Archive for February, 2010
More on the Disconnect between IR Academics and Beltway People
Back in September I puzzled over the disconnect between international relations academics and the Washington foreign-policy establishment. Back then, I wrote that
the two groups have been wildly at variance in terms of their views on important public policy issues. Take the Iraq war, for example. As anyone who was in Washington at the time knows, the [Foreign Policy Community] was extremely fond of the idea of invading Iraq. To oppose it was to marginalize oneself for years. Indeed, those who promoted the disastrous adventure have prospered, while those who (bravely or stupidly, depending on your point of view) opposed it remain huddled in the chilly, dusty alcoves of popular debate.
In the academy, meanwhile, there was hardly any debate over Iraq–almost 80 percent of IR academics opposed the war. [.pdf] To the extent academics did enter the public debate on the issue, it was to pay for an advertisement in the New York Times warning against the war. [.pdf] The only academics who spoke out in favor of the war (to my knowledge, anyway) were IR liberals like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who sought policy positions in Washington. (Slaughter, of course, was rewarded with a spot as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, while to my knowledge none of the academic opponents of the war have gained Washington policy jobs.)
Today, Daniel Drezner describes his experience at
a small conference devoted to the idea of getting scholars and policymakers in the same room to talk about U.S. policy towards a Great Power That Shall Remain Nameless. The idea was that policymakers could highlight issues that professors might have overlooked and vice versa.
Everything was going along swimmingly until one of the policymakers in the room complained that some of the academic memos that had been prepared for the conference were too long to be read by policymakers — which was true, except that wasn’t the purpose of these memos. In response, a Smart and Well Respected Political Scientist went off on a serious and righteous rant. Why didn’t policymakers or staffers in DC actually read what experts thought about a particular issue? It wasn’t just that political scientists were being put on the sidelines — we were being completely ignored.
While Drezner’s post centers on the blame senior academics deserve for stigmatizing policy pronouncement from untenured political scientists, I think it’s worth revisiting the fact that policymakers and IR academics just don’t agree about much, as I highlighted above. And, as if on cue, Steven K. Metz of the Army War College crops up in comments (you have to scroll down), writing in part that:
I really believe the key is for academics to learn how to express themselves in a policy relevant way rather than expecting policymakers to work through academic style analysis and writing. Heck, I remember participating in a workshop early in the Bush administration that brought together the elite of security studies professors. The stated purpose was to develop policy relevant analysis. But all I heard over two days was that the Bush administration needed to jettison its worldview and adopt the one advocated by the speaker. (emphasis mine)
That is, when you got “the elite of security studies professors” in a room with senior policy people in DC, they wanted to use the opportunity to warn the DC people that their expertise led them to the conclusion that the policies we were following were, in fact, dumb. I think everybody complaining about the gulf between the fields needs to come to some sort of grips with the fact that there are just big disagreements between the Beltway consensus and the IR academic views on many, many issues. And unless and until either a) policymakers feel inclined to listen to scholars on those subjects or b) academics lose their interest in warning the policy community about their policies, just pushing them together in various arenas is not going to do much good.
The Maytag Repair Man Would Make a Better USTR
Ron Kirk hasn’t exactly been burning the candles at both ends as U.S. Trade Representative. And I don’t expect he’ll be racking up the frequent flier miles anytime soon, given his recent assessment of the trade policy scene. Here’s what he had to say, as reported by Jerry Hagstrom of Congress Daily:
Speaking at the USDA Annual Outlook Forum, Kirk said members of Congress “are more open and receptive” to the idea of creating a trans-Pacific agreement because it could be written from scratch.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership comes “without any of the biases of the three [agreements] under consideration,” he said. Kirk added members of Congress also like it because it would take 18 to 24 months to develop and would not come up for approval until after the 2010 elections.
Basically, Kirk’s planning to hang his trade expansion hat on some future trade agreement that’s still in the conception phase and years away from a shot at reality, while giving up on the already-signed agreements with Korea, Colombia and Panama because those agreements are too much of a burden politically for Congress, who would prefer to start from scratch.
That’s trade leadership from the Obama administration!
At this point, though, likening Kirk to the Maytag repair man might be too optimistic an analogy. The USTR hinted that he might find something to do on the enforcement side of his job description. According to Hagstrom:
Kirk stressed the administration’s commitment to enforcing trade agreements, saying that “enforcement is not protectionist.”
A Value-Added Tax Is Not the Answer…Unless the Question Is How to Finance Bigger Government
While admitting that spending restraint is the ideal approach, Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution asks whether a value-added tax (VAT) might be the most desirable of all realistic options for dealing with an unsustainable budget situation.
Read his post for yourself, but I think a fair summary is that he is basically saying that a) there will be a crisis if we don’t do something about future deficits, b) a crisis will result in very bad policy, and c) if we support a VAT now, we will at least be able to extract concessions from the other side.
I have no idea whether there will be a future crisis, but I think the rest of Tyler’s argument is wrong.
But before explaining my position, let’s start by stating what I assume to be our mutual objective, which is to control the size of government. We all agree that there is a problem because government is too big now, and it is projected to get even bigger because of the built-in growth of entitlement programs. One symptom of growing government is deficits, which are very large today and will be even bigger in the near future as more and more baby boomers retire and push up costs for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Big Teacher Is Watching
Researching government invasions of privacy all day, I come across my fair share of incredibly creepy stories, but this one may just take the cake. A lawsuit alleges that the Lower Merion School District in suburban Pennsylvania used laptops issued to each student to spy on the kids at home by remotely and surreptitiously activating the webcam built into the bezel of each one. The horrified parents of one student apparently learned about this capability when their son was called in to the assistant principal’s office and accused of “inappropriate behavior while at home.” The evidence? A still photograph taken by the laptop camera in the student’s home.
I’ll admit, at first I was somewhat skeptical—if only because this kind of spying is in such flagrant violation of so many statutes that I thought surely one of the dozens of people involved in setting it up would have piped up and said: “You know, we could all go to jail for this.” But then one of the commenters over at Boing Boing reminded me that I’d seen something like this before, in a clip from Frontline documentary about the use of technology in one Bronx school. Scroll ahead to 4:37 and you’ll see a school administrator explain how he can monitor what the kids are up to on their laptops in class. When he sees students using the built-in Photo Booth software to check their hair instead of paying attention, he remotely triggers it to snap a picture, then laughs as the kids realize they’re under observation and scurry back to approved activities.
I’ll admit, when I first saw that documentary—it aired this past summer—that scene didn’t especially jump out at me. The kids were, after all, in class, where we expect them to be under the teacher’s watchful eye most of the time anyway. The now obvious question, of course, is: What prevents someone from activating precisely the same monitoring software when the kids take the laptops home, provided they’re still connected to the Internet? Still more chilling: What use is being made of these capabilities by administrators who know better than to disclose their extracurricular surveillance to the students? Are we confident that none of these schools employ anyone who might succumb to the temptation to check in on teenagers getting out of the shower in the morning? How would we ever know?
Radioactive Corporate Welfare
A good default proposition regarding the government’s role in the economy would state that the government should not loan money to an enterprise if the enterprise in question cannot find one single market actor anywhere in the universe to loan said enterprise a single red cent. It might suggest – I don’t know – that the investment is rather … dubious.
Alas, like all good propositions regarding the government’s role in the economy, this one is being left by the roadside by the Obama administration. Unfortunately, the only complaint being made by a not insubstantial segment of the political Right – frequently, the political crowd that is busy decrying “Bailout Nation” – is that the loan guarantees are not fat enough.
I write, of course, about the $8.3 billion federal loan guarantee announced by President Obama this week for Southern Company to build two new nuclear power plants. The money will be used to guarantee the loans being made by the federal government (via the Federal Financing Bank) to partially cover the cost of Southern’s projected $14 billion nuclear construction project at their Vogtle plant near Waynesboro, Georgia. The loan guarantees were authorized by Congress in the 2005 Energy Policy Act and, we are told, are the first installment on a total package of $54 billion that the President would like to hand out to facilitate the construction of 7-10 new nuclear power plants (Congress, however, has only authorized $18.5 billion to this point).
The claim being made by some – that the loan guarantees are necessary to jump-start investor interest in new nuclear power plant construction – is not quite correct. Even these lavish loan guarantees aren’t enough to do that. In a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy dated July 2, 2007, six of Wall Street’s s then-largest investment banks – Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley – informed the administration that, contrary to the government’s expectations, anything short of a 100 percent unconditional guarantee would be insufficient to induce private lending.
Why is it risky to build nuclear power plants? Because new nuclear projects tie up more capital for longer periods of time than its main competitor, natural-gas fired generation. Nuclear power makes economic sense only if natural gas prices are very high. Then, over time, the high initial costs of nuclear power would be offset by nuclear power’s lower fuel costs. Moreover, as noted by Moody’s in an analysis published in July of last year, there is uncertainty associated with construction costs, regulatory oversight, technological developments that might reduce the cost of rival facilities, and the ability of utilities to recover costs and make a profit over the lifetime of the plant – a risk tied up in the economic prospects of the region being served by the plant. And those risks have been increasing, not decreasing, as time has gone on.
UN Climate Official Steps In It, Then Aside
There are numerous possible reasons for UN climate chief Yvo de Boer’s decision to resign—from his inability to cobble together a new climate treaty last December in Copenhagen (where he wept on the podium), to recent revelations of his agency’s mishandling of climate change data.
What the climate science community and the public should focus on now are the ramifications of de Boer’s resignation. For one thing, it signals that hope is dead for a UN-brokered global treaty that would have any meaningful effect on global temperatures. It also means that the UN intends to keep its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pretty much intact under the leadership of the scientifically compromised Rajenda Pauchari, who should have resigned along with de Boer.
This development guarantees that the Obama administration will have an unmitigated mess on its hands when signatories to the Framework Convention sit down in Mexico City this November in yet another meeting intended to produce a climate treaty. The Mexico City meeting convenes six days after U.S. midterm elections, in which American voters are fully expected to rebuke Obama for policies including economy-crippling proposals to combat climate change.
In short, Mexico City is about as likely to produce substantive policy decisions as the TV show ‘The View.’ Backers of radical climate change measures are now paying the price for over two decades of telling the public—in this case literally—that the sky is falling.
The Paucity of Poor Kids in Many Public Schools
There’s a widespread belief that public schools are homogeneous and all inclusive while private schools are bastions of the elite. This was proven to be a myth decades ago by the renowned sociologist James Coleman, and as far as I know, that pattern of findings hasn’t changed in recent years.
Nevertheless, the myth continues. A new Fordham Institute paper provides a partial antidote, pointing out that quite a few public schools enroll virtually no low-income kids, making them bastions of the elite. Where the Fordham paper trips up a bit is in calling these elite public schools “private public schools.” As already noted above, private schools are, on average, better economically integrated than their government counterparts, so this phrase is exactly backwards and, as Sara Mead points out, is quite a slap in the face to the many private schools that do yeoman’s work serving large numbers of low-income students. Still, good to have folks taking note of these data.
Thursday Links
- A few things you might not know about rail travel: “Automobiles in intercity travel are as energy efficient as Amtrak. Cars are getting more energy efficient, while boosting Amtrak trains to higher speeds will make them less energy efficient.” The list goes on…
- Quiz Time! Which was the only country in the 27-nation European Union to register economic growth without going through a recession last year? The answer might surprise you.
- Unionized teachers refuse to work 25 minutes more a day, so Rhode Island town fires all of them.
- Arnold Kling on Haiti, poverty, and capitalism.
- Podcast: This is what happens to American jobs when you have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.
Mandating Coverage of Pre-Existing Conditions = Price Controls
Kevin Williamson’s article “Priceless Is Worthless” from the December 21 issue of National Review sat on my nightstand for two months. When I finally read it, I was glad I hadn’t pitched it. It was like someone had taken Friedrich Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and made it accessible and entertaining:
For the Soviets, there were no real prices, so there was no feedback loop between producers and consumers: If we’d had that model for soft drinks, we’d still be drinking New Coke, and the cola executives in Atlanta would be strutting around in their nifty military uniforms, with epaulets and braid, telling us to drink our New Coke and like it, because they had determined, RATIONALLY, that this is what we want. A good rule of thumb: Fear the man who says he will make things rational by ignoring reality–and ignoring prices is ignoring reality.
Williamson warms my libertarian heart when he exposes laws requiring insurers to cover pre-existing medical conditions as price controls:
You’d never take a bet that you knew you were going to lose, right? Insurance companies won’t do that, either, unless they get paid to do so–specifically, unless they are allowed to charge at least as much for covering Preexisting Condition X as it’s going to cost them to treat Preexisting Condition X. Ignoring the reality of prices–waving the magic wand and saying: “There shall be no price put on preexisting conditions”–does not solve the problem. Health care costs money. The price is right, and you cannot politically engineer your way out of that reality, no matter how many sickly toddlers you parade around on CNN.
Free-market health care reforms would take a great leap forward if all conservatives and libertarians would just start calling such laws what they are: price controls.
“Smart Growth” from a Dumb Agency
The same federal agency that brought us monumental failures like public housing wants to play a bigger role in fostering so-called regional “smart growth.” HUD secretary Shaun Donovan recently traveled to Portland, Oregon to announce the Obama administration’s new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities.
This new bureaucracy will distribute $140 million in grants for regional “smart growth” planning:
With OSHC’s grant programs, HUD will provide funding to a wide variety of multi-jurisdictional and multi-sector partnerships and consortia, from Metropolitan Planning Organizations and State governments, to non-profit and philanthropic organizations. These grants will be designed to encourage regions to build their capacity to integrate economic development, land use, transportation, and water infrastructure investments, and to integrate workforce development with transit-oriented development. Accordingly, OSHC’s grants will be coordinated closely with the Department of Transportation (DOT) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Donovan told a Portland State University crowd that “We at HUD are big admirers of what you’re doing here.” However, Randal O’Toole’s dismantling of the Portland planning utopia myth in a Cato Policy Analysis shows that the city is nothing to be emulated. That is unless other cities want less affordable housing, more congestion, higher taxes, and businesses relocating elsewhere.
Donovan then met up with his EPA and DOT colleagues in Seattle at smart growth conference. HUD isn’t the only one opening up the taxpayer’s wallet:
And the Department of Transportation is proposing $527 million to promote “livable communities” through grants to states and cities. Transportation secretary Ray LaHood says those grants, too, must meet the goals of his partner agencies.
LaHood: “It supports any new initiatives we develop on our own like expanding transit in low–income neighborhoods, or what our friends at HUD and EPA are working on in collaboration.”
Local coalitions are already forming to seek those federal dollars.
Let the rent-seeking begin.
The merits of Portland’s urban planning can be debated all day. But it stands federalism on its head when the federal government takes a particular city’s policies and then tries to shove it down the throats of the rest of the country. Based on what I know of Portland’s planning, I certainly wouldn’t want it where I live. Other cities, like Houston, have reached the same conclusion. But, I guess if Shaun Donovan likes it, then damnit, we’re all going to like it.
When they Give You “Anti-Lemons”…
On Tuesday, I criticized a new economic modeling paper (“Anti-Lemons”) purporting to show that unfettered education markets are bad and that government can fix them with the right regulations.
Andrew Gillen comes to the study’s defense, and I’m delighted that he’s taken the trouble to reflect on it rather than just saying “I like it.” But there are problems with his analysis. First, he faults me for dismissing the “Anti-Lemons” models for being based on false assumptions, citing Paul Krugman:
I am a strong believer in the importance of models, which are to our minds what spear-throwers were to stone age arms: they greatly extend the power and range of our insight. In particular, I have no sympathy for those people who criticize the unrealistic simplifications of model-builders.
Even if we put aside the fact that Paul Krugman is at times less reliable than the Daily Show website, there is an important difference between assumptions that are “unrealistically simplified” and those that are patently wrong. With the former, your model might still huck its intellectual spear somewhere in the general vicinity of the truth, with the latter, you’re just going to put your eye out.
“Anti-Lemons” is in the put-your-eye-out camp. Among other things, it assumes the productivity of all schools is equal. This is both totally false and highly germane — efficiency varies dramatically among schools, and private schools as a whole are consistently more efficient than government schools (as we will see below). Failing to recognize that reality will lead to incorrect results from the model, and this is just one of the false assumptions the paper adopts (see my previous post for others).
Second, Gillen writes that
going by Coulson’s numbers in figure 2 here, we would expect to find a positive impact of markets over government on achievement in slightly less than 2 out of 3 studies (with insignificant findings making up the majority of the others). If the case for free markets over government schools is really so clear cut (and I lean strongly in this direction), than why isn’t this 3 out of 3?
There are many plausible reasons for this result (lack of statistical power, omitted variable bias, other misspecification errors, etc.), but one is particularly worth raising here: government schools in many parts of the world spend several times as much per pupil as their private sector counterparts. This is true in most developing countries, from which a great deal of the inter-sectoral research hails. And when I looked at statewide data from Arizona in 2006 I found that government schools spend roughly 50 percent more than private schools. While it’s true that government school outcomes tend not to improve much as spending rises, the same cannot be said of private schools.
If this is true, you might ask, then wouldn’t the inter-sectoral research on school efficiency be more stark than the research on achievement (that fails to take spending levels into account)? The answer is yes. In fact, if you examine the efficiency bar in the same figure 2 cited by Gillen above, you will see that every single one of the efficiency comparisons between market and monopoly schools is significant and favors the market schools.
So, not only is the “Anti-Lemons” model useless, it is worse than useless: it seems to mislead even intelligent readers into believing that there is some mystery in the literature that needs to be solved by blindly waiving a spear around.
“Anti-Lemons” is neither Camelot, as I said yesterday, nor is it Sparta as Andrew implied. It’s the kid from Christmas Story who nearly puts his eye out by the cavalier application of a potentially powerful tool.
Shameless Vote-Buying through Education?
There’s an act for that! And another act, and another act, and another…
Oh, did we forget to mention the painful results? Well, federal education “gifts” do have a tendency to blow up in your face.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
