Why our prep-school diplomats fail against Putin and ISIS | New York Post
“Why do our “best and brightest” fail when faced with a man like Putin?” Ralph Peters asks. “Or with charismatic fanatics? Or Iranian negotiators? Why do they misread our enemies so consistently, from Hitler and Stalin to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph?”
The answer is straightforward:
Social insularity: Our leaders know fellow insiders around the world; our enemies know everyone else.
The mandarin’s distaste for physicality: We are led through blood-smeared times by those who’ve never suffered a bloody nose.
And last but not least, bad educations in our very best schools: Our leadership has been educated in chaste political theory, while our enemies know, firsthand, the stuff of life.
Above all, there is arrogance based upon privilege. For revolving-door leaders in the U.S. and Europe, if you didn’t go to the right prep school and elite university, you couldn’t possibly be capable of comprehending, let alone changing, the world…….
That educational insularity is corrosive and potentially catastrophic: Our “best” universities prepare students to sustain the current system, instilling vague hopes of managing petty reforms.
But dramatic, revolutionary change in geopolitics never comes from insiders. It’s the outsiders who change the world.
An Athenian general once wrote:
The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its laws made by cowards, and its fighting done by fools.
~ Thucydides (c. 460 BC – c. 400 BC)
Read more at Why our prep-school diplomats fail against Putin and ISIS | New York Post.
Here’s How to Achieve Full Employment
Economic Policy Institute President Lawrence Mishel provides the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce with a shopping list of measures he believes are necessary to achieve full employment. Some are right on the mark while others seem to have missed the basic rules of Supply and Demand taught in Econ 101. My comments are in bold.
The goals that economic policy must focus on are, thus, creating jobs and reaching robust full employment, generating broad-based wage growth, and improving the quality of jobs.
Jobs
Policies that help to achieve full employment are the following:
1. The Federal Reserve Board needs to target a full employment with wage growth matching productivity.
The most important economic policy decisions being made about job growth in the next few years are those of the Federal Reserve Board as it determines the scale and pace at which it raises interest rates. Let’s be clear that the decision to raise interest rates is a decision to slow the economy and weaken job and wage growth. There are many false concerns about accelerating wage growth and exploding inflation based on the mistaken sense that we are at or near full employment. Policymakers should not seek to slow the economy until wage growth is comfortably running at the 3.5 to 4.0 percent rate, the wage growth consistent with a 2 percent inflation target (since trend productivity is 1.5 to 2.0 percent, wage growth 2 percent faster than this yields rising unit labor costs, and therefore inflation, of 2 percent). The key danger is slowing the economy too soon rather than too late.
Fed monetary policy should not target one sector of the economy (i.e. wages) but the whole economy (i.e. nominal GDP).
2. Targeted employment programs
Even at 4 percent unemployment, there will be many communities that will still be suffering substantial unemployment, especially low-wage workers and many black and Hispanic workers. To obtain full employment for all, we will need to undertake policies that can direct jobs to areas of high unemployment……
Government programs don’t create jobs, they merely redistribute income from the taxed to the subsidised.
3. Public investment and infrastructure
There is widespread agreement that we face a substantial shortfall of public investment in transportation, broadband, R&D, and education. Undertaking a sustained (for at least a decade) program of public investment can create jobs and raise our productivity and growth…..
Agree. But we must invest in productive assets that generate income that can be used to repay the debt. Else we are left with a pile of debt and no means to repay it.
Policies that do not help us reach full employment include:
1. Corporate tax reform
There are many false claims that corporate tax reform is needed to make us competitive and bring us growth. First off, the evidence is that the corporate tax rates U.S. firms actually pay (their “effective rates”) are not higher than those of other advanced countries. Second, the tax reform that is being discussed is “revenue neutral,” necessarily meaning that tax rates on average are actually not being reduced; for every firm or sector that will see a lower tax rate, another will see a higher tax rate. It is hard to see how such tax reform sparks growth.
Zero-sum thinking. If we want to increase employment, we need to increase investment. Tax rates and allowances should encourage domestic investment rather than offshore expansion.
2. Cutting taxes
There will surely be many efforts in this Congress to cut corporate taxes and reduce taxes on capital income (e.g., capital gains, dividends) and individual marginal tax rates, especially on those with the highest incomes. It’s easy to see how those strategies will not work….
Same as above. We need to encourage investment by private corporations.
3. Raising interest rates
There are those worried about inflation who are calling on the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates soon and steadily thereafter. Their fears are, in my analysis, unfounded. But we should be clear that those seeking higher interest rates are asking our monetary policymakers to slow economic growth and job creation and reflect a far-too-pessimistic assumption of how far we can lower unemployment, seemingly aiming for unemployment at current levels or between 5.0 and 5.5 percent….
Agreed. Raising interest rates too soon is as dangerous as raising too late.
Wage growth
It is a welcome development that policymakers and presidential candidates in both parties have now acknowledged that stagnant wages are a critical economic challenge…… Over the 40 years since 1973, there has been productivity growth of 74 percent, yet the compensation (wages and benefits) of a typical worker grew far less, just 9 percent (again, mostly in the latter 1990s)……
Wage stagnation is conventionally described as being about globalization and technological change, explanations offered in the spirit of saying it is caused by trends we neither can nor want to restrain. In fact, technological change has had very little to do with wage stagnation. Such an explanation is grounded in the notion that workers have insufficient skills so employers are paying them less, while those with higher wages and skills (say, college graduates) are highly demanded so that employers are bidding up their wages…….
Misses the point. Technology has enabled employers in manufacturing, finance and service industries to cut the number of employees to a fraction of their former size.
Globalization has, in fact, served to suppress wage growth for non-college-educated workers (roughly two-thirds of the workforce). However, such trends as import competition from low-wage countries did not naturally develop; they were pushed by trade agreements and the tolerance of misaligned and manipulated exchange rates that undercut U.S. producers.
This small paragraph hits on the key reason for wage stagnation in the US. Workers are not only competing in a global labor market, but against countries who have manipulated their exchange rate to gain a competitive advantage.
There are two sets of policies that have greatly contributed to wage stagnation that receive far too little attention. One set is aggregate factors, which include factors that lead to excessive unemployment and others that have driven the financialization of the economy and excessive executive pay growth (which fueled the doubling of the top 1 percent’s wage and income growth). The other set of factors are the business practices, eroded labor standards, and weakened labor market institutions that have suppressed wage growth. I will examine these in turn.
Aggregate factors
1. Excessive unemployment
Unemployment has remained substantially above full employment for much of the last 40 years, especially relative to the post-war period before then. Since high unemployment depresses wages more for low-wage than middle-wage workers and more for middle-wage than high-wage workers, these slack conditions generate wage inequality. ……
The excessive unemployment in recent decades reflects a monetary policy overly concerned about inflation relative to unemployment and hostile to any signs of wage growth……
2. Unleashing the top 1 percent: finance and executive pay
The major forces behind the extraordinary income growth and the doubling of the top 1 percent’s income share since 1979 were the expansion of the finance sector (and escalating pay in that sector) and the remarkable growth of executive pay …… restraining the growth of such income will not adversely affect the size of our economy. Moreover, the failure to restrain these incomes leaves less income available to the vast majority……
Zero-sum thinking.
Labor standards, labor market institutions, and business practices
There are a variety of policies within the direct purview of this committee that can greatly help to lift wage growth:
1. Raising the minimum wageThe main reason wages at the lowest levels lag those at the middle has been the erosion of the value of the minimum wage, a policy undertaken in the 1980s that has never fully been reversed. The inflation-adjusted minimum wage is now about 25 percent below its 1968 level……
Will reduce demand for domestic labor and increase demand for offshoring jobs.
2. Updating overtime rules
The share of salaried workers eligible for overtime has fallen from 65 percent in 1975 to just 11 percent today……
This will continue for as long as the manufacturing sector is white-anted by offshoring jobs.
3. Strengthening rights to collective bargaining
The single largest factor suppressing wage growth for middle-wage workers over the last few decades has been the erosion of collective bargaining (which can explain one-third of the rise of wage inequality among men, and one-fifth among women)……
How will this improve Supply and Demand?
4. Regularizing undocumented workers
Regularizing undocumented workers will not only lift their wages but will also lift wages of those working in the same fields of work…..
How will this improve Supply and Demand?
5. Ending forced arbitration
One way for employees to challenge discriminatory or unfair personnel practices and wages is to go to court or a government agency that oversees such discrimination. However, a majority of large firms force their workers to give up their access to court and government agency remedies and agree to settle such disputes over wages and discrimination only in arbitration systems set up and overseen by the employers themselves…..
How will this improve Supply and Demand?
6. Modernizing labor standards: sick leave, paid family leave
We have not only seen the erosion of protections in the labor standards set up in the New Deal, we have also seen the United States fail to adopt new labor standards that respond to emerging needs……
No issue with this. But how will it improve Supply and Demand?
7. Closing race and gender inequities
Generating broader-based wage growth must also include efforts to close race and gender inequities that have been ever present in our labor markets…….
No issue with this. But how will it improve Supply and Demand?
8. Fair contracting
These new contracting rules can help reduce wage theft, obtain greater racial and gender equity and generally support wage growth……No issue with this. But how will it improve Supply and Demand?
9. Tackling misclassification, wage theft, prevailing wages
There are a variety of other policies that can support wage growth. Too many workers are deemed independent contractors by their employers when they are really employees……
No issue with this. But how will it improve Supply and Demand?
Policies that will not facilitate broad-based wage growth
1. Tax cuts: individual or corporate
The failure of wages to grow cannot be cured through tax cuts. Such policies are sometimes offered as propelling long-run job gains and economic growth (though they are not aimed at securing a stronger recovery from a recession, as the conservatives who offer tax cuts do not believe in counter-cyclical fiscal policy). These policies are not effective tools to promote growth, but even if they did create growth, it is clear that growth by itself will not lift wages of the typical worker…….
Zero-sum thinking. Compare economic growth in high-tax countries to growth in low tax countries and you will find this a highly effective policy tool.
2. Increasing college or community college completion
……advancing education completion is not an effective overall policy to generate higher wages……. What is needed are policies that lift wages of high school graduates, community college graduates, and college graduates, not simply a policy that changes the number of workers in each category.
Better available skills-base leads to increased competitiveness in global labor market and more investment opportunities in the domestic market.
3. Deregulation
There is no solid basis for believing that deregulation will lead to greater productivity growth or that doing so will lead to wage growth. Deregulation of finance certainly was a major factor in the financial crisis and relaxing Dodd–Frank rules will only make our economy more susceptible to crisis.
What we need is (simple) well-regulated markets rather than (complex) over-regulation.
4. Policies to promote long-term growth
Policies that can substantially help reduce unemployment in the next two years are welcomed and can serve to raise wage growth. Policies aimed at raising longer-term growth prospects may be beneficial but will not help wages soon or necessarily lead to wage growth in future years. This can be seen in the decoupling of wage growth from productivity over the last 40 years. Simply increasing investments and productivity will not necessarily improve the wages of a typical worker. What is missing are mechanisms that relink productivity and wage growth. Without such policies, an agenda of “growth” is playing “pretend” when it comes to wages.
Long-term investment is the only way forward. To dismiss this in favor of short-term band-aid solutions is nuts!
My proposal is a lot simpler, consisting of only five steps:
- Invest in productive infrastructure.
- A simplified tax regime with low rates and few deductions apart from incentives to increase domestic investment.
- Restrict capital inflows through trade agreements and maintain a fair exchange rate.
- Fed monetary policy supportive in the short-term but with long-term target of neutral debt growth — in line with GDP (nominal).
- Move education up the priority list for government spending. Improve the education standards and training of teachers — they are the lifeblood of the system — rather than increasing numbers.
Finland proves the education lie
Hank Pellissier at GreatSchools examines the education system of over-achiever South Korea:
…South Korea is often regarded, along with Finland, as one of the two premier K-12 education systems in the world — in no small part due to the spectacular academic performance of its students. According to a 2006 survey by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which evaluates the scholastic performance of 15-year-olds in 57 nations every three years, South Koreans rank first in reading, third in math (tied with Hong Kong), and 10th in science (tied with Liechtenstein). More than 97% of South Koreans graduate from high school, the highest graduation rate in the world.
South Korea emulates the pressure-cooker classroom environment common in Japanese schools:
South Koreans attend school 220 days per year, almost two months more than the 180 days of Americans. (The Japanese enroll an astonishing 243 days per annum; South Korea abdicated first place in 2005 when its students ceased going to school half days on Saturday.) What distinguishes South Koreans from everyone else, however, is the immense number of hours they study outside the classroom. High schoolers, and even middle schoolers, in South Korea are often engaged in scholastics until midnight or 2 a.m. After taking classes in up to 11 subjects, they attend private academies called “hagwons” where they obtain supplemental learning. The bottom line? Most South Korean children spend 13 hours a day or more with their bottoms glued to a chair.
Should Western schools try to emulate this intensity in an attempt to match South Korea’s outstanding performance? The answer is a resounding NO. Finland offers a far better model.
Although these grueling schedules help South Korea’s high test scores, the nation is remarkably inefficient at another PISA criterion known as “study effectiveness.” When PISA calculates each nation’s achievement based on the number of hours spent studying, South Koreans rank only 24th out of 30 developed nations. The winner in study effectiveness is Finland, the world’s true PISA champ, placing first in science, second in math, and second in reading. Finnish students only attend school 190 days per year (two weeks more than U.S. children) and receive less than a half-hour of homework per day.
Finland is #1 in study effectiveness, achieving outstanding results with little of the “meat-grinder” approach common to so many education systems:
Never burdened with more than half an hour of homework per night, Finnish kids attend school fewer days than 85% of other developed nations (though still more than Americans), and those school days are typically short by international standards…..Finland downplays educational competition in a number of ways. Schools aren’t ranked against each other, and teachers aren’t threatened with formal reviews. At many schools, teachers don’t grade students until the fifth grade, and they aren’t forced to organize curriculum around standardized testing….
Surely this is a model worth emulating? I would be interested in the views of any readers who are employed in education.
Read more at Great Schools: The Finnish Miracle
and Great Schools: Lessons from South Korea
Why children struggle to read
Researcher Jennifer Buckingham writes:
Written English is a code. Once children learn the code, they can read almost any word. Some children learn to read without much formal teaching in phonics – these children are the minority. Most children need to be taught the code through phonics. Children who have not needed much phonics instruction to read well often need phonics to spell correctly. All children from all socioeconomic backgrounds benefit from good phonics instruction, but especially children who have not had the benefit of pre-school or a literacy-rich early home life.
I agree that phonics is important. But if English is a code, shouldn’t educators focus on making that code as simple and easy-to-learn as possible. English started as a phonetic language more than a thousand years ago, but subsequent evolution has introduced a myriad of complex spelling and grammatical rules that take children years to master.
Perhaps that is why education over-achievers Finland and South Korea enjoy such high rankings. Hank Pellissier at GreatSchools writes:
In 2006 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted a survey of 15-year-olds’ academic skills from 57 nations. Finland placed first in science by a whopping 5% margin, second in math (edged out by one point by Chinese Taipei), and third in reading (topped by South Korea)……Finnish and Korean languages are easy to read and spell; they don’t have the illogical phonetics of English.
Simplifying the structure of English phonetics would go some way to leveling the playing field.
Read more at Publications – Comment: First, become a good reader.
This online school may replace modern liberal arts colleges | Quartz
Graeme Wood describes Minerva, challenging traditional education methods employed by liberal arts colleges:
The paradox of undergraduate education in the United States is that it is the envy of the world, but also tremendously beleaguered. In that way it resembles the US health-care sector. Both carry price tags that shock the conscience of citizens of other developed countries. They’re both tied up inextricably with government, through student loans and federal research funding or through Medicare. But if you can afford the Mayo Clinic, the United States is the best place in the world to get sick. And if you get a scholarship to Stanford, you should take it, and turn down offers from even the best universities in Europe, Australia, or Japan. Most likely, though, you won’t get that scholarship. The average US college graduate in 2014 carried $33,000 of debt.
Financial dysfunction is only the most obvious way in which higher education is troubled. In the past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budged. The easiest way to picture what a university looked like 500 years ago is to go to any large university today, walk into a lecture hall, and imagine the professor speaking Latin and wearing a monk’s cowl. The most common class format is still a professor standing in front of a group of students and talking. And even though we’ve subjected students to lectures for hundreds of years, we have no evidence that they are a good way to teach…
In recent years, other innovations in higher education have preceded Minerva, most famously massive open online courses, known by the unfortunate acronym MOOCs. Among the most prominent MOOC purveyors are Khan Academy, the brainchild of the entrepreneur Salman Khan, and Coursera, headed by the Stanford computer scientists Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Khan Academy began as a way to tutor children in math, but it has grown to include a dazzling array of tutorials, some very effective, many on technical subjects. Coursera offers college-level classes for free you can pay for premium services, like actual college credit. There can be hundreds of thousands of students in a single course, and millions are enrolled altogether. At their most basic, these courses consist of standard university lectures, caught on video.
But Minerva is not a MOOC provider. Its courses are not massive they’re capped at 19 students, open Minerva is overtly elitist and selective, or online, at least not in the same way Coursera’s are. Lectures are banned. All Minerva classes take the form of seminars conducted on the platform I tested. The first students will by now have moved into Minerva’s dorm on the fifth floor of a building in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood and begun attending class on Apple laptops they were required to supply themselves….
The Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone. What’s left will be leaner and cheaper….. Yet because classes have only just begun, we have little clue as to whether the process of stripping down the university removes something essential….
Minerva will, after all, look very little like a university—and not merely because it won’t be accessorized in useless and expensive ways. The teaching methods may well be optimized, but universities, as currently constituted, are only partly about classroom time. Can a school that has no faculty offices, research labs, community spaces for students, or professors paid to do scholarly work still be called a university?
Read more at This online school may replace modern liberal arts colleges – Quartz.
Inside the Nation’s Biggest Experiment in School Choice | WSJ.com
Stephanie Banchero at WSJ describes how state introduction of charter schools in New Orleans has lifted academic performance.
There is broad acknowledgment that local schools are performing better since Hurricane Katrina washed away New Orleans’ failing public education system and state authorities took control of many campuses here.
Graduation rates went to 78% last year from 52% before Katrina—surpassing Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, Calif., cities also struggling to boost achievement among lower-income students. The share of New Orleans students proficient in math, reading, science and social studies increased to 58% in 2012 from 35% before the 2005 storm, state data shows.
….About 84% of its 42,000 public school students attend charters, the largest share of any district in the U.S.
Charter schools are largely free to manage their own budgets and hiring, set curriculum and schedules, and select textbooks. The lowest performing schools are eventually closed by state officials or replaced with new operators.
For the school year that started in August, parents picked among 78 charter schools, as well as eight traditional campuses, one independent school with a board appointed by the governor and 38 private schools that are paid with state-issued tuition vouchers. To help guide the selection, public schools are issued grades of A to F, based on academic performance.
State-issued vouchers promote competition amongst schools and lift performance. The system not only empowers parents but also empowers staff in those institutions, judging them on performance rather than on conformity to strict regulatory controls.
An experiment in the Lombardy region of Italy has also demonstrated that similar competition between state and private institutions in the health care sector reduces costs and improves outcomes. Given the striking success of this model, expect to see growing adoption in both health care and education despite resistance from vested interests.
Read more at Inside the Nation's Biggest Experiment in School Choice – WSJ.com.
A lesson from Sweden
Sweden is one of the leaders in a recent OECD survey of literacy and numeracy levels. Anders Aslund describes how the education system recovered from the ravages of the 1960s and 70s:
The Swedish school system, Palme’s [hardline socialist Olof Palme] original bailiwick, was badly ravaged by left-wing reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, all pupils are entitled to school vouchers of equal value for each child of a certain age. Their parents can allocate this school voucher to any school the child is qualified to enter. As a result, while in the 1970s Sweden had only four private schools, one-fifth of Swedish secondary schools are now private, some for profit, others cooperatives or non-profit foundations…….
Read more at TheMoneyIllusion » A Lesson for Ed Balls (And Noah Smith).
How do our reading and math skills compare to other countries? | WSJ
Skills Testing
Workers in Spain and Italy were the least skilled among the 24 developed countries surveyed by the OECD for proficiency in literacy and numeracy.
Literacy and Numeracy scores:
Italy 29.8%; 28%
Spain 32.5%; 28.6%
USA 45.7%; 34.4%
UK 49%; 41%
Australia 56.4%; 45.8%
Japan 71.2%; 62.5%
Click here to see the infographic Literacy and Numeracy Scores for OECD countries | WSJ.
Everything you think you know about poverty is wrong | Deseret News
Mercedes Whie reports on a lecture by developmental economist Lant Pritchett:
One common belief among people working in international development is that a poor country can be changed by improving its education system, but Pritchett’s research suggests otherwise. The problem in poor countries is that they cannot make effective use of their people’s skills, Pritchett said, so giving them more skills does lead to development. Counter-intuitively, his research has shown that countries whose education system improves actually grow slower on average. He suggests that one reason for this may be that putting more educated people into a corrupt bureaucracy may result in more sophisticated corruption.
Read more at Everything you think you know about poverty is wrong | Deseret News.