Happiness Needs a Sense of Control

Everyone worries about happiness these days, and in Britain, Tory leader David Cameron calls for attention to the General Wellbeing (GWB) rather than Gross Domestic Product.  But Minette Marrin worries that you can’t expect people to be happy unless they are in control of their lives. 

Yet not just in charity but in almost everything else the individual is losing that sense of control or hope for the future. We live in a democracy, yet more and more people feel that they are not represented, their wishes are ignored and they can do absolutely nothing about it.

When everything is run by the nanny state then people don’t have control and responsibility for their own lives.

Illegal and criminal immigrants stay here with impunity yet at the same time ordinary people’s civil liberties are being eroded. Stealth taxes have gone up without the promised reforms. The auditing of schools is shown to be pretty much useless, maniacally exhaustive though it is, and our children are being betrayed. National Health Service hospitals are diseased and debt ridden. Nobody can think what to do about the Asbo set. Labour’s youth employment schemes, hugely expensive, have been a total failure. Pensioners are driven to despair by tax and neglect.

In other words, government doesn’t work and it is making us miserable.  But does that stop the nannies?  Certainly not.  Jonah Goldberg compiled a little list today from the NY Post.  It’s the list of all the things that New York City banned last year.

1. pit bulls;
2. trans-fats;
3. aluminum baseball bats;
4. the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; f
5. oie gras;
6. pedicabs in parks;
7. new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers;
8. lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency;
9. vehicles in Central and Prospect parks;
10. cell phones in upscale restaurants;
11. the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute;
12. mail-order pharmaceutical plans;
13. Candy-flavored cigarettes;
14. gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily;
15. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus;
16. Wal-Mart.

People need control over their lives, but instead we have the nanny state prescribing in ghastly detail what kind of fat we may eat.

The rule of thumb for a free society should be that it infringes liberties rarely, but when it does so it is for important reasons.

Yeah.  So what are we going to do about it?

We could take back control of our lives from the state.  Then we will be freer, and probably happier.

Chavez. What Planet is He On?

You have to wonder.  After a century of socialism, thug dictators are still extolling its virtues.  As reported by Theresa Bradley and Alex Kennedy, socialism is going to be the salvation of the country.

"Building Venezuela's way to socialism, that's the only way to redemption and salvation of our country," Chavez, 52, said in his inaugural address to the National Assembly this morning in Caracas.

Oh yeah?  reported by Juan Forero the financial markets had other ideas. 

Financial markets from Buenos Aires to Caracas reeled on Tuesday following Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's announcement that he plans to nationalize some private companies

Well, we know what is going on.  Chavez is a populist.  He appeals to voters in Venezuela who think that they are poor because others are rich.  Whatever Chavez really thinks about the path to prosperity, he isn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.  If he can get away with assembling all the power in Venezuela into his own hands, why not?  It didn't do Fidel Castro any harm, after all.

Or maybe the ideas of Douglas North, the rational expectations guru, apply.  Reported by Arnold Kling, North and his collaborators claim that the natural order of political power is a "limited access" order.

Limited-access orders are societies that provide meaningful political and economic rights only to narrow elites... [North] argue[s] that limited-access orders are the "natural state:" they are stable, they resist economic progress, and they only rarely make the transition to open-access orders.

Maybe a limited-access order is better than disorder.  But in the twentieth century many of these limited-access orders went straight down the toilet.

Are the Democrats for Real

What is it that really worries Republicans and conservatives as we lick our wounds after November?  It is the nagging fear that the Democrats didn’t just win because it’s an off year election and the voters are in a foul mood.

Not that the voters don’t deserve to be a foul mood, mind you.

But what if the Democrats were executing a secret plan, a grand strategic concept, a new approach to politics and we right-wing foot-soldiers didn’t have a clue what hit us?  That is what keeps us awake at night.

Fortunately an evil Republican spy has come up with the answer.  She sneaked into the Pelosi victory party with all the heavy hitter Democratic contributors. 

And everything is ok.  There’s no "there" there in the new Democratic Congress.

Writer Lisa Schiffren talked to a contributor, a real-estate developer, at the party. 

I asked the real-estate developer what he thought of Pelosi. “I spent a lot of time with her. She told me she could win. She said she had a plan.” What was the plan? “The idea was that they would just criticize whatever plans the Republicans put out there”. They would tear them down -- like they did with Social Security -- and not put out their own plans. They have been very disciplined.” Indeed. No stray substance at all -- and this sharp businessman had forked over $25 grand in support.

So that’s all right.  That six point plan was just what it seemed to be, a lot of nothing.

Of course, the assembled party faithful had some interesting things to say.  Take a load of this.  Here’s what Schriffen’s real estate developer had to say about the issues.

“All the wealthy people I know, they only care about having their taxes cut. I don’t think that’s right.” “What are the issues you really care about?” I asked. “Rich and poor in this country. It’s not right,” he said, as if it was obvious what that implied.

OK, conservatives, stop laughing and get back to work.  When are you going to come up with the next brilliant conservative idea to reform the Democrats’ corrupt and unjust welfare state? 

You can’t beat nothing with nothing, you know.

AJAX and The innerHTML Problem

Here at Road to the Middle Class we are nothing if not modern.  That means that the site ought to be LAMP compliant, using Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP, and so it does.  But now, according to The Economist and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, it appears that a truly modern site should use AJAX as well.  AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and Xml) is the technology that Google uses on GMail.

Well, how hard could it be?

The standard demonstration of AJAX on W3Schools.com shows how to use an AJAX setup to update text hints on the fly.  You press a key to enter a character in a text box and every time you release the key your page requests a new text hint from the server with an HttpRequest.

When the response comes back from the server you update the text hint element like this:

document.getElementById("txtHint").innerHTML =xmlHttp.responseText

And everyone is happy.

But there’s a problem.  The best use of AJAX here at Road to the Middle Class is to fold/unfold blog entries.  We conserve real estate by showing only the first 50 words of a blog and allow you to click a link to get the whole article.  But that means that the content coming back from the server is going to include HTML markup.  What happens if the responseText isn’t just simple text but includes embedded HTML? 

Good question.  It turns out, using the W3Schools example, that embedded HTML works on Firefox but not on our friends at Internet Explorer: IE6 and IE7.  The IE boys take one look at the embedded HTML and decide that it’s not a job for innerHTML.  They return an "unknown runtime error".

Here’s how you update your page with AJAX when the responseText is complex and includes embedded HTML as it is here at Road to the Middle Class.  I call it the Double Span Solution.

First of all, you surround your text with two <span> elements, like this:

<p><span id=blog101><span id=blog101s>
<p>Text including a <a href="">link</a> and stuff.</p>
</span></span>
</p>

The idea is that when you want to replace the text in the middle of the two <span> elements you replace the entire inner <span> element.  You delete the old <span> and add a new <span> with the responseText and all of its HTML markup.

First of all you set up the new <span> element, preserving the element id from the old <span> element and adding in the responseText from the server.

var elem = document.getElementById("blog101s")
var newSpan = document.createElement(’span’)
newSpan.id = elem.id
newSpan.innerHTML = xmlHttp.responseText


Now remove the "blog101s" element and anything else floating around.

for (var i = 0; i < document.getElementById("blog101").childNodes.length; i++) {
   var n = document.getElementById("blog101").childNodes[i]
   n.parentNode.removeChild(n)
}

OK.  Now append the new <span> element right under "blog101".

document.getElementById(gBlogid).appendChild(newSpan)

And that should do it.

Dont Forget Most Old Media is Union Shop

Dear old TIME magazine is slimming down, according to The New York Times.  Writes reporter David Carr

Time Inc. management, with the help of air cover from the consultants from McKinsey, is trying to cut costs to reflect brutal realities in the mass magazine business. At the end of the month, there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division, and it will not end with Time’s 280 editorial employees.

You can imagine that American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson isn’t exactly in tears. 

Does the world need TIME? I can’t think of a reason why. I have to wonder if McKinsey [TIME’s expensive consultant] didn’t present shutting down the magazine as one of the main options for management to consider.

The thing to remember is that Old Media is organized in a hauntingly similar way to Big Auto.  The help is all unionized.  You may not realize this, because when journalists write about labor relations they do not add a little tag "full disclosure: reporter is a union member," which they would do if, say, writing about their alma mater.

Yes.  Any time you read an article by a big-foot journalist you are probably reading words written by a member of the Newspaper Guild.  The guild is now part of the Communications Workers of America.  That means, of course, that they are probably being paid way above what the market would bear.

And that makes the situation of the MSM even more tricky.  Because they are stuck with a cost structure that is way out of line with reality.

Back in the old days the only way you could get your name in print was on somebody else’s dead tree.  And the barriers to entry in the dead-tree business meant that the union journalists could charge monopoly rates for their services.

Those days are over and the dead-tree titles are desperately trying to slim down.

Here for instance, is a report in Editor and Publisher about print unions complaining about the slimming down of The Wall Street Journal.

The union [IAPE] representing staffers at the Journal took out an ad today in a rival, The New York Times, calling into question Dow Jones’ commitment to quality journalism.

Well, surely you wouldn’t expect them to take out an ad in the Journal?  And you surely don’t expect them to take a "proposed increase -- 400% according to the IAPE -- of health care costs" without complaint?

Do You Believe in Education Myths?

With something as politicized as education you always wonder about what you read in the paper or watch on the news.  After all, the media is not called the media for nothing.  It is a medium, a channel of communication.  There is a lot of money in education.  Money and power.  With all that money and power, how much of what we know about education is true? 

Jay Greene is an expert on education policy and he’s written about his findings in Education Myths.  The full title is Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools--And Why It Isn’t So.  So you can see where he is coming from.  Greene writes: 

Over the past 30 years, many of our education policies have been based on beliefs that clear-eyed research has recently shown to be false. Virtually every area of school functioning has been distorted by entrenched myths.

OK.  Let’s have a test of education knowledge.  Which of the following generally accepted ideas are true?

• Schools are underfunded.
• Teachers are underpaid.
• Schools can’t be expected to overcome the effect of social problems.
• Smaller class sizes produce better results.
• More credentials means better teachers.
• Penniless public schools can’t compete against rich private schools.
• School choice and school vouchers don’t work.

The answer, of course, is none of the above.  All of the above ideas are education myths.  Want to know the correct answers?

• Schools have received a vast increase in funding in the last 30 years. 
• Teachers are paid at about the same hourly rate as engineers, architects and other professionals.  They are less well educated and have better tenure than the other professionals.
• Schools can make a dent in social problems; in fact that is what the father of the common school, Horace Mann, promised 150 years ago. 
• Smaller class sizes don’t seem to make much of a difference. 
• Credentials don’t seem to make a difference. 
• Public schools have much more money per student than private schools, and that is still true if ignore the money spent on bureaucracy and special needs.
• And, of course, school choice and school vouchers work, not just for the kids at charter schools and private schools but at the public schools forced to compete with them.

It’s a grim prospect.  How could we all be so wrong?  But Greene isn’t discouraged.  He takes the long view.

Disentangling popular misconceptions from our education system--and establishing fresh policies based on facts that are supported by hard evidence--will be the work of at least a generation.

Go ahead, read the whole thing.

Let's Not Blame Conservatives On Education

Oprah is getting a bit of flak because she is funding a school for girls in South Africa, according to Clarence Page.

"I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools (in America) that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there," she said. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school."

And just because she amazed and delighted conservative commentators,  "that doesn’t mean she’s wrong."

In fact, Page agrees with Oprah.

She’s not blaming the victims. Our kids don’t know anything except that which they are taught by parents, peers, teachers and other role models.

If kids just want iPods, then it’s what just what they are taught.  "We" are all to blame.

Excause me, Mr Page.  "We" are not to blame.  You are to blame.  You liberals.

For over 150 years we have had a one-size-fits-all government school system run most of the time by liberals.  It bores most kids out of their minds, and it does nothing to channel the group activities of teenage boys into beneficial channels.  This system was set up by liberals and it is presently run by liberals.

And it is liberals that are standing in the school house doors stopping education reform in its tracks.

What shocked and amazed conservative commentators about Oprah was that any liberal would break ranks and criticize the current system.  Oprah is saying that she’d be wasting her money by building a school in this country.

And hey, it’s her money.

Besides, if we really want our kids to appreciate education, we should follow Oprah’s example: Fix up the old, crumbling structures into which we herd too many of our students here at home. If we want our kids to appreciate education, we have to show some respect for it, too.

Oh really.  What planet are you living on.  Most of the schools in this country are palatial.  And they still don’t educate.

Let’s try something new.  Let’s give parents the right to send their children to the schools of their choice.  What a concept!