Liberal School Choice

Let the schools pick the students. Anything to give more power to public bureaucrats instead of to the people.

Betts suggests this: first fund the schools equally on a per-student basis. Then distribute trade-able rights to admit highly advantaged students; and allow schools to auction those rights. Schools would then be forced to figure out how much they valued the money they were spending relative to the highly advantaged children they wanted. We don’t know what the outcome would be. At one end of the spectrum you’d have schools with high concentrations of advantage and not much money; at the other end of the spectrum high concentrations of disadvantage and loads of money. It would probably take a few years for administrators to work out what the real costs of disadvantaged children were; but they would have a powerful incentive to work it out.

I'm just about speechless.

Chicago Living Wage

Cafe Hayek's Russell Roberts takes down a proposed law in Chicago. The Chicago city council has a proposal to force big box retailers (defined as more than a billion dollars in sales with stores greater than 90,000 square feet) to pay workers $10/hr plus $3 in benefits. Target and Wal-Mart have responded by suspending plans to open more stores and deciding whether to close additional stores. Mayor Daley would also like to know how the aldermen in Chicago are going to replace the 8000 lost jobs if Wal-Mart doesn't continue its expansion.

Of course, if this plays out where the "living wage" is enacted and Target and Wal-Mart leave, then we're left with the unseen effects of such a law. With no big boxes prices will gradually rise to levels seen in the non-big box retailer world. Of course, this effect will be slow and unseen, therefore no one will really complain about it. There will just be 20,000 less jobs in the greater Chicago area. But that's not what gets aldermen elected, raising people's wages with a law gets them elected. Unfortunately, this law not only won't raise anyone's wages it will end up lowering wages by having more people fighting for fewer jobs in the retail sector.

In addition, the unskilled teenagers who can't find work stocking shelves or whatever unskilled kids do at Target are not going to get any job experience. With fewer business unable to give a teenager a job because of wage standards that teenager never gets a chance to get a toehold in the labor force. How's he going to get started? What happens is the kid gets public assistance at the first opportunity, then becomes involved in the neverending circle of government dependency. This dependency is what draws him out to vote for an alderman who will raise the wages of the poor by imposing some minimum wage. The cycle starts again, relegating another generation of teenagers to government dependency.

Global Warming Skeptic

Coyote Blog once again makes a coherent and unvitriolic case against global warming alarmism. Of course, to question the conventional wisdom of future doom from global warming is to be the ultimate in wingnuttery. But until climatoligists can come up with a model that works for the past 50 years, I don't necessarily believe their model for the next 100.

City Busybodies

Mike Hendricks takes the city of Kansas City to task for outlawing selling gas to someone who hasn't already paid for it. It seems the city is tired of enforcing theft laws so they're putting the onus on business owners. Hendricks asks the next logical question.

Will bank lobbies be outlawed because that’s where bank robberies often occur?

Capitalism and Freedom

I'll let Kevin Drum's post on public vs. private education lead off my review of "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman.

First, there's that 8th grade reading score, which is a whopping 5.7 points (about half a grade level) below that of private schools. That's a big difference.

Second, these scores confirm a widely-reported and disturbing trend: public schools seem to do OK at the elementary level, but student scores start to drop significantly in secondary school. In this study, the delta between public and private schools dropped 6.8 points in reading and 3.5 points in math between 4th and 8th grades. If the study had been extended to 11th grade, I suspect that decline would have continued.

I don't have any answers here except for a guess: namely that the pedagogy wars don't really matter much. Phonics vs. whole word? New math vs. old? Open classrooms vs. strict discipline? Without disparaging the people who work hard trying to figure this stuff out, it seems as if practically any of these approaches can succeed or fail depending on how well they're implemented.

But what does seem to show up over and over again is the effect of concentrated poverty. Nearly everything I've read suggests that when the number of kids in poverty reaches about 50% in a school, teaching becomes nearly impossible — and that this matters much more in secondary school than in elementary school.

(First off, Drum asserts that there really isn't much of a difference between public vs. private; the portion that I selected doesn't make that clear, but I was mostly interested in the paragraphs selected. Sorry, if I misrepresent the point of Kevin's post.) Friedman addresses the point of concentrated poverty on the public schools in "Capitalism and Freedom". His policy suggestion is vouchers which allow parents to choose their child's school based on factors they deem important rather than having the state decide based on geography. Friedman argues this would alleviate some of the problems of concentrating poverty in certain schools. Of course, another reason of poverty being concentrated geographically is the state's entry into building housing for those poverty, concentrating all of the impoverished into a small geographic area. Friedman's solution to this is to give the poor cash to use how they wish. The main part of this cash would come in the form of the negative income tax, which today is called the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Friedman's writing is truly inspiring (admittedly, I am predisposed to believing in what he is writing). Above, I chose 3 policies that I believe the government has failed it's citizens; housing, education and poverty. As Friedman argues, government control in and of itself is to blame. This control has really affected other aspects of the system, for instance Housing and Urban Development affecting the education system. Whereas, giving the power to the people would not have affect the schools as much as concentrating poverty in one location.

Friedman's argument is against the concentration of power instead, to borrow from George H.W. Bush, of the thousand points of light. This week is the FDA's 100th anniversary. Friedman also takes down the idea of giving licensing function to the government, specifically the FDA and licensing of doctors. In this OC Register editorial by Satya Thallam, you can find the Friedman influence.

The FDA requires that a manufacturer of a new drug must prove both safety and effectiveness (the latter mandate added in 1962). By increasing the time and cost necessary to bring a drug to market, fewer drugs are developed, and even approved drugs forgo years of beneficial use. Fortunately, things have been improving, with the FDA now on par with the speedier approval times of similar agencies in Europe.

Economist Sam Peltzman has shown that the number of new drugs approved declined precipitously after imposition 44 years ago of the effectiveness requirement. He also showed that the proportion of inefficacious drugs didn't change in wake of the added requirement, writing that the "penalties imposed by the marketplace on sellers of ineffective drugs … left little room for improvement by a regulatory agency." His conclusion has been confirmed by other researchers.

But even if the FDA does little in the way of ensuring effectiveness, we should sing its praises for keeping us safe, right?

Noble intentions aside, any reasonable concept of safety is at best relative. The safe use of a drug is dependant on innumerable particulars, unique to the individual. By attempting to create a safety standard for something as variable as physiology, the FDA imposes onto the marketplace a rule that is at once clumsy and constricting.

Manufactured insulin may be essential to some and deadly to others. Radiation therapy and the AIDS cocktail often entail debilitating side effects. What should be the rule for considering them safe or not?

While the regulation of dosage, side effect and precautionary information helps the FDA mitigate this one-size-fits-all problem, the agency's failure to account for variation is seen in significant off-label usage, the unregulated prescription of drugs for uses other than the ones they were approved for.

Consumers are protected by a dynamic mixture of expert consultation, individual experimentation, independent and industry certification and the tort system. The FDA should be mindful of this existing system, because no one lobbies for the patients who die, or delay treatment, while waiting for a promising therapy to be approved.

The FDA's mission is ubiquitous; it affects every aspect of our lives. And so the story goes, we have the sausage- (and law-) making process to thank.

The policy prescriptions Friedman espouses in "Capitalism and Freedom" will probably never be extremely popular, but generations will read this book and be inspired by it's expression of freedom. It is a wonderful book that is as relevant today as it was in 1962.

The Wikipedia page for the book describes the impact of "Capitalism and Freedom".

The effects of Capitalism and Freedom were great yet varied in the realm of political economics. Some of Friedman's suggestions are being tested and implemented in many places, such as the flat income tax in Slovakia, a floating exchange rate which has almost fully replaced the Bretton Woods system, and school vouchers for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, to cite a few prominent examples. However, many other ideas have scarcely been considered, such as the end of licensing, and the abolition of corporate income tax (in favor of an income tax on the stock holder). Though politicians often claim that they are working towards "free trade," an idea the book supports, no one has considered taking his suggestion of phasing out all tariffs in 10 years. Nevertheless, Friedman popularized many ideas previously unknown to most outside economics. This and other works helped Milton Freedman to become a household name. The Times Literary Supplement called it "one of the most influential books published since the war." However, many of the ideas described in this book remain radical (or, according to critics, reactionary) and controversial to this day.

To see Friedman explain his theories, Radley has a link to a '60's era taxpayer subsidized television interview.

School Choice

When we stop calling school choice and vouchers a satanic idea maybe we can have a real debate about it. Milton Friedman explains his revolutionary idea from 50 years ago in the linked article.

“The fundamental thing that’s wrong with our present setup of elementary and secondary schooling is that it’s a case in which the government is subsidizing a product,” he says. “If you subsidize the producers, as we do in schooling, they have every incentive to have a status quo, and a non-progressive system, because they are a monopoly.”

Friedman finds it unfair that a mother who sends her child to private school should also have to pay to educate children whose parents send them to public school — an injustice made more egregious in his view by the fact that the private school mom probably has more money and so has already paid more in taxes.

But he is just as ticked off by what he sees as the great unfairness to poor kids.

“It’s very clear that the people who suffer most in our present system are people in the slums — blacks, Hispanics, the poor, the underclass.”

When I ask him about the “achievement gap” separating low-scoring black and Latino students from better-scoring whites and Asians, he blames my “friends in the union.”

“They are running a system that maximizes the gap in performance. . . Tell me, where is the gap between the poor and rich wider than it is in schooling? A more sensible education system, one that is based on the market, would stave off the division of this country into haves and have-nots; it would make for a more egalitarian society because you’d have more equal opportunities for education.”

But how would overburdened minimum-wage workers be expected to find the time to research a slew of school options, I ask — hearing the patronizing tone of my question as it crosses my lips.

“Who’s in a better position?” Friedman asks.
...
“In the last 10 years, the amount spent per child on schooling has more than doubled after allowing for inflation. There’s been absolutely no improvement as far as I can see in the quality of education. . . .
The system you have is like a sponge. It will absorb the extra money. Because the incentives are wrong.

“Would you really rather have your automobile produced by a government agency? Do you really prefer the post office to FedEx? Why do people have this irrational attachment to a socialist system?”

Friedman says that Americans have benefited enormously from free market competition in virtually every other part of their lives. He thinks it’s a matter of time before consumers demand the same right to choose how their children’s minds will be nourished as they do in deciding what food to feed them.

Kitchen Confidential

Over the past several weeks I have been enjoying "Kitchen Confidential": Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain has a show on the Travel Channel where he goes to exotic locales and eats their local fare. Fox had a sitcom last season based on this book starring Bradley Cooper, or as I refer to him, Sack Lodge. I liked that show which was a behind the scenes look at a kitchen at a fine dining restaurant. Wow, what an introduction.

The book was eminently enjoyable. There were no punches pulled by Bourdain. He describes kitchens as unbridled cruelty and pain, what I like to refer to as scraped knuckles. There is no coddling in a kitchen; slice your hand open? Stick it in ice water, wrap it up, get back on the line. Burn your hand? Shut up and get back on the line. Get your feelings hurt? Leave.

Bourdain takes several enjoyable detours through his life story, such as items for your home kitchen, how to cook like a chef, and what not to do at a restaurant; such as don't get fish on a Sunday. Bourdain's life story is rough. His early line cooking days were done as a junkie as well as copious amounts of weed and coke. Nowadays, just 7 or 8 drinks while doing a shift in the kitchen.

Bourdain tells a great story and his love of cooking shines through his surprisingly good writing, being that he's a cooking school graduate and never went to college. I'm probably the only person to put this combination together but "Kitchen Confidential" reminded me of "The Things They Carried". The way Bourdain tells story is not unlike how O'Brien tells a story. Towards the end of "Kitchen Confidential" when Bourdain is telling of how a chef he greatly admires runs a kitchen is completely unlike how he himself runs a kitchen, writes that everything the reader has read in the book before is obviously wrong. That reminded me of O'Brien's chapter explaining that it didn't matter whether a war story actually happened because it could have happened. Bourdain's explanation just struck me as being similar.

"Kitchen Confidential" was a very enjoyable read. I will probably read Bourdain's new book, "The Nasty Bits" and another book called "Heat" which has interested me on the New Releases table at Barnes & Noble. Having never worked in a restaurant before, yet loving restaurants, I enjoy the look that Bourdain gives.