The Heart of the Education Problem

In Britland they have recently discovered that social mobility is going down not up.  As Anne McElvoy writes in The Spectator:

[Children] born in 1970 are more likely to have ended up poor themselves than the children born in 1958. There is no sign that the trend has changed.

So guess what: more central government education programs are needed.

You see, back in 2002 the London School of Economics published a study:

comparing able children from a disadvantaged background [Group A] with less able children from middle-class homes [Group B]. The two lines on the graph cross over shockingly early. Group A’s progress falls off sharply at the age of four or five. At the same point Group B begins to race ahead. The poor-but-bright child all too easily falls by the wayside in this race[.]

The solution is obvious, apparently.

I would certainly argue for pupils to be taught in ability groups when they reach secondary level... We still need to do much more to encourage autonomous new providers of schools within the state sector who come in to do things better, and force existing schools to emulate their achievements.

Notice that McElvoy takes for granted the essential assumption of welfare state politics.  The disadvantaged are helpless.  Everything is to be done for them by the experts.  Ability groups are to be instituted, new providers encouraged, existing schools are to be forced to emulate.

Here’s a concept.  What do the disadvantaged actually want for their children?  Do they want them to get an education?  If so, what are they prepared to do to bring that about?

I recently listened to Ruth Messinger, CEO of American Jewish World Service, tell a fundraiser that in their microloan program in the Third World, the women recipients immediately apply their earnings to the education and the health care of their children.

You mean to say that in the Third World the poor actually spend their own money on their children to improve their life chances?

Then why are the poor in the First World considered to be helpless to seek the welfare of their children, requiring 24/7 supervision by the academic middle class?

"Make No Mistake"

After President Bush vetoed the Democrats’ emergency war funding bill everyone got together at the White House to discuss what to next, reports the Chicago Tribune:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the meeting “positive.” held in “good faith.” Her Republican counterpart, Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, called it “very productive,” reporting no tense moments.

But they hardly decided what the outlines of a new bill would look like.

“Make no mistake,” Pelosi said, “Democrats are committed to ending this war.”

If Democratic leaders had their druthers it would probably be for President Bush to withdraw from Iraq before the 2008 election.  Then any subsequent problems would be Bush’s fault.

But President Bush has probably no intention of allowing such an outcome.  Let the Democrats withdraw from Iraq in 2009.  Then any subsequent problems would be the Democrats’ fault.

Don’t like it?  You think that politicians should just do the right thing, irrespective of partisan advantage? 

GM to Advertise on Limbaugh Show

This year on August 1 talk radio will be 19 years old.  It started with Rush Limbaugh and the end of the old FCC Fairness Doctrine that mandated “balance” in political opinion on the airwaves.

Tomorrow, Rush Limbaugh announced on his show today, he will not be performing his assigned host duties flawlessly.  He will not be performing them at all.  Instead he will be in Detroit talking to his new sponsor General Motors.

Conservatives will understand that this is an epic event.  Let us spell it out.

Beginning in the spring of 2007 General Motors Corporation will be advertising on the Rush Limbaugh Program.

Up till now the national consumer brands have been reluctant to advertise on controversial conservative talk radio.  That is odd, when you consider that talk radio enjoys huge national audiences.  But we know why.

The big consumer corporations are afraid.  They are afraid of being mau-maued by liberal interest groups.  There is even the possibility of a boycott.

If you doubt that read the comments about General Motors’ decision to hire conservative host Sean Hannity as “lead spokesman for a car giveaway campaign called ‘You’re a Great American.’”  Lots of people would like to punish General Motors for using Hannity as a spokesman.

I wonder if General Motors knows what it is getting into.  I’d say that if a Democrat gets into the White House in 2008 then congressional Democrats will want to punish GM for advertising on conservative talk radio.

In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if such an effort begins by the summer.

Romney: You Make the Call

The AP recently reported that Mitt Romney didn’t think it was that important to go after Osama bin Laden.  Here’s the quote from the AP article by Liz Sidoti:

[Romney] said the country would be safer by only "a small percentage" and would see "a very insignificant increase in safety" if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. "It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person," Romney said. Instead, he said he supports a broader strategy to defeat the Islamic jihad movement.

John McCain and conservative opinion journalists jumped on him.

Good job as usual, MSM, in burying the lede says blogger Dean Barnett.  Romney’s remarks were part of an interview in which, beyond the tactical question of bin Laden, he said the following about the war on terror: 

Global Jihad is not an effort that is being populated by a handful or even a football stadium full of people. It is — it involves millions of people and is going to require a far more comprehensive strategy than a targeted approach for bin laden or a few of his associates.

 So Romney is taking the strategic view, which is that the US and the west are in a long term conflct with the forces of Islamic Jihad.  He judges that this movement does not depend on a single leader, so that decapitation is not worth spending vast amounts of money.

As I watch the Republican presidential contest unfold I confess that I am getting more and more impressed by Romney.  You get the feeling that he has sat down for months with staff and advisers and really thought about the strategic issues to be faced, domestically and in foreign policy.

Either he has thought about the issues or he is doing a superb job of making it look like he has.

How will we tell?  A guy who has done his strategy right will usually have his forces in the right place at the right time.

The classic case of strategy beating tactics was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.  Many of the battles were inconclusive and many over-eager Prussian commanders made tactical mistakes.  But the Prussian armies were almost always in the right place, and the French armies were almost always in the wrong place.

There’s a reason why we call the activities of politicians prior to an election a “campaign.” 

"Eurostar Generation" Threatens Euro Social Model

They call them the “Eurostar Generation.”  They are the young French professionals who have bought one-way tickets on the Eurostar train from Paris to London. 

And when they get to London they are often amazed at how quickly they can find jobs.

Politicians are noticing, as Anne Applebaum reports.  The highlight of the current French presidential election has to have been the election rally of candidate Nicolas Sarkozy in London to a crowd of 2,500 French expats.

He called London “one of the great French cities,” and with 300,000 French living and working in London, he may be right.

The French ex-pats, along with the notorious “Polish plumbers,” are wrecking the social welfare state that the left has tried to mandate in Europe.

For the past decade, French, German and other European leaders have tried to unify European tax laws and regulations, the better to "even out the playing field" — or (depending on your point of view) to make life equally difficult everywhere.

 But humans are a wandering species, and they naturally migrate abroad to find greener pastures, whatever the dictates of the rich and the powerful.

Up to now, the new Europe has lacked a European “idea,” according to Applebaum.

Almost by accident, the European Union may have created a new kind of European citizen instead: mobile, English-speaking, Internet-using, perhaps with the same nostalgia for Krakow or Dijon that first-generation New Yorkers feel for Missouri or Mississippi but nevertheless willing to live pretty much anywhere.

And that could be the way that Europe shakes off its lassitude and finds a new cultural and economic vigor.

"Target Failing Families" or "More Responsibility"

In Britain’s Daily Telegraph recently Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted that his policies on crime and social breakdown hadn’t worked.  Although things had really improved and crime rates had gone down during his premiership (a claim that many dispute) there was still more to be done.

[T]he proper answer is to add to the ASB laws measures that target failing and dysfunctional families early, and place those families within a proper, structured, disciplined framework of help and insistence on proper behaviour.

Well, sorry Prime Minister, but that didn’t go down too well in the comment section.  As in:

• “Utter drivel.”
• “The problem is, you have not been tough on crime - you just say you have.”
• “This man’s capacity for delusional thinking knows no limits.”

The Telegraph thoughtfully produced an op-ed by Leader of the Opposition David Cameron two days later.  Cameron was able to expand upon the theme he articulated upon his election to Conservative Party leadership over 18 months ago.  Society is not the same thing as the state.

(Try that concept on a liberal friend.  Chances are that they won’t get it.)

In criticizing Blair’s proposal for a government program to target the tiny minority of dysfunctional families Cameron writes:

Only a Labour politician would think that you can pump billions of pounds into public services and expect crime to fall and social wellbeing to rise in direct consequence...
Labour’s intentions may have been good, but its approach failed because its only instruments were taxpayers’ money and mechanical central control.

Labour’s government solution to crime and incivility is wrong.  What is needed is “Not more control. Not more money. But more responsibility.”

That is what I mean when I say that ’’there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state’’. When Labour politicians talk of ’’society as a whole’’, they mean the state. For me, ’’society’’ is more plural and unstructured. It is composed of all the institutions and associations that individuals form for business, pleasure and social action. It is here that the real answers to crime and incivility lie.

For Cameron the comments section was more diverse, as we postmoderns say. 

• More piffle and tosh...
• “I believe that this is a reasonable and well thought article. Changing behaviours takes a generation, so this is not a simple subject to tackle.”
• “Well said Mr. Cameron. What’s lacking today is peer pressure from society[.]” 

There were plenty of complaints like “piffle and tosh.”  There were demands for specific policies.  But there was also genuine approval. 

What Cameron does not say, and what his readers do say is that if the “institutions and associations” are to get bigger then the state has to get smaller.  There’s no getting away from that.  It is the power of the state that has decimated the little platoons.  To recruit and re-form the little platoons we need to stop the state from controlling them and bossing them around.

As Arthur C. Brooks writes in Who Really Cares, when government spends an extra dollar on social services it crowds out a little less than 50 cents in charitable assistance.  If you figure that private charity is about twice as productive as government then you are backing out private effort dollar for dollar. 

Is this all we have achieved after a century of the welfare state?

Go Ahead, Make My Day

Former Senator John “Two Americas” Edwards told Democrats in California that he would raise taxes at least back to the Clinton levels, according to Stephen Dinan.  Said Edwards 

What I believe is the starting place is to go back to the Clinton levels[.]

Go ahead, Senator Edwards.  We Republicans have the reputation of being the stupid party.  That means that we really need help from the opposition in order to win elections and get into power.

Democrats raising taxes has been a real winner for Republicans in the last generation, and if you don’t get that, well, that’s ok with us.

Of course, we understand that when you are talking to a convention of government-employed Democrats you must never suggest that the gravy train must come to an end.

Chances are though that Edwards will never get close to a tax increase.  The current collapse of the dollar will mean a return, sooner or later, to the economic policy of 1981-83.  The way to recover the dollar and the economy at the same time, as President Reagan demostrated a generation ago, is high interest rates balanced by tax cuts and spending cuts.

And chances are by January 2009 the next Democratic president will find that spending cuts and and tax cuts will be the only solution to the country’ economic problems.

But that’s ok.  Democrats advertise themselves as the reality-based community, so we can be confident that they will want to use proven economic science in fixing the economy.