With more policy discussion than most articles out there:
Category: Domestic issues
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Rich dumb kids
Last week at a Council of Foreign Relations event on the “history maker” Lawrence Summers, former Treasury Secretary and former President of Harvard University, the main event, Mr. Summers himself said that:
It is really a tragedy that if you look in the United States today… rich dumb kids are much more likely to go to good universities than poor smart kids.
Mr. Summers appears to have been referring to the work of Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education who wrote the book Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action.
Mr. Summers identified this as the largest problem in higher education today. Part of the reason must be that he sees this as one of the root causes of the problem The Economist identified prominently in 2004 [subscription required] – that America is less socially mobile than it was a generation ago, and has fallen behind Europe in allowing social classes to become more stratified. The children of the rich are more likely to be rich, and the children of the poor and middle class are less likely to move beyond their class than those in Europe. The Economist posited that part of this effect might be due to the rise of meritocracy in America: as those with more talent were given greater opportunity (especially as a result of the institutionalization of standardized testing), their children have genetic as well as financial advantages, and so are more likely to maintain their social position in a society that rewards talent. Despite this possibility, The Economist still sees the trend as disturbing.
Mr. Summers seems to agree. He believes the top educational priority of the next president should be to even out the admissions process at the elite colleges.
Just as a matter of historical what-if: imagine a world where the rich and “legacy” admissions did not guarantee George W. Bush entrance into Yale, with his mediocre school records.
The elite colleges represent real advantages for those individuals who seek to attain the highest political and business positions. Our past three presidents have all been graduates of Ivy league institutions. (As a matter of fact, all three were products of the Yale university system.) Beyond the Ivy League, the United States has only elected one new president who was not a graduate of a top university or military academy since the 1920s – Ronald Reagan.
The stratification of American society is a big deal – and one that no candidate is talking about. Even John Edwards, the champion of the little guy, focused more on eliminating poverty – a worthy goal certainly – than on the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us.
N.B. I know from my experience – as a middle class kid at a top college – that a significant number of my peers seemed to have gotten into Holy Cross based on financial factors alone. Many of these people saw attendance at an elite college as something owed to them. Tom Wolfe, an author of limited scope and insight, made the same point rather well in his I am Charlotte Simmons, which, though winning “Most Awkward Sex Scene(s) of 2005” was still George W. Bush’s favorite book of that year.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but here is the full text (as prepared for delivery) of Mr. Obama’s speech (video here; the stakes at play in this speech from a previous post here):
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
Continued after the jump…
This 60 Minutes piece from a few weeks ago was astounding. I had heard about it because of the temporary station outage at CBS’s Alabama affiliate conveniently lasting the length of the piece. Of course, in its defense, the Alabama affiliate did re-broadcast the piece a week later. Timing it for maximum attention, they broadcast it during prime time on a Sunday.
In an odd turn of events, the re-broadcast of the short segment – as well as the rest of CBS’s lineup had extremely low ratings that night because of the brand-new phenom of February TV, the Superbowl.
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Too many exceptions to the rule
From Elizabeth Weil of the Times.
One reason for this, Giedd says, is that when it comes to education, gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. “On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations.” Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys’ locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls’ locker room. What would happen? While you’d end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place. Giedd suggests the same is true when educators use gender alone to assign educational experiences for kids. Yes, you’ll get more students who favor cooperative learning in the girls’ room, and more students who enjoy competitive learning in the boys’, but you won’t do very well. Says Giedd, “There are just too many exceptions to the rule.”
I think Jay Giedd, quoted above, summarizes the reasons so many policies don’t work. “Too many exceptions to the rule.”
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Public groundswells
Adam Nossiter of the New York Times profiled Republican and reformer Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Mr. Jindal is being promoted as a future Republican star. So far, he seems like the real deal. Mr. Jindal decided to start his reforms by taking on the most prominent aspect of the corruption: lavish meals for state politicians.
The governor, ignoring cries of pain and going against the unswerving devotion to Louisiana’s food culture, pushed for the $50-a-meal cap, at any restaurant. No more unlimited spending.
In a town where legislators have been known to proclaim paid-for meals a principal draw to public service, this was an especially unpopular move. Last week, State Representative Charmaine L. Marchand of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans said the limit would force her and her colleagues to dine at Taco Bell, and urged that it be pushed to $75 per person, to give them “wiggle room.”
No public groundswell took up her cause, and the $50 limit held.
(Incidentally, the dry humor the last line demonstrates made the article for me.)
Linda Chavez wrote in an article that originally appeared in the New York Post about “Liberal patriotism” that real patriotism understands these simple facts:
Our elected officials don’t make America great, nor do temporal policies. America is great because of its people, its defining institutions and its freedoms.
As a liberal and a patriot, I agree with Ms. Chavez. At least in this instance. But somehow, Ms. Chavez manages to praise America’s “defining institutions and its freedoms” ((Which must obviously include the Congress, the courts, the laws of the land, and the Bill of Rights.)) while endorsing the power of the executive branch to break the law, violate the freedoms of its citizens without due process, violate the Bill of Rights, and even torture. Ms. Chavez’s understanding of patriotism itself is so tortured that she manages to decry – at a full column’s length – a candidate’s spouse’s off-the-cuff remark as demonstrating a nefarious anti-freedom-ism while applauding that the Attorney General, in his considered testimony, refused to reject “cruel and inhuman treatment” of prisoners as is Constitutionally required of him.
Somehow, “freedom” – in the sense Ms. Chavez uses the term – has nothing to do with violating civil liberties. And upholding the “defining institutions” of America sometimes requires breaking the law. Those who seek to uphold the law – or who are embarrassed by the blatant lawlessness – are not considered patriots. Instead, they “put politics before the national interest” and give “aid and comfort to the enemy” while trying to “hamper the military’s ability to fight…effectively.” There is a more sympathetic way to view Ms. Chavez’s inflammatory and extreme rhetoric but she certainly doesn’t encourage anyone who disagrees with her in the slightest to attempt to find it.
To some extent, I ask myself: why do I even care about what this woman is writing? She may be wrong; she may be using her position as a syndicated columnist to promote lies and unfairly attack good people. Isn’t it a standard “conservative” line that liberals are in fact traitors by their very nature? ((See anything Ann Coulter has said in the past decade, and much of what Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity have said.)) But at this point, is it even newsworthy that a “conservative” political commenter regularly calls the majority of Americans “America-haters” – and worse?
Maybe not. But it is worth pointing out again – and again – that as these hacks drape themselves with the Stars and Stripes, they undermine the very freedoms and attack the very people they claim to admire.
There is a reasonable argument to be made in favor of torture, law-breaking, and freedom-impingement. But it involves compromises our core values in the face of enemy aggression. That’s an argument no hack wants to make.
Jeffrey Rosen, writing in The New York Times today, compares Ms. Clinton’s commitment to civil liberties and privacy to Mr. Obama’s:
[Ms. Clinton’s] speeches about privacy suggest that she has boundless faith in the power of experts, judges and ultimately herself to strike the correct balance between privacy and security.
Moreover, the core constituency that cares intensely about civil liberties is a distinct minority — some polls estimate it as around 20 percent of the electorate. A polarizing president, who played primarily to the Democratic base and refused to reach out to conservative libertarians, would have no hope of striking a sensible balance between privacy and security.
Mr. Obama, by contrast, is not a knee-jerk believer in the old-fashioned liberal view that courts should unilaterally impose civil liberties protections on unwilling majorities. His formative experiences have involved arguing for civil liberties in the legislatures rather than courts, and winning over skeptics on both sides of the political spectrum, as he won over the police and prosecutors in Chicago.
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Soft on crime
Michelle Cottle of The New Republic writes in this week’s issue about how Ms. Clinton’s think tank went for Senator Barack Obama:
Still, it’s hard not to see Hillary’s loss of the unofficial CAP primary as a microcosm of her surprisingly tenuous claim on the party establishment. Maybe it loved her in the beginning, or at least felt loyalty to her. Yet the relationship was always a bit codependent for some people’s taste, and, along the way, more and more Dems came to see it as unwholesome and costly. Obama may have been an attractive suitor. But he swept into the midst of a marriage that was probably shakier than most people realized.