If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Defame ‘Em

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Can public and charter schools peacefully coexist? “Demonizing the Helpers” wouldn’t be a theme of so many posts if it wasn’t such a common defensive strategy adopted by entrenched interests. In this case, Thomas Sowell notes that “charter schools provoke the ire of those who have failed students up to now.” It’s good to reflect on the actual goals of our educational system and to weigh every option that could help to achieve those goals. Real outcomes show that changes in public education are sorely needed, and charter schools have proven that they can be part of the solution. Instead, stakeholders in the failing public education monopoly have sought only to protect their turf, engaging in a systematic campaign to vilify charter schools and their supporters. 

Net Neutrality: A Tangled Web

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Net neutrality probably doesn’t mean what you think it means. It would essentially dictate that heavy network users, capacity hogs that often slow your access speeds, could not be charged a premium by providers to rationalize their usage. It would reduce incentives to increase network capacity and speeds. It would lead to less innovation on the internet. There are many other nuances that make net neutrality an awful proposition, including denial of the simple notion embraced by libertarians that private parties should be free to price their resources as they choose, and exposing the evolution of the internet to the manipulative hands of government regulators. If you want government control of the internet, then you want net neutrality.

Internet capacity is not like the air we breath. Providing network capacity is costly, and existing capacity must be allocated. Like any other scarce resource, a freely-functioning price mechanism is the most effective way to maximize the welfare surplus to be gained from this resource. Net neutrality would eliminate that solution. To those who fear corporate owners of the internet backbone, it should be noted that the market for backbone services is highly competitive, and network effects are so strong that it doesn’t make sense for them to price anyone out of the market.  

Here are two instructive links:

How Net Neutrality Hurts the Poor is a fairly short blog post explaining how non-neutrality serves the best interests of the poor in less-developed countries and in the developed world. The author explains a simple truism (“Low-quality Scotch is part of the optimal stock of Scotch”) and applies it to internet access. As I’m fond of reminding my spouse on Saturdays, “Low quality repairmen are part of the optimal stock of repairmen,” and she agrees!

Here’s a good piece with additional background on the issue: Neutralism: The Strange Philosophy Behind the Movement for Net Neutrality

Hating Poverty and Incivility

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Getting Past Name-Calling to Talk About Poverty is a Juan Williams op-ed that is right on target. I don’t often find myself in agreement with Williams on matters of public policy, but the thoughts he expresses here about the poverty debate should be welcomed by anyone who cares about the real issues. He welcomes the interest in dialogue from Republicans about reforms to anti-poverty programs. Williams calls for an end to the absurd accusations of racism that have been hurled at conservatives expressing interest in the debate, recognizing that the invective does nothing to advance the cause of ending poverty. Existing poverty programs at best provide funds to blunt the effects of low income; they do little to lift the impoverished out of the cycle. 

At the DOJ, We’ll Prohibit Anything We Want

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This seems just a bit out-of-line with the Constitution: the DOJ’s Operation “Choke Point”. “… the DOJ and its allies are going after legal but subjectively undesirable business ventures by pressuring banks to terminate their bank accounts or refuse their business. The very premise is clearly chilling—the DOJ is coercing private businesses in an attempt to centrally engineer the American marketplace based on it’s own politically biased moral judgements.”

Benghazi Baloney Protected the POTUS

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White House email shows the administration knew the Benghazi “talking points” were BS. The email and 40 other documents were made public by Judicial Watch, which obtained them via an FOIA lawsuit. The documents bring the events surrounding Benghazi into much sharper focus. There was clearly a set of intelligence available in the immediate aftermath of 9/11/12 indicating that the compound had been attacked (four Americans died), and that there had been no “demonstration” preceding the attack. Well after that time (but before Susan Rice spoke to Meet The Press the following Sunday), the White House communications team was still in spin mode, as the email makes clear. Obama’s election campaign was too important to allow anyone to think there had been a “policy failure.”

Physician: Why Take Insurance?

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Bravo to Daniel Craviotto for penning A Doctor’s Declaration of Independence, appearing today on wsj.com. It’s a condemnation of Obamacare from a man who understands sound medicine. Like many physicians, he’s had it with mindless regulations that take time away from patients and and interfere with the application of medical expertise. And he’s had it with the distortions that are typical of price regulation. “So when do we say damn the mandates and requirements from bureaucrats who are not in the healing profession? When do we stand up and say we are not going to take it any more?”

 

Economic Mobility Is Alive and Well

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The widespread belief that the U.S. is mired in an era of reduced economic mobility is a myth. Some prominent research cited at the link says as much. There are several kinds of mobility, of course — cultural mobility, social mobility, physical mobility, and they all bear relationships to economic mobility in one way or another. The article points out that physical mobility has increased dramatically, yet today it is less important than ever in the sense that we can accomplish so much from the comfort of a living room couch. “Today, most Americans have access to resources that were once inconceivable, and that access lets us cover more cultural and social ground than humans had ever previously been able to manage.” 

I always enjoy discussions of the inadequacies of economic yardsticks (the author mistakenly refers to such measures as “econometrics”), especially measures of output like GDP. The article uses a little humor to illustrate some of these measurement problems (e.g., “What’s the value of being able to track Alec Baldwin’s meltdowns in real-time?”), but the measurement problems contribute to the fallacy of immobility.

“… in the midst of all these developments, our reigning preoccupation is a false narrative about dwindling economic mobility. Apparently the breakthroughs and benefits accrue in such dizzying but routine fashion now that even our most fervent potentates of hope and change have trouble keeping track of our progress.”

“Everyone Has Won And All Must Have Prizes”

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… said the Dodo to Alice. That philosophy is harmless enough when the subject is party favors. It is extremely unwise when applied to the larger distribution of rewards in society, as it all but guarantees that the total rewards produced by society will diminish over time. Thomas Piketty is preoccupied with the notion that future growth of the capital stock will exacerbate the unequal distribution of rewards in society. He believes the ensuing instability could be the ultimate undoing of capitalism. Piketty has gone to some effort to create a sort of intellectual foundation for this point of view. The egalitarian left is infatuated with his new book, “Capital In The Twenty-First Century.” But Piketty’s analysis is more like a series of assertions, with little in the way of solid empirical and analytical support. Here are two insightful reviews: Garrett Jones in Reason and Ryan Decker on his “Updated Priors” blog.

How Can Innovation Improve the Environment?

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Matt Ridley has an nice essay emphasizing that The World’s Resources Aren’t Running Out. They won’t, and the reason is innovation. There is a phenomenon that strikes the environmental left as such an impossible paradox that they cannot see their way clear to understanding how the environmental problem has been and will be solved: economic growth brings wealth that allows us to afford the development of new, cleaner technologies, and those technologies in turn encourage more economic growth. To add a qualifier, it will be solved unless governments prevent markets from doing the work.

Transactions That Matter

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The Commerce Department is now releasing quarterly estimates of Gross Output along with GDP. This will contribute to a better understanding of the economy because it gives a more comprehensive view of economic decisions. GDP measures the value of a country’s “final” output in a given time period, which is the same as the income earned in producing that output. Gross Output (GO) measures the total value of all transactions that occur in the process of generating final output and income.

This is an important distinction, as economists have traditionally focused on “aggregate demand” for final goods and services, a convenience made possible by the traditional measurement of GDP. However, this construct understates the breadth and complexity of economic activity. There are myriad decisions made along the way to producing any product, which take time to play out, even in the “short-run” when some inputs are fixed. The GO measure will help to shed light on the economy’s dynamics, such as its responses to shocks and various policy changes. It may also contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between monetary aggregates and economic activity.