Suppose There Was a Government Apple Industry

Imagine this, writes Terence P. Jeffrey. “Suppose there were a law that forced you to pay a government agency for apples you were supposed to feed your children.”

And suppose it turned out that some of the government apples were bad. What should parents do?

When they complained to the public-apple agencies, agency bureaucrats and their union would say: "Excuse me, the bad apples are not our fault. You need to give us more money so we can build better apple storage facilities, and so we can pay better wages to apple handlers."

But the apples still didn’t improve. Eventually we get to a federal Department of Apples. And apple quality still doesn’t improve.

You know what this parable is all about. In the matter of the education of our children we have a system exactly like the government apple system. And the price is going up all the time.

Between the 1970 and 2002 school years, average per-pupil spending in public elementary and secondary schools rose 111 percent, from $4,170 (in constant 2001-2002 dollars) to $8,802.

But the performance of the nation’s students is not going up. Only 29 percent of eighth-graders are rated “proficient” in math and reading.

What do you think we should do, fellow Americans? Increase spending? Increase federal oversight? Start criminalizing underperformance of teachers and principals?

Or shall we use the apple industry as a model, and leave the market to decide how to produce, distribute, and deliver good wholesome apples to parents and children?

Bush Nominates a Theocratic Abstinence Advocate

Oh no, the theocrats in the Bush administration have nominated an abstinence advocate to head up the federal Office of Population Affairs.

Dr. Eric Keroack “advocates abstinence as the most reliable method of pregnancy and STD prevention,” according to Jennifer Roback Morse author of Love and Economics and Smart Sex.

Why are the theocrats still trying to frighten kids when everybody knows that the universal solution to contraception and STD infection is condoms?

But that is not the real problem with Keroack, writes Morse.

Evidently, Keroack has given lectures in which he claims that there are long-term emotional costs to non-marital sexual activity.

According to Amanda Schaffer, writing in Slate, Keroack said this: “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.”

Yes. That is a real problem. He is suggesting that
people who sleep around risk becoming “emotionally wounded.” And studies show that teenage girls who have sex with multiple partners suffer from depression.

But we can’t go too far down that road. Back at the dawn of the feminist age Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex that the “independent woman” needed the physical release of a love affair or two to refresh herself in her intellectual labors.

Suppose that we concede that “science” has established that what is euphemistically called “a sexual life” is bad for the mental health of women? Then what is left of the whole sexual revolution and the war against marriage—or indeed the whole feminist project?

What indeed?

Honor Friedman With Choice in Education and Health Care

As we mourn the passing of Milton Friedman, American hero, we must painfully recognize that much of what he urged upon the United States as beneficial reform remains to be realized, particularly, write Newt Gingrich and David Merrit, in education and health care.

Milton Friedman stood courageously for choice in education and health care against all the special interests of the nation. What better memorial to the great man could we build than a real reform in education and health care.

The status quo is failing our students, and to truly see real change, we need to enact real change. The simplest and surest way to transform education is to give students and parents the freedom to choose where they will go to school. This means eliminating restrictive zoning laws that force kids into schools simply because they live nearby. This means introducing free-market forces into education, encouraging schools to compete for students, much like businesses compete for customers. This means that schools that do not perform will either improve or close their doors -- which is as it should be. There is no middle ground.

And here is the bottom line. If they submitted to the discipline of parental choice, our nation’s educators would feel better about themselves. Instead of acting like dogs-in-the-manger, they would accept the gospel of accountability and would experience an amazing improvement in their positive self-esteem.

Then there is health care. And here choice and transparency could transform 14 percent of the nation’s economy.

We need to put the consumer at the center of the health-care system, just as we do in every other market. And the surest way to do this is by creating a national market to purchase health insurance.
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[G]overnment must allow competition to flourish. More competition among insurers in a national market will encourage more creative products, better services and lower prices -- just as it always does wherever competition thrives -- and every American will be able to find affordable coverage. The Health Choice Act, which was introduced by Representative John Shadegg of Arizona, will go a long way toward creating a rational, working market in health care.

A vital part of this rational market is the availability of information. Information on performance, cost, and quality allows consumers to make informed decisions, but health care is perhaps the only market in which consumers have virtually no access to this information.

There’s a simple way to understand all of this: shopping. Ruthlessly and consistently, America’s shoppers have promoted corporations that are willing to commit themselves to nothing but the interest of the consumer. And they have demoted corporations that faltered in their dedication to the consumer. That is why Wal-Mart is the king of retail and Starbucks is the king of coffee.

When are we going to free our education shoppers and health-care shoppers to work their magic on education and health care?

Single Parenthood is Dangerous for Children

We educated Americans can afford to screw up. We have skills and we have backup. But there is a class of Americans that don’t. They are the children of single-parent families. In fact, as Kay S. Hymowitz tells us in Marriage and Caste in America, it’s gone beyond a question of class. The single-parent “lifetyle” choice is more of a caste, a separate world from the middle-class mainstream of American life.

As the Wall Street Journal folks put it:

experts who have looked closely at the phenomenon have hardly anything positive to say. Past research indicates that the bulk of unwed births are to young women, typically in their 20s, who are not college-educated and are not prospering. There's also a mountain of evidence to suggest that children raised by such single mothers are at an increased risk for virtually every social problem you can think of--poverty, crime, drug use, etc.--including single parenthood.

It’s curious really. Children who live with mother and boy-friend are something like 10 to 20 times more likely to suffer violence than the child of biological married parents. Imagine if fast food were 20 times more likely to result in negative outcomes for children! Why, the activists would be appearing twice daily to testify to Congress and twice nightly on the network news.

Why then is there silence on the danger, the physical danger to children of single parenthood?

The world wants to know.

Education Choice is Working

It’s a neverending task. To demonstrate again and again that choice works in education.

Because the entrenched interests don’t want you to know. Because the entrenched interests want to continue to enjoy their sinecures and their privileges without accountability.

It’s a dog-in-the-manger attitude that we all are capable of. The desire to sit like a bump on a log, getting that check every month, but not actually being responsible for outcomes. Not being responsible to taxpayers, not being responsible to parents, not being responsible to students.

So here is David Green reporting on school choice achievements in the US and Sweden.

Yes. Imagine that! School choice is alive and well in Sweden! According to Green (emphasis added):

Since 1992, parents in Sweden who are dissatisfied with the local state school have had a right to send their child to an independent school and to receive state funding, now equivalent to the average cost of a place in the state system.

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Controversial at first in Sweden, vouchers now enjoy cross-party support. They are even supported by the unions. The president of the Swedish Teachers Union has said that its members were "a little suspicious at first" but were now satisfied.

In the US school choice is also proceeding, on a very limited scale. Harvard researcher Caroline Hoxby has analyzed the results. She (emphasis added):

studied attainment by Milwaukee's pupils before and after the introduction of vouchers. She compared three types of school: those most subject to competition (with two-thirds or more of pupils eligible for vouchers); those subject to some competition (with less than two-thirds of their pupils eligible); and a group of other Wisconsin schools not subject to additional competition. Compared with the monopoly era before 1998, competition raised standards for everyone, and the bigger the risk of losing pupils to rival schools, the greater the improvement.

Of course, this is like comfirming that gravity works. We know that people work better when they are challenged by competition, whether it is boys competing in school, businesses competing against businesses in the global marketplace, or schools competing against other schools about town.

And anyone that doesn’t get it “just doesn’t care about kids.”

Giza Pyramids Made of Concrete?

I know, it sounds so low rent. Surely the pharaohs that built the pyramids at Giza in Egypt couldn’t have descended to something as rude and crude as concrete when they built their mausoleums?

But that is what John Noble Wilford reports in The New York Times. A team of researchers has taken samples of the interior of the pyramids and believe that some of the blocks of stone are in fact lime-based concrete. If true, it means that concrete was invented 2,500 years earlier than was thought.

Dr. Barsoum and his co-workers, Adrish Ganguly of Drexel and Gilles Hug of the National Center for Scientific Research in France, analyzed the mineralogy of samples from several parts of the Khufu pyramid, and said they found mineral ratios that did not exist in any known limestone sources. From the geochemical mix of lime, sand and clay, they concluded, “the simplest explanation” is that it was cast concrete.

But some people are not so happy about all this.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of antiquities in Egypt and director of the Giza pyramids excavations, said in an e-mail message, “The idea that concrete was used is unlikely and completely unproven.”

Apparently the pyramid has been “restored and reinforced many times with the extensive use of concrete” so it’s possible that Barsoum and his collaborators were merely sampling more recent additions to the tombs.

Of course, it was only the outer casing that was built of pure white limestone. The inner casings were made of much rougher stuff. But concrete? Dahling, it’s so K-Mart!

Steven Pinker is Half-Right on Education

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker is a standout contributor to our national dialogue. When Pinker talks, people listen. What he says about Harvard’s once-in-a-generation review of its course structure is important.

And what he says tells us a lot about our intellectual elite and the way they experience the world—and more crucially how they impress their opinions on the rest of us.

Pinker looks at the university’s “Report of the Committee on General Education” and finds a couple of problems. First of all he doesn’t like the tone of the committee’s approach to Science and Technology, and secondly he doesn’t like the approach to Reason and Faith.

On Science and Technology he worries about the introduction:

“Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative.”

Well yes, life-saving medicines and nuclear weapons, “and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers.”

To Pinker, the committee is missing the point.

Missing from the report is a sensitivity to the ennobling nature of knowledge: to the inherent value, with consequences too far-reaching to enumerate, of understanding how the world works. For one thing, it is a remarkable fact that we have come to understand as much as we do about the natural world: the history of the universe and our planet, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life.

Exactly, Dr. Pinker. The knowledge we have gathered in the last couple of centuries about the natural world is nothing short of miraculous. And the more we know, the more mysterious the universe appears.

But Pinker is also worried about the juxtaposition of Reason and Faith.

[T]he juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith — believing something without good reasons to do so — has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these.

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Religion is an important force, to be sure, but so are nationalism, ethnicity, socialism, markets, nepotism, class, and globalization.

Oh dear, Dr. Pinker. The reason that reason and faith are juxtaposed is because they are a Yin and Yang: the “Is” and the “Ought,” the facts and the meaning of the facts.

It’s all very well to amass a pile of facts about the world, but what do they mean? And what do we do about it? Faith or Religion is the process by which we breathe meaning into facts and form a judgment about “what is to be done.”

In fact, we can never “know” what is to be done. Everything about the future is uncertain, and that uncertainty is encapsulated in the findings of Kant that we cannot prove the existence of God, nor can we prove the non-existence of God. Similarly in the twentieth century, Kurt Gödel came up with his incompleteness theorem that states that the consistency of the axioms (the givens) in a system cannot be proved within the system.

That means that in order to prove the validity of the axioms of a system you must build a bigger system that tests the axioms of the smaller system. And so on.

Humans have come up with an ingenious system to deal with this radical uncertainty: Faith. We live out our lives on faith, assuming that certain things are true even though we can’t prove them to be true.

And even more radically, we have faith in reason. Why should reason and the application of reason in science be absolutely true? All we know is that reason works, provided it is confirmed by experiment, in all the science we have done thus far.

Reason is a very human tool for living in the world. How do we know that it is universal? We don’t. We just have faith in it.