man, the Iago of slackers.

Big Trouble in Little China

July 2, 1986

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The Ghost Busters of the kung fu genre. Cheesy over-the-top martial arts thriller (half spoof, half serious) meets super-sharp dialogue and fully drawn characters, again with all the little things done right: “A brave man likes the feel of nature on his back, Jack.” “Yeah, and a wise man has got enough sense to get in out of the rain!“

Aliens

July 18, 1986

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Continuing a theme, it’s the characters who make this a big cut above the standard action flick – another real high point for sci-fi, and one of the best “straight action” movies ever made (as distinct from movies that are more in the “epic” or “adventure” subgenres). The debate in the APC about whether to nuke the site from orbit (“it’s the only way to be sure”) is one of the most note-perfect scenes I’ve ever seen. It also serves (in a way so subtle that you don’t notice it until it’s all over) as a great character intro for Hicks, who has been silent in the background until now while Apone and Hudson stole the show, but now must lead the unit. “But he’s a grunt! No offense?” “None taken.” And the way he says it, it’s clear that there really was no offense taken. It’s not the standard “call of destiny” scene, like Luke standing over the still-smoldering ruins of his aunt and uncle’s farm. But it serves the same function in the narrative – for both Ripley and Hicks.

Spaceballs

June 24, 1987

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“Aww, that’s just what we need . . . a Druish princess.”

“Funny – she doesn’t look Druish.”

Robocop

July 17, 1987

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Blends two of the great strengths of sci-fi that rarely go together well, but do so here: super-cool hi-tech action and smart social commentary, including some very clever social satire (“I’d buy that for a dollar!”). Kudos also for the excellent twist ending: The elderly corporation president is held hostage with a gun to his head by his villainous vice president. Robocop can’t save him because the VP has had him programmed to be unable to take action against an officer of the company. Then the old president, who has been mostly a smiling-grandfather figure until now, suddenly shows that he didn’t get to be the president without learning how to think quickly under pressure. “Dick . . YOU’RE FIRED!” Whereupon Robocop blows the VP away.

The Living Daylights

July 31, 1987

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Just as the Wrath of Khan stands for the Star Trek franchise, this stands for the Bond franchise. But, again as with Wrath of Khan, it’s convenient that one of the franchise’s strongest entries happens to have been a summer movie. Vastly underappreciated due to the juvenile public reaction against the toning down of Bond’s sexual immorality, this complex espionage thriller delivers action, snappy dialogue (targeting recticles appear on the windshield of Bond’s car and he explains to the girl: “I’ve had a few optional extras installed”), and – not least important – marks the start of the series’ deliberate development of Desmond Llewelyn’s comic genius. Bond observes as an MI6 technician carrying a loud stereo on his shoulder flips a few switches and launches an RPG-type rocket out of it. “It’s a little something we’ve worked up for the Americans,” remarks Q with evident delight. “It’s called a Ghetto Blaster.”

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

June 22, 1988

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One of those times when a super-clever novelty act turns out to be more than just a novelty act. It does for classic cartoons what Raiders did for 1930s cliffhanger serials – translates it into the idiom of modern film. And see above re: Christopher Lloyd.

Batman

June 23, 1989

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Remembered, of course, for Jack Nicholson’s Joker – and it still will be, even now that Heath Ledger has reinvented the character in an even more impressive way – it’s hard to remember now that it was this movie that resurrected the then-mostly-defunct genere of comic book movies, which is no small feat given the peculiar imperatives of that type of narrative, and also revolutionized the visual style of movies in related genres. One of the most influential movies of the last generation.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

July 3, 1991

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Noted at the time for its then-record budget, Terminator 2 did for special effects what Tim Burton’s Batman did for comic book narratives – showed the narrative power they were capable of weilding.

A Brief History of Time (Documentary)

August 21, 1992

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Just kidding! 🙂

But I think his appearances on The Simpsons have shown Stephen Hawking’s potential as an action hero (“If you are looking for trouble, you found it”), and if they made a summer movie starring him, I’d go.

Jurassic Park

June 11, 1993

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I suppose I’m including this mostly out of a sense of obligation, given its prominence and influence – although I did decide not to include Rambo 2 in spite of its (probably greater) influence. In this case I think the craftsmanship of the movie is better. (The moment where Sam Neil dismisses Jeff Goldblum as a “rock star” intellectual lightweight, for example, works well.) This is a movie I wouldn’t spontaneously suggest watching, but would happily watch if others in the room wanted it.

Speed

June 10, 1994

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Continuing that theme, here’s another movie that I include largely out of a sense of obligation, yet I wouldn’t include it if I didn’t think it had merits. Craftsmanship again makes the difference.

Apollo 13

June 30, 1995

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Much more than a nerds-as-heros flick (although it is clearly that), this movie is a triumph of the filmmaker’s craft. Nothing in it is particularly spectacular in itself, but all the pieces click perfectly and the whole is much more than the sum of its parts.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

May 2, 1997

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The franchise degenerated so quickly in the subsequent films that I don’t think the full cleverness of the original is still as widely appreciated. The better you know Bond, the more gags you’ll notice here. And maybe it’s just me, but I bust a gut laughing at Austin trying to get the little go-kart turned around in the narrow dead-end hallway. I don’t know why, it just works.

Men in Black

July 2, 1997

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If you haven’t seen it in a while, plug it back in. It’s a lot funnier than you remember.

The Mask of Zorro

July 17, 1998

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One more for the “laugh if you will” file, but I think this movie stands out from the crowd. Action, comedy, terrific performances, and – in case you haven’t noticed, this is an important mark of a great movie for me – really good dialogue. The aging Zorro (Anthony Hopkins) wants to train a drifter he’s picked up (Antonio Banderas) to replace him. Hopkins points to the sword in Banderas’s hand and asks, “Do you even know how to use that thing?” “Of course I do,” replies Banderas. “The pointy end goes in the other man.”

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

June 30, 1999

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What does one say? If you haven’t seen it, words aren’t going to convey the experience. I’m only about 50% on board for the movie’s agenda, but they do it cleverly so as to avoid turning away people who aren’t ultimately with them – their focus is on the failure of parental responsibility, not on the policy question of what should be allowed on TV.

Shrek

May 18, 2001

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It could have been a one-joke movie, but consistent cleverness and Eddie Murphy’s breakout performance made it franchise-worthy.

Spider-Man

May 3, 2002

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What Batman created, Spider-Man recreated. Standing as radiant day to Tim Burton’s somber night, Sam Raimi’s equally powerful vision of the super hero radically broadened the scope of the genre.

Batman Begins

June 15, 2005

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And then, of course, the dark night of Batman came roaring back with its own reinvention – this time with subtlety and intellectual heft. Chris Nolan embarks on the novel mission of making a Batman movie that’s all about Batman, and it works on every level.

The Dark Knight

July 18, 2008

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See here, here, here, here, here, and here. Nuff said.

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Posted by Greg Forster

Did Milton Friedman Support School Choice Tax Credits?

October 15, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Did Milton Friedman support school choice programs where the financing runs through the tax code rather than the treasury? He always made it clear that if he had a choice between them, he preferred vouchers (funded through the treasury) over either of the two alternatives forms of school choice that use the tax code (direct tax credits for families to offest thier tuition costs or scholarships distributed by charitable organizations and funded by donations that make the donor eligible for a tax credit). But that doesn’t mean he didn’t support the tax-code alternatives or didn’t consider them to be “true” school choice programs.

I bring this up because Robert Enlow of the Friedman Foundation has dug up a letter that Milton wrote in support of Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program. The letter was written on May 17, 2005 and was addressed to a Florida corporate leader who was considering whether or not to support the program.

Milton wrote:

I agree with you completely that the tax code should be used solely to raise revenue to fund necessary government spending and not to create social policy. Unfortunately, in schooling, the tax code is already being used to create social policy, by devoting tax funds to maintaining a socialist education system. If the state decides to subsidize the schooling of children, the straightforward way is to provide a voucher to each parent and let the parent choose the school that he believes is best for his or her children. Let the private market provide the schools. If the state wants to set up schools, let them charge tuition and compete with private schools on a level playing field.

Unfortunately, for reasons we are both well aware of, ranging from unions to school administrators and religious concerns, that ideal solution is not feasible.** Where it has been feasible to any significant extent, as in Milwaukee and the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program, it has worked well. But again and again, as currently in Florida, an inferior tax credit program seems the only political option. Tax credits are an indirect, and I believe less efficient, way to do what vouchers do more directly. But they do promote the basic objective, of expanding parental choice and thereby introducing more competition into the educational industry. As a result, I have reluctantly supported tax credit programs in a number of states.

Let me just repeat, the tax system is being used for social purposes with both vouchers and tax credits.

**I think we may take it as given that he means “not currently feasible in Florida.” Any attmept to attribute to Milton Friedman the view that vouchers were “not feasible” in general would be absurd in light of his continuing active support for voucher efforts right up to the end of his life.

Milton was always completely open about his opinions, even to a fault. If he was thinking about whether to change his mind about something, but wasn’t yet sure whether to change his position, he would say so – and this would sometimes drive people to claim he had in fact changed his position.

We see that openness in this letter. He admits that his support for tax credits is only as a second-best option and even says the he supports them “reluctantly.” But if you knew Milton even a little bit – and I was only privileged to know him a little bit before he died – you know that he wouldn’t say he supported them at all unless he really supported them. The emphasis here is on the support, not the reluctance; the reluctance only comes in because (as the opening sentence makes clear) he’s addressing an audience that shares his concerns about tax credits.

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Posted by Greg Forster

Vote Milton in 2008

October 14, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In a recent issue, the Weekly Standard‘s Matthew Continetti vents his anger at the House Republicans who killed the first bailout bill. I was about to quit reading after the first paragraph or so – because, really, why bother? – when this line struck me: “It was the day when Lou Dobbs replaced Milton Friedman as the face of economic conservatism.”

Excuse me? Milton Friedman didn’t even approve of the existence of the Fed. Does Continetti think he would approve of having the government buy $700 billion in financial assets? Would Milton Friedman also support having government buy up people’s mortgages and “renegotiate” the terms, or any other gimmick the GOP happens to dream up in its quest for votes?

It is just barely possible that what Continetti meant, but failed to actually say, was that Friedman would have opposed the bailout in a responsible, intellectually defensible manner, while the House Republicans didn’t. But the whole tone and tenor of Continetti’s article suggest otherwise. I’m afraid it looks a lot like Continetti simply identifies respectable and responsible economic conservatism with support for the bailout, and of course Milton Friedman is the respectable and responsible economic conservative par excellence, and Continetti failed to think through the implications. I wish he were the only bailout defender who took this attitude.

The whole thing reminded me of a classic William F. Buckley column entitled “Quick! Get Milton Friedman on the Line!” and published on Oct. 22, 1987, right after the Black Monday market crash. The entire column consists of a transcript of Buckley’s phone call to Friedman after the crash. I’ve emphasized a few lines that might be of heightened interest in light of current events:

How are you, Milton?

We’re fine, how are you?

I was wondering whether you could do me a favor. I would like nine hundred words for National Review on the market breakdown. We would need it by Thursday, noon.

Nope.

Why not?

I have never written an economic analysis tailored to the market, and I’m not going to start doing that now.

Why?

Because the behavior of the market doesn’t correlate in any significant way with the behavior of the economy. It’s a mistake to imply that it does, and that would be inferred if I wrote about it.

Well, why don’t you write precisely on that theme? And it wouldn’t be cheating, would it, if you were to suggest what the investor might expect from the market, given the condition of the economy?

Yes, it would – I would be in the business of vetting the market, and I just told you, I’m not going to do that. I make my own decisions about the market, but not for public instruction. I sold all my stocks during the summer.

You did!

I did. And I’m going back into the market tomorrow.

Later, Buckley remarks that “the talk is of another 1929 depression,” to which Milton replies, “nonsense.”

Well, do you subscribe to the proposition that there are safeguards built into the system that would prevent a depression on a 1929 scale?

In 1954, I delivered a lecture in Sweden under the title, “Why the American Economy is Depression-Proof.” I have seen no reason since then, and see none now, to change that conclusion.

But your position all along has been that even the Great Depression was avoidable, correct? Even without the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and the SEC, and Social Security, et cetera?

Yes. The economic downturn from August 1929 to the end of 1930 was more severe than during the first year of most recessions, but if an upturn had come shortly after, the episode would have been classified as a garden-variety recession. It was converted into the Great Depression by the collapse of the financial system in successive waves. In 1931, 1932 and 1933. The stock market played no significant role in this collapse. The argument that the 1929 market crash produced the 1931 to 1933 economic contraction is a prime example of post hoc, ergo procter hoc.

You’re saying that it could all have been avoided?

Yes. The financial collapse of 1931 to 1933 need not have occurred and would have been avoided if the Fed had never been established, or if it had behaved differently. The Fed’s inept performance led to changes in the financial system that make a similar financial collapse highly unlikely.

Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?

Yes, that’s good news.

I still don’t see why you won’t write nine hundred words on just what you’ve said for National Review.

You’ve got nine hundred words in what I’ve just said.

Good point. Thanks a lot, Milton, and good night.

Good night, Bill.

The column appears in Buckley’s Happy Days Were Here Again.

As the election approaches, the Friedman Foundation’s choice of “Vote Milton in 2008” as the theme for this year’s Friedman Day feels more and more appropriate.

Coming Tomorrow: Did Milton Friedman oppose financing school choice through tax credits? Archeologists have uncovered startling new evidence! Tune in for the text of a newly discovered letter in which Milton lays out his position.

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Posted by Greg Forster

David Warren Bails Out on the Bailout

October 13, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

On this page I’ve cited comments by Canadian columnist David Warren as providing potential support for backers of the bailout. I don’t think, however, Warren had explicitly taken a position. Well, now he has, and it turns out he’s against. I figured out of fairness I should take note of it. I think Jay will particularly like the way he puts this:

Were it not for the panic, very little would be lost. The things that we produce by our labour we may continue to produce, so far as they are needed; and the things we need may continue to be produced, in exchange. Money itself, so long as it is taken at face value, may continue to be the convenient mode of exchange. Neither now, nor in 1929, nor in any of the other times of stock plunge and bank failure, has anything much been lost, until, to use Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s phrase, “fear itself” became the enemy of the people.

For in practical terms, the stocks on Wall Street are not worth nothing. Formidable agencies of production lie behind each of them. When their heads have cooled, investors may sort out which are over-valued, which under-valued by comparison, and what needs writing off. The more I try to think it through, the clearer it seems to me that every “rescue plan” is counter-productive. The sorting-out process is seriously confused when the government blunders in.

Indeed, the consensus of the economists I have read is that the Great Depression was largely an artifact of government intervention, reacting to a meltdown by freezing it into place. For politicians and bureaucracies characteristically mistake money for goods, words for things, pictures for reality.

Warren has actually been on fire for the past couple weeks; Mark Steyn has recirculated this thoughtful column on the “two solitudes” in U.S. politics, and with Canada having its own election underway, Warren’s relentless attacks on Conservative PM Stephen Harper (“Twice I have tried to unload the contents of a column over the head of Stephen Harper, whose betrayal of conservative causes I have been inclined to take personally. The other candidates do not annoy me nearly as much, since I have never been tempted to like, admire, or support any one of them.”) culminated in this paean to the (now apparently defunct) “returned ballot” rule, which once allowed a Canadian to show up at the polling place and formally register that there was no candidate for whom he would care to vote.

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Posted by Greg Forster

Small Children Suffer So Billionaire Lawyers Can Profit

October 8, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I am an angry man this morning.

My daughter, who just turned three, can’t talk much yet. (For the record, that’s not her picture at the top of the post.) Of all the difficulties she goes through because of her very limited ability to speak, one of the worst is that when she’s scared or in pain, she can’t tell us what’s wrong. She’s accustomed to communicating with us (through sign language, by pointing, by pulling us over to something, and through the limited set of words she can use), so when she desperately needs to communicate that her throat hurts or her head hurts and she doesn’t know how, she panics. Ordinary illnesses are terrifying to her. And of course that makes them doubly painful for us.

We thank God for the medicine companies that have produced the pain relievers and other medicines that get our daughter, and us, through these ordeals. I can only imagine what my daughter’s life would be like if she couldn’t take medicine to relieve her pain, and her terror.

On page B8 of your Wall Street Journal this morning, you will find a story about how the medicine companies that make children’s cold and cough remedies are “voluntarily” relabeling their products at the “request” of the FDA. These medicines will now be (mis)labeled with the warning that they shouldn’t be given to children under four.

These medicines are known to be safe for small children when used as directed. The FDA doesn’t dispute this. If the FDA had a legitimate reason to act, it wouldn’t make a request, it would make a rule, and enforce it.

These medicines were even marketed for children under age two until last October, and that change was also made “voluntarily” at the “request” of the FDA.

When the FDA requests that medicine companies voluntarily do something, it’s like when Vito Corleone summons the undertaker to the morgue and asks if he’s prepared to do him a favor.

So what justification was given for this request? Well, it seems that two-thirds of ER visits associated with these medicines come from children under four accidentally ingesting them. Different sources are saying either 6,000 or 7,000 ER visits are associated with these medicines, meaning that we’re talking about roughly 4,000 visits. [UPDATE: It appears to be 6,000 visits by children under 6, 7,000 visits total. It’s not surprising that most of the visits are by children under 6 given that these are medicines specifically marketed to young children. But that only makes it worse. The FDA is alarmed because, out of all ER visits by children under 6, two-thirds are by children under 4. Think about that. It’s like the old Dilbert cartoon where the boss is enraged that 40% of all sick days are taken on Monday or Friday.]

Most of the ER visits presumably don’t result in death or even long-term health impacts. If these medicines killed 4,000 children a year, the FDA would have acted against them openly rather than by subterfuge, and it would have done so a long time ago.

Who gets to speak for the millions of children who will suffer, over and over again, suffer every moment of pain that an untreated illness causes, because a relatively tiny number of parents can’t be bothered to store their medicines properly and as a result they have to endure one lousy ER visit? No one.

I am an angry man this morning.

Why would the FDA do such a moronic thing? We all know the answer. I don’t even have to say it. (Check the title of the post if you’ve forgotten it.)

Now, I know that in reality, many parents will keep on using these medicines. But some won’t. Lots of parents trust the FDA, more fool they. And what about future parents, who aren’t paying attention to what the FDA does today because they’re not parents yet? No dobut some will hear the truth, but others won’t. And what if the drug companies decide that now that these medicines are labeled for kids over four only, they can up the dose? We can watch for that, of course, but it’s one more obstacle between children and pain relief.

By tomorrow I will have resigned myself to this latest injustice. By now I ought to know better than to get this mad. I’ve spent my career fighting a government school monopoly that systematically destroys children’s lives so that the unions can make the gravy trains run on time. I can write about that without getting mad; if I got mad every time I contemplated the injustice of the system, I couldn’t do what I do. Why am I mad when it’s my daughter and not somebody else’s?

Because I’m human, I guess.

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Posted by Greg Forster

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