Thought I left:
— “Ten Things Political Scientists Know That You Don’t.
— Chilean miners and Super Mario.
— Worthwhile Canadian attack ad.
— Condi Rice didn’t make the world safer.
— Big business wants to slam politicians it dislikes while avoiding accountability.
— The other Michael Ohers
Ra Ra Riot, “Boy”.
Vikas Bajaj writes that Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla is not a huge fan of charity:
By backing businesses that provide education loans or distribute solar panels in villages, he says, he wants to show that commercial entities can better help people in poverty than most nonprofit charitable organizations.
“There needs to be more experiments in building sustainable businesses going after the market for the poor,” he said in a telephone interview from his office in Menlo Park, Calif. “It has to be done in a sustainable way. There is not enough money to be given away in the world to make the poor well off.” [...]
Mr. Khosla says that he is not completely opposed to charities — that his fund may even donate to some nonprofit entities. But he says he is generally skeptical that nongovernmental organizations can accomplish much because they tend to drift away from what their donors wanted them to do.
I think there’s at least something to that and it reminded me of a somewhat different point that came to mind when I read Dayo Olopade’s article on the Gates Foundation. If you’re thinking about a charitable undertaking, it seems to me that you need to balance between two considerations. On the one hand, there’s the objective importance of the issue you’re tackling. On the other hand, there’s the odds of success. Gates seems to me to be leaning very heavily on the first set of considerations. Something like the Kimbell Art Museum represents a very different approach. The lack of first-rate cultural institutions in Fort Worth Texas wasn’t a problem of world-historical proportions, but the bequest that built the museum definitely solved the problem and did so with good ex-ante odds.
So I think that if I wanted to try to put together the most defensible possible version of Khosla’s thesis here it would be to say that maybe the world’s billionaires should direct their energy more at the world’s low-hanging fruit. Like if some rich donor just started buying up the publication rights to important books and turn them into Creative Commons texts. There could be free ebooks, cheap print books, you could pay to have them translated into new languages, etc. That wouldn’t end poverty or fix India or anything, but building the Great Library of the Digital Age would improve quality of life at the margin for many people and it’s basically guaranteed to “work.”
I don’t know if I agree with that argument, but it seems kind of plausible to me.
(cc photo by GraceFamily)
Ezra Klein on education policy:
I’m up for trying things like merit pay and charter schools, but their supporters way oversell their benefits. As of now, actually, we’re not entirely sure they have benefits. The thing that we’re pretty sure does work (pdf) is early-childhood education, but for some reason, it’s hard to get people interested in that. But putting $20 billion and serious political capital into that bucket would get you much larger returns than anything you can do for existing schools or entrenched poverty.
I think we ought to reject this way of characterizing the state of research on charter schools and early childhood education. What we know about early childhood intervention is that high quality interventions have giant benefits. But that’s also what we’ve learned from charter schooling—KIPP has giant benefits. So why not send everyone to KIPP? Well, there are questions aboutscalability. But those exact same questions exist for high-quality pre-K. Where, for example, are all these new teachers going to come from?
The real difference, as a political matter, between high-quality pre-K and high-quality charters is that high-quality pre-K would be done with a new revenue stream whereas charters involve redirecting existing revenue streams. That means that each has pros and cons relative to different constituencies and I’m happy to say I support both. Which side it’s more politically feasible to make headway on at any given moment is going to have to do with local budgetary conditions, but from a policy standpoint the issues are basically parallel and the best stuff is both expensive and highly effective. For the record, it’s worth noting that existing preschool programs in the United States tend to be managed more like charter schools than like centralized school districts.
Fundamentally, though, people should recognize that the less we know about the best way to educate poor children effectively the more that bolsters the case for expanding choice and operational flexibility. If the question is “how do we make sure poor kids don’t get measles” the answer is easy—we appropriate some money and give them the damn vaccines. That’s because we know perfectly well as an organizational matter how to throw together a highly cost-effective vaccination program. But it’s precisely because in education we see such a range of outcomes and it’s so unclear what “works” from the standpoint of what actually takes place in the classroom that it makes sense to try to decentralize provision.
I haven’t tried very hard to describe the scene in Hebron, since I honestly think I don’t have the writing chops to do it justice. But Chris Hayes was also on the trip and he’s got what it takes:
Around the corner, on Shuhada Street, are the last Palestinian holdouts in the neighborhood. They occupy second-floor apartments with balconies covered in metal braces and chicken wire. Because the street is closed to Palestinians, the residents of these caged apartments are not allowed to use their front doors; at those rare times when they leave to get provisions they must go out via the roof or makeshift doors.
As we reached the limits of H2, past graffiti of Stars of David and the slogan For every settlement evacuated, we will kill 100 Arabs, we arrived at an Israeli checkpoint, a small wooden shack manned by a few soldiers. Mikhael told us that as an Israeli, he couldn’t go through but urged us to do so. As if passing through a magic portal, we emerged on the other side into the honking, bustling chaos of a living city: shops selling T-shirts and DVDs, shopkeepers smoking cigarettes and shouting to one another over the noise, commuters hailing cabs and pedestrians dodging snarled traffic. And then, back through the magic door and into the deathly silence of occupied Hebron.
There, while settlers routinely harass Palestinian residents and the tension sometimes erupts into violence, the IDF has succeeded in its immediate goal of avoiding large-scale bloodshed. This has come, however, at the cost of turning a holy city into a moral obscenity. One might be tempted to dismiss Hebron as unique, but Mikhael insists it’s only a matter of degree rather than kind. “This is the same policy all over the West Bank,” he says. “Separation, militarization, patrol roads. In rural areas it looks a lot nicer, but it’s no different.”
Read the whole thing.
(cc photo by Aidan Jones)
Faye Fiore and Mark Z. Barabak report for the LA Times on Ann Quinn’s unhappiness with the ability of Washington politicians to put partisanship aside, roll up their sleeves, and get down to work:
In 15 years of marriage they have never agreed on anything political. When she put a John Kerry sign on the lawn in 2004, he ran out and got a George W. Bush sign to plant right next to it. But when it comes to the important things — Patrick, improvements to their two-story Dutch colonial house, which car to buy — they put their differences aside and did what needed to be done. If they can figure out how to make it work, why can’t Washington?
Kevin Drum is peeved:
Eh. If Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner only needed to agree on a maintenance schedule for the Capitol Dome or how big the House motor pool needed to be, they’d get along fine too. But Ann Quinn and her husband, in 15 years of marriage, still don’t agree on anything political even though they love each other and live a wonderful life together. Shouldn’t that tell us something? If 200 Anns and 200 Johns had to decide whether to raise taxes, they wouldn’t do any better at it than Pelosi and Boehner.
I think Drum’s got this wrong. It’s not that Ann & John can agree on things because they’re less important than politics. Instead, as the article states they disagree about politics but do manage to agree “when it comes to the important things.” That’s because though policy disputes are substantively important, whether or not Ann & John reach consensus on policy issues is totally unimportant. When it comes to home renovations or raising their son, there are large gains to be made by compromising whereas when it comes to politics there’s nothing at stake so they just disagree.
The problem in congress is that though policy is a positive-sum game where it’s possible for people with sharply divergent viewpoints to forge compromises, electoral politics is a zero-sum competition for seats. Historically, members of congress were subjected to weak party discipline and thought of themselves primarily as entrepreneurial figures charged with cutting deals with one another to advance their own interests. But we’ve shifted in recent years to a different paradigm in which discipline is tighter and lawmakers—especially on the Republican side—see themselves as footsoldiers in the battle for majority control. That becomes a game in which there’s very little incentive for anyone to compromise, so you don’t see a ton of compromising happening.
In the UK, parties never compromise on anything and the parliament operates by pure majority control. Except suddenly the most recent election created a large incentive for Tory-LibDem cooperation and lo and behold compromise turned out to be possible.
Ethan Devine has a very good article in Foreign Policy sketching out Japan’s economic problems as a cautionary tale for China:
When China’s working-age population peaks in 2015, it will be 20 years after Japan’s crested the wave, but it will do so at a much lower level of prosperity than was Japan’s at that time. The harsh reality is this: Japan got rich before it grew old, and China will grow old before it gets rich. [...]
History has given China this moment to do what Japan could not. The Japanese did not seriously attempt to rebalance until their economy was well-developed, ossified, and allergic to change. So when the jig was up on their longstanding economic model, rather than rebalance, Japan unraveled. In this sense, the global financial crisis was serendipitous for China. By reminding China’s leadership that relying on exports means depending on unreliable foreigners, the crisis put the pain of rebalancing in perspective. It is not out of altruism that we have seen renminbi appreciation accompanying Chinese wage hikes and other rebalancing measures. A slight loosening of controls over media and finance could be in the offing. Deregulating the service sector might be a frightening political proposition, but perhaps less so than not having one when the exports dry up.
It is worth saying, however, that from a different perspective I can see how Japan just looks like a success story to many people. After all, Japan’s PPP-adjusted per capita GDP is about level with France and higher than Spain, Israel, or Italy. Most people around the world, in other words, are poorer than the Japanese. So “you’re going to end up like Japan” isn’t necessarily much of a nightmare scenario to leaders in the developing world. Devine’s point is that China won’t end up like Japan, but instead risks seeing its economic growth stall out at a much lower level of development. But making that argument stick requires at least as much attention to the significant differences between the economies as to the similarities.
The narrative richness of Lydia DePillis’ story on how the neighborhood of Bloomingdale finally got a bar and the challenges facing various local businessmen who saw a market opportunity here is worth a read. It’s not the case that this kind of regulatory issue is why unemployment in 2010 is so much higher than it was in 2007, but it does help explain why joblessness is higher than it might otherwise be both in 2007 and in 2010.
It’s well known that the United States does terribly on life expectancy compared to other developed countries. But perhaps a lot of that is due to factors related to violence, car accidents, and infant mortality that are distinct from the mainstream of the health care system.
So Aaron Carroll looks instead at life expectancy at 65:
And:
Strong evidence of systematic underperformance in the American system. And yet since we’re talking about Medicare-eligible people here that also suggests that the issue can’t be solved by messing with who has insurance or how insurance-provision is organized. You need to actually delve down into the delivery of health care services.
Less noted is a parallel development in the de facto Palestinian capital of Ramallah. I’m not sure exactly what I expected from a city under Israeli occupation, but it wasn’t what I found in Ramallah. Once you get through the checkpoint and on the road into town, Ramallah turns out to be a pretty nice place. Not uniformly, of course. It has a Third World vibe and the slum districts that come with it. But the Grand Park Hotel is very nice and by no means the only hotel catering to foreigners. The friendly cab drivers ask if it’s your first time in Palestine and chitchat in passable English. Five Americans can walk without fear late at night through the confusing street grid and find a delightful Palestinian-Italian fusion restaurant with a bustling crowd and enjoy round after round of drinks. A construction boom is underway, with banks and offices and houses springing up everywhere. Roads are being renovated, with banners eagerly extolling the U.S. government’s role in footing the bill. [...]
But the Ramallah bubble is truly a bubble. Fayyad’s achievements come either as gifts from Israel (in terms of reduced checkpoints and road closures) or from the U.S. and Europe in the form of money used to underwrite a massive growth in the state apparatus. He has no democratic legitimacy and has no way to deliver sustainable economic gains under the current circumstances of the occupation. Politically aware Palestinians understand what’s happening all too well: More than one described him as a tool of the occupation rather than a leader of the Palestinian people. Nonviolent resistance organizers observed that Fayyad’s strategy is predicated on engaging in essentially no resistance of any form. His economic-development strategy amounts to running a tight ship in terms of personal corruption, plus begging for scraps from Israel and America, which severely constrains his political options in a way that utterly destroys his credibility.
Steven Pearlstein has an intelligent reply to my post on his advocacy of nominal wage cuts as the best path out of the economic ditch.
Greek protestors in 2008 (cc photo by murplejane)
I don’t really disagree with anything he says, but I do disagree with the idea that we should focus on this. The fact of the matter is that organizing nominal wage cuts is very difficult. Examples of the difficulty of organizing nominal wage reductions often come from unionized industries, but it should be pointed out that this is largely because unionization makes it logistically easier for firms to undertake nominal wage cuts rather than mass layoffs. The logistical problems because exponentially more difficult when you’re not talking about a single firm, but instead to the idea of across the board sector-by-sector wage adjustments. An old-school social democracy could, in theory, handle this with a giant meeting between union leaders and business executives but that’s not the USA and the politics are ugly. What’s more, you’d be looking at one heck of a planning problem. In tradable sectors an accountant can sit down and do the math but trade is a relatively small part of the US economy and there’s plenty of reason to think real wages are too high in many not-so-tradable sectors (and I would, in fact, include newspaper columnists in this category) where it’s hard to figure out the “right” level on the back of the envelop.
But note that in that last sentence I switched between discussing “nominal wages” and “real wages” and this is the key to the whole thing. In Pearlstein’s case for lower nominal wages the benefits are stemming from the fact that lower nominal wages lead to lower real wages. But you could also achieve this outcome by raising the price level. The politics of this are also a bit ugly but the logistics are much better. You don’t need to say to any firm, individual, union, professional association, or anyone else and say “your real wages are too high.” Instead, the rise in the price level will let the wage adjustments sort out on their own—fields where real wages are too high will see flat nominal wages, and in fields where real wages are fine there will be nominal pay increases. You don’t need an omniscient planner, you don’t need to hurt anyone’s feelings, and you avoid the debt-deflation problems associated with adjusting entirely on the wage side.
Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Ireland signed away their freedom to make monetary policy in order to get themselves 10 years of low borrowing costs. They have no choice but to go the Pearlstein route and it’s a hard road to travel. We can get the same impact faster and better by having the Federal Reserve do its job.
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