Archive for July, 2010
No, There Are NOT “Five Job Seekers for Every Job Opening”
The Washington Post published “5 Myths about unemployment” by Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. The article is indeed full of myths, though not in the intended sense.
“There are now roughly five unemployed people for every available job,” says Ms. Shierholz, adding “there literally aren’t jobs for four of every five unemployed workers.” That statement has been repeated endlessly− in recent columns by Paul Krugman and Art Laffer, for example, and in a July 20 Wall Street Journal editorial which said “there are still five job seekers for every job opening.”
Regardless how often you hear this, the statement is completely false. After all, the same survey that showed only 3.2 million “job openings” in May also showed 4.5 million people were hired that month. If 3.2 million “openings” measured all available jobs, as Ms. Shierholz claims, then how did 4.5 million get hired? I exposed this myth and others in my June 10 Wall Street Journal article. “The myth that there are nearly six job seekers for every available job,” I wrote, “arises from the misnamed BLS ‘Job Opening and Turnover Survey’ (JOLTS), which asks a few thousand businesses how many new jobs they are actively advertising outside the firm. But note well that this concept of ‘job openings’ does not purport to include ‘every available job.’ On the contrary, it is closer to being a measure of help wanted ads. ‘Many jobs are never advertised,’ explains the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook; ‘People get them by talking to friends, family, neighbors, acquaintances, teachers, former coworkers, and others who know of an opening.’ Because many jobs are never advertised they are also never counted as job openings! The BLS Handbook also notes that, ‘Directly contacting employers is one of the most successful means of job hunting.’ Those jobs are also not counted as job openings.”
Unfortunately, I apparently failed to persuade even the Wall Street Journal editors about this statistical hoax. So, let’s get a second opinion.
The Minneapolis Fed recently interviewed Stanford economist Robert Hall, the famed co-author of Hall-Rabushka flat tax and (as he once told me) a “Clinton Democrat.” For 32 years he has chaired the NBER committee that defines the dates of business cycles. If he’s not an expert, who is?
Hall noted that “there’s been a decline in the profitability of hiring a worker without a corresponding decline in the wage. The incentive to create a job is the difference between what a worker will contribute to the business and what the worker has to be paid.” But he also noted that the difficulty of finding a job is not just because fewer jobs are created, but because employers “do relatively little to try to recruit workers” when unemployment is high: “Interestingly, the number of people who find jobs each month is more or less a constant…,” said Hall, ”So, something like 4 million people find jobs every month. Even with 10 percent unemployment, as recently, we’ve still seen the same thing. A very large number of people looking, very low job-finding rate for each individual, but the product—the number of jobs filled—is roughly a constant. It’s a very important fact about the labor market. Think about a slack market from an employer’s point of view. They see there are all kinds of highly qualified people out there they can hire easily, so they don’t need to do a lot of recruiting— people are pounding on the door.”
When job seekers are pounding on the door, the number of advertised “job openings” is a useless indicator of the much larger number who actually find jobs. If the Washington Post were really interested in exposing myths about unemployment, they could start by debunking the myth that the “job openings” survey means “there literally aren’t jobs for four of every five unemployed workers.” That is literally hogwash.
DISCLOSE Near the End
The cloture vote on the DISCLOSE Act will soon be taken. It appears that its supporters lack the votes to close off debate.
Brad Smith explains some of the problems of DISCLOSE.
Roger Pilon notes other failings.
President Obama tried to rally the troops yesterday by taking a populist tone. I have never thought Obama was a very good demagogue, and his efforts at populism belie his strengths. President Obama and congressional Democrats are hoping a defeated DISCLOSE will be good for their fall campaigns. Historically, campaign finance issues have had little salience with the public. On these issues, more than others, hope does seem to spring eternal.
Incumbency as a Special Interest
Today Politico Arena asks:
Is DISCLOSE dead on arrival?
My response:
With the American public, especially the long unemployed, clamoring for ever-more campaign finance regulations, you’d think that passage of the Democrat’s DISCLOSE Act would be a piece of cake. Yet the party that perfected the politics of special interests is coming up short in its effort to pass a measure they claim will protect us from special interest politics. The ironies are endless.
Take the most obvious: Notwithstanding its purported purpose, this bill is replete with carve-outs for special interests, from the NRA to the Sierra Club and far beyond. The special treatment of unions is of course a dead giveaway about the real motives behind the bill. Then there’s the bill’s failure to preserve the anonymity of small donors — nominally the constituency of Democrats, and the people campaign finance “reform” purports to protect through its myriad “leveling” provisions – the chilling effects of which have contributed to the ACLU’s opposition to the bill. And speaking of chilling effects, disclosure aside, the onerous reporting requirements alone will chill the speech of many.
But perhaps the greatest irony of all concerns the conflict of interest that pervades such legislation. Here we have a party that will assiduously sniff out any conceivable conflict of interest that a business might have calling for more regulations, the effect of which will make it harder for opponents to challenge their incumbency. Talk about a conflict of interest — incumbents writing the rules under which challengers and their supporters may speak in upcoming elections. The First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law …” — was written to prohibit that kind of self-dealing.
Party Control Lives on in China
Andrew Higgins of the Washington Post reviews a new book on the continuing power of the Communist Party in sort-of-capitalist China:
McGregor points out that ‘Lenin, who designed the prototype used to run communist countries around the world, would recognize the [Chinese] model immediately.’ Case in point: the Central Organization Department, the party’s vast and opaque human resources agency. It has no public phone number, and there is no sign on the huge building it occupies near Tiananmen Square. Guardian of the party’s personnel files, the department handles key personnel decisions not only in the government bureaucracy but also in business, media, the judiciary and even academia. Its deliberations are all secret. If such a body existed in the United States, McGregor writes, it ‘would oversee the appointment of the entire US cabinet, state governors and their deputies, the mayors of major cities, the heads of all federal regulatory agencies, the chief executives of GE, Exxon-Mobil, Wal-Mart and about fifty of the remaining largest US companies, the justices of the Supreme Court, the editors of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the bosses of the TV networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the heads of think-tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation.’
But not the Cato Institute, you betcha!
Pacific Legal Foundation Files Suit against ObamaCare’s Individual Mandate
For more on Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services — and plaintiff Matt Sissel, a 29-year-old artist and former National Guardsman who earned a Bronze Star during his second tour as a medic in Iraq — see the Pacific Legal Foundation’s web site.
Is the Supreme Court Conservative?
In my last two posts I described how the New York Times misunderstands the Constitution and highlighted Reason’s great new article comparing conservative and libertarian theories of constitutional interpretation. Well, now I have a chance to put those topics together, in response to yesterday’s big front-pager entitled “Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative in Decades.”
Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak — generally a sharp and honest broker — surveys some new political science literature and concludes, among other things, that since John Roberts became Chief Justice five years ago, the Court has been moving (modestly) to the right and is now “the most conservative one in living memory.” Ed Whelan debunks both of these empirical claims at NRO’s Bench Memos blog — I disagree with Ed on some legal issues, not least unenumerated rights, but his fisking is worth a read – and I want to add two broad points.
First, the claim that “all” (or even most) judicial decisions can be assigned an ideological value is simply laughable. Are all decisions favoring criminal defendants, unions, and people claiming discrimination or civil rights violations ”liberal” while those favoring prosecutors, employers, and the government “conservative” (as the scholars who maintain the database maintain)? What about union members suing unions or large corporations suing each other? What if the criminal defendant is a Fortune 500 CEO (like Conrad Black and Jeffrey Skilling in this past term’s ”honest services fraud” cases)? What about “reverse” racial discrimination claims like those at issue in Ricci v. DeStefano (the New Haven firefighters case)? What about an oil company suing the EPA? A financial services company suing the SEC (or vice-versa)?
And what about civil rights claims involving the Second Amendment, or the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, or the right to earn an honest living? Are those not ”real” civil rights claims? What if it’s poor people losing their houses to a big developer who promises a town it will create jobs and increase tax revenues? What if it’s black hair braiders who can’t set up their shops without passing haridressing license exams requiring expertise only with white hair styles? What if it’s women who want to buy and carry handguns to defend themselves on their walks home in a dangerous neighborhood? Attempts to code such cases — like attempts to decide them based on “empathy” or support for the “little guy” – are bound to fail.
Second – and this ties together all the criticisms – the labeling of decisions (and courts!) as “conservative” and “liberal” ultimately boils down to results-based analysis that equates law with politics. The liberal political position is to favor abortion rights, separation of church and state, gun control, wealth redistribution, economic regulation, and racial preferences, and to disfavor the death penalty. It is then obvious that court rulings against those positions must be “conservative.” Add in the fact that the researchers performing all these analyses –and reporters writing about them — are themselves quite “liberal” and it becomes all the more alarming when the Supreme Court moves in a “conservative” (= wrong) direction.
ADA’s 20th Anniversary
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and celebratory discussions, events and rallies are underway (sometimes with taxpayer help) in Washington, D.C. and around the country. Few if any of the events will include any panelists who are skeptical about the law, and indeed much press coverage nowadays treats the ADA as if it were uncontroversial, with at best a nod to libertarian commentators who see it as a coercive and fabulously expensive government venture into what ought to be private decision-making. When Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul recently voiced some relatively mild criticism of the law, he drew heated criticism for days.
Which is not to say the ADA and related legislation does not continue to generate startling and unsettling results on a regular basis. Thus in recent months a New Jersey jury ordered a rheumatologist to pay $400,000 for not providing a deaf patient with a sign language interpreter at his own expense; the Ninth Circuit ruled that the law may require movie theaters to provide captions and descriptions for blind or deaf viewers; a federal appeals court ruled that the nation’s paper currency unfairly discriminates against the disabled and must be redesigned (thus taking a different view from the National Federation of the Blind, which doesn’t think there’s a problem); a police dispatcher won a settlement in her lawsuit saying she was unfairly discriminated against because of her narcolepsy (tendency to fall asleep at inappropriate times); a large online tutoring service agreed to provide interpreters; miniature golf courses learned they will have to make 50 percent of their holes accessible to wheelchair users; and so forth. On Friday the Department of Justice announced that it would revisit the high-stakes question of whether and to what extent website operators must make their designs and services “accessible” to disabled computer users, perhaps in onerous and expensive ways.
One reason for the law’s immunity from criticism is that it is defended as a matter of identity politics: if you’re against it, then you must be against the people it protects. So it is treated as rude, not merely provocative, to bring up the failure of the original ADA premise that the new law would “pay for itself” by increasing the labor force participation of the disabled (the rate declined instead). Or to question the law’s “all for one, one for all” extension of the disability label to cover alcoholics, the mentally ill, and the mentally retarded, groups whose problems have historically been seen as quite different from those of the blind, deaf or paraplegic. Or to mention the money-driven ADA “filing mills” in California, Florida and other states under which complainants roam the land filing hundreds of similar complaints against local businesses which their lawyers then convert into assembly-line cash settlements.
No, the most suitable way to mark an identity-politics milestone may be to turn to those who have been obliged to think through some of the identity-politics issues from the inside. Among those who’ve criticized the ADA from a disabled perspective are Russell Redenbaugh, a blind businessman and member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission (“My own fear is that the ADA implementing regulations can have a chilling effect on the hiring of the disabled.”), attorney and wheelchair user Julie Hofius (law makes job-seeking harder by “inhibiting free discussion between interviewer and interviewee”), and Greg Perry, author of the book Disabling America: The Unintended Consequences of the Government’s Protection of the Handicapped (“caring by gunpoint”). Their writings might be a place to start in figuring out whether we should aspire to another 20 years of ADA more intense than the last.
The Politics of WikiLeaks
In publishing a massive trove of government documents on the war in Afghanistan, WikiLeaks has done a useful thing. And because it often publishes information that is embarrassing to government, rather than dangerous to it, WikiLeaks is a good thing for democracy.
I say that to prevent the criticism below from getting me labeled as part of an effort to silence WikiLeaks or distract from the news it generates.
For starters — and this is more about the media than WikiLeaks — there’s the fact that thus far there is little new here. As we saw last week with the Washington Post‘s Top Secret America blockbuster, the media fetishizes secret information, even when it merely elaborates on stories we’ve already heard.
My problem with WikiLeaks is its practice of stamping its politics on its leaked documents. For example, in April, when it released that gruesome video of U.S. Apache helicopter pilots in Iraq enthusiastically killing civilians that they mistook for insurgents, WikiLeaks titled the video “Collateral Murder,” despite the obvious efforts of the pilots to comply with the rules of engagement.
Now rather than simply put its documents on the web and let people draw their own conclusions, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds a self-congratulatory press conference where he declares “it is our experience that courage is contagious” and compares the document release not just to the leak of Pentagon Papers but to the opening of the Stasi archive in East Germany. Certainly U.S. forces in Afghanistan have committed war crimes (it would be hard to run a war of this scale and avoid them completely) and spun the war’s progress. If these documents reveal more of those doings, that’s a good thing. But even the harshest critic of the war’s conduct ought to be able distinguish it from the activities of a Stalinist secret police force. I bet that the Stasi, faced with a similar leak problem, would have found a way to plug it by now.
Grandiosity is also evident in Assange’s recent response to transparency advocate Steve Aftergood’s critique of WikiLeaks seeming lack of privacy standards. In one paragraph, Assange irrelevantly brags that he spoke before European parliamentarians, asserts that “WikiLeaks not only follows the rule of law, WikiLeaks is involved in creating the law,” announces its opposition to “plutocrats and cashed-up special interests” (not secrecy?), and then claims to have inspired Senate legislation to make Congressional Research Service reports public, even though bills to that effect predate his organization’s existence by nearly a decade.
In the future maybe we can get Wikileaks’ product without its commentary.
Who Said That about National Standards and Tests!?
There are lots of reasons to be very concerned about the national standards and tests barreling in silence toward education domination. Below, I offer several of those reasons — and one possible standards alternative – along with links to material expanding on the big concerns. Give ‘em a read, and as you do play a little game: See if you can guess who is quoted in each point:
- “[T]he Department of Education — without explicit congressional authority — would use discretionary dollars to launch the test-development process….Congress should have something to say about the arrangements for so momentous a shift in American educational federalism.”
- “The Education Department has been rushing to put the…plan into operation….Critics have been ignored.”
- “The main contract so far is with the Council of Chief State School Officers….’The chiefs,’ as they are known in educator-land, are the Washington-based association of state superintendents, and they form one of the establishment’s most change averse crews.”
- “It doesn’t judge certain information to be important and certain books to be best, but, rather, partakes of fashionable academic relativism.”
- “[T]he whole idea might be privatized [see page 20], turned into a commercial (or philanthropic) testing program…with no government entanglement or federal funds.”
So who said these things? Me? Jay Greene? Jennifer Marshall and Lindsey Burke? The folks at the Pioneer Institute?
No, it wasn’t any of those national-standards opponents. It was, in fact, none other than Chester Finn: president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute; leading standards-and-testing proponent; and diagnoser of paranoia among those who worry about the same sorts of things he complains about above!
So what’s going on here? Does Finn support national standards and testing rushed into place by the Department of Education, without Congressional approval, and driven largely by “The Chiefs,” or doesn’t he? Should we, as Finn wrote in the same piece that produced the quotes above, “apply the brakes” to this “before a wreck occurs”? Are private standards and tests really a preferable option?
What I can say to help shed light on these questions is that the quotes above come not from something new, but a 1997 Weekly Standard article by Finn opposing Clinton administration efforts to get states to adopt national standards and tests. (You can find the article here but have to subscribe to read it). These are not comments directed at the current national standards effort.
What I can’t say — and what is, of course, most important — is what has caused Finn’s tune on national standards and tests to change. Why such concern in 1997 about so many things that seem to bother him little today? Why, for instance, was it a terrible idea in 1997 to rush implementation of national standards and tests, but it’s not a deal-breaker today? Why was it troubling that CCSSO had a central role in 1997, but it’s apparently hunky-dory in 2010? Why was it a bad thing to blow off critics in 1997, but alright today?
No doubt Finn can offer many decent reasons why numerous things that troubled him in 1997 don’t do so today, but I for one can’t think of any. And before we go any further along the perilous road to nationalization, I’d sure like to know what those reasons are.
ObamaCare Remains Unpopular, or Round Two of My Exchange with Maggie Mahar
Maggie Mahar responds to my response to her critique of Michael Tanner’s claim that ObamaCare is deeply unpopular. Mahar’s alternative narrative, espoused by many on the Left, is that “the more voters learn more about the reform legislation, the more they seem to like it.”
Mahar shows that her narrative works if you begin looking for a trend at the high-water mark of opposition, if you look at a few select polls, if you look at not-so-straightforward poll questions, if you interpret simultaneous declines in both support and opposition as growing support, and if you devise a rationale for ignoring the views of those who most oppose ObamaCare. Which is to say, her narrative doesn’t work. ObamaCare remains deeply unpopular.
Mahar claims that support for repealing ObamaCare has been trending downward since reaching its high water mark of 63 percent on May 22, as measured by the polling firm Rasmussen Reports. This was shrewd; if you’re going to look for a downward trend, the high water mark is an excellent place to start. But it doesn’t paint an accurate picture of what’s been happening with public support for repeal. Starting on the enactment date, as I wrote before, “Rasmussen finds opposition to repeal hovering between 32-42 percent, and support for repeal hovering between 52-63 percent, with no clear trend on either side.” No clear trend, and a majority consistently supports repeal. Check out Rasmussen’s data and see for yourself.
Next, Mahar selects a few polls that do support her narrative (e.g., Gallup, NBC/Wall Street Journal, Kaiser Family Foundation). For example, in her first post, Mahar cites an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from June that suggests voters would prefer a Democratic congressional candidate who didn’t want to repeal ObamaCare over a Republican who did. Aside from the results being barely statistically significant, the question she cites introduces confounding factors such as party affiliation. When that same poll asked a more straightforward question, it found that 47 percent of respondents would be enthusiastic about or comfortable with a candidate’s desire to repeal ObamaCare, compared to 40 percent who would have reservations or be uncomfortable.
Moreover, selecting just a few polls probably paints a less accurate picture than looking at something like Pollster.com, which aggregates all polls and therefore (presumably) cancels out the quirkiness of individual polls.
Washington State Considers Privatizing the System
Washington state legislators will reportedly have to cut billions from the budget when they reconvene next session, and governor Christine Gregoire has commissioned a privatization study to see if taking the big step makes economic sense. Washington’s public schools spend about $13 billion annually (around $13,000/pupil — see Table 8 here), so increasing the system’s efficiency has the potential to solve the state’s budget crisis….
…which is why many Washington taxpayers will be disappointed to learn that the governor’s privatization study is only for the ferry system, not the schools. Since ferry-travelers pick up about two thirds of the system’s operating costs, its total burden on taxpayers is 26 times smaller than that of the public schools. Even if ferry operations could magically be made entirely free, it wouldn’t solve WA’s budget problems.
Of course there’s a widespread belief that schools have to be run by the state to build social harmony and preserve the republic, but these beliefs, though deeply held, have no basis in reality. The civic-mindedness of independent school students/graduates is typically equal to or greater than that of public school students/graduates, and having a single official system of state schools actually creates social conflict over the curriculum — conflict that increased parental choice would lessen.
So not only would liberating Washington education from the shackles of monopoly help to control costs, it would better realize the ideals that a public education system is meant to advance.
Gov. Gregoire?
Conservatives vs. Libertarians on Judicial Activism
I should have posted this earlier, but if anyone interested in legal issues — should be everyone given that most things coming out of Washington these days have constitutional defects — hasn’t yet read Damon Root’s cover story in the July issue of Reason magazine, drop what you’re doing now and do so.
While not a J.D. — or perhaps because he isn’t — Damon paints a completely accurate picture on the differences between conservative and libertarian approaches to constitutional interpretation and judicial philosophy. And I don’t mean a rehash of debates on social issues except in legalese; there are real subtleties involved, particularly when most people adhering to either of these camps call themselves “originalists” of one stripe or another. Damon’s article is both deep and wide, surveying the landscape of relevant legal thinkers and explaining to non-lawyers why all this is so, so important. (And no, I personally am not featured.)
What is more, you can now also watch Damon discussing his article and reporting in this area:
This is groundbreaking and important journalism.
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