I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
Confucius
For Once, A Commencement Address Worth Listening To
Wellesley High School (MA) teacher decided to give a tough love commencement address. (HT Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek). Mark J. Perry of Carpe Diem frequently blogs about college grade inflation; he has an interesting cumulative grade distribution chart which shows that A's are now the most common grade; the percentage of B's is relative stable, but the number of C's has sharply declined. (In contrast, I think when I graduated from OLL, only one other student, a pre-med major, graduated summa cum laude.) When I taught my own classes, I had very few (if any) comparable students (I did not teach at a tier 1 university; metropolitan area universities have looser entrance standards); I took a more pragmatic approach in assigning letter grades (there was no direct pressure, but a tenure-track professor's teaching was primarily judged by dubiously reliable single-item student ratings at the end of the semester, which largely reflected whether the students liked you--and I tend to be more of an acquired taste, as my best friend from UH admitted). I had less generous grade distributions, although usually low-ability students didn't stay past the drop date, so I didn't issue significant numbers of D's and F's.
What was interesting was certain feedback I would get; I mentioned before in the blog about something I heard from one of my UWM students: he was earning an A in his history class with just a couple of hours a week of work, but he was spending over 10 hours a week on my class, and he was worried about getting a C. (He thought that I was being unfair and had unrealistic expectations of students. But computer science majors taking my classes hardly broke a sweat.) Others said that they had been an A/B student all their lives until they got to my class. It shouldn't be so hard, so I must be a lousy teacher. (Among other things, many students were writing computer programs for the first time, which means developing new types of skills.)
My favorite one, like I've written in the past, was the student whom wanted administrators to know that he learned more in my class than any other class he took at UWM, but none of the credit belonged to me because he had to do it all on his own! (Don't hate the player: hate the game.) I should have had that one framed, because he handed me probably the greatest compliment any college professor ever got. He was an adult, and if and when he took a job, employers didn't want to hire high-maintenance workers needing a lot of direction. (And I'm sure that all parents of teenagers are dying to know how I, a mere clueless bachelor, managed to motivate a young man to do something on his own that he didn't want to do; what can I say? It must be a gift...)
College isn't high school; the first of my two gifted engineer nephews thought that he could skate by in college like he did in high school and almost lost his full-ride scholarship in his freshman year. I mentioned in a recent post that many of my students had lousy work habits, poor initiative and communication skills, and unrealistic expectations. Some readers might think that I hated students and maybe it's a good thing I'm no longer teaching. On the contrary: with all due respect to my own professors, I was probably the most naturally gifted professor I knew (despite teaching some of the most boring stuff anyone can imagine): I have very good oratorical and testing skills, never had stage fright, am extraordinarily well-organized, used newer textbooks, introduced topics being discussed by practitioners, and didn't skate by on minimal effort like many professors I knew (e.g., teaching the same courses every semester). When I found my UTEP database students didn't know data structures (a course prerequisite, but taught by a lecturer operating on a hidden agenda), I basically had to halt the class and squeeze in a mini-data structures course. My students were complaining that I was covering too much material! But I felt that the buck stopped with me.
If I didn't care about the students and teaching, I could have gone with the flow, assigned less work, had fewer exams, reused last year's lecture notes and textbooks, issued easy grades, and looked the other way on issues of academic honesty, assigning the same grades as to students whom earned their grades the honest way. (Students are often aware that their colleagues are cheating, and they resent teachers whom they see as clueless or intentionally looking the other way. Of course, in a lawsuit-happy country and universities with well-defined student due process rights, a professor has a heavy bureaucratic burden (believe me, I've pursued cases at UWM and UTEP, and it's bureaucratic hell on earth; I also found myself being attacked during the process by fellow faculty and administrators--unlike students, tenure-track professors have few due process rights): one can suspect dishonesty, but that's not enough. As much as students despise the cheaters, they hate even more coming forward as a snitch. I suspect that many professors, using subjective aspects of evaluation, engage in the academic equivalent of "shoot, shovel, and shut up".)
On the other hand, I knew professors whom essentially had given up on students and were going with the flow: they gave computing assignments little more than typing exercises. They didn't care that students ended up with a degree that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, having to compete against graduates from better programs. It would have been so much easier on me to go with the flow, avoid the spotlight, and get my ticket punched through tenure. I see it more as an indictment on academia than on myself; I don't think Kingsfield would get hired by Harvard Law today--Barack Obama while he was a student there would probably have petitioned against his hiring!
Rasmussen Polls On Class Warfare and Related Matters
I have a research interest in the development and validation of applied psychology subjective measures (e.g., attitudes and beliefs). I have mentioned as a graduate teaching fellow and a full-time professor (for 5 years), I was highly competent in the art of writing a good exam. There are different skill sets involved, but as a writer (and especially as a poet) I am very aware of the subtle nuances in phrasing a question or response (e.g., multiple-choice questions, universally derided but a good tool in broadly sampling a student's knowledge and skills in a subject matter). There are various biases that the measure developer must guard against. For example, some people who complete a survey want to be "helpful" and choose the "right" answer; another problem is predictable patterns in questioning where the subject anticipates the desired response from previous context without even reading the full question at hand. For instance, in a measure on gun control, positively worded questions might be pro-regulation and negatively worded questions are pro-liberty. As a behavioral scientist, I don't have a vested interest in the outcomes: if a person has a mixed point of view on an issue, I want to capture that as accurately as possible.
Most political policy polls, particularly progressive ones I've seen, are utter crap. (In the IT profession we have a classic acronym: GIGO--"Garbage-In, Garbage-Out".) For example, when the California Supreme Court struck down the traditional definition of marriage, the Proposition which restored it was polemically termed by propagandists and mainstream media as a "ban on gay marriage". The traditional definition of marriage simply limits legally recognized marriage to the union of a man and a woman, a traditional restriction, not an arbitrary one. Other kinds of relationships (e.g., polygamous) are also not recognized, but it's no accident that the propagandists didn't choose to spin California Proposition 8 as the "ban on polygamous marriage".
Emily Ekins of Reason recently published the results of a couple of instructive polls regarding the collective bargaining kerfuffle in Wisconsin. In essence, the wording in one poll asked "do you support taking away certain public sector collective bargaining rights?" (43% favor), and the wording in the other poll asked "do you supporting limiting public sector collective bargaining?" (51% favor). There can be little doubt that progressive propagandists deliberately choose the wording of issues, and it makes all difference, artificially raising acceptance.
On economic issues, it should not surprise us when leftists try to exploit well-known common biases. HT Don Boudreaux whom referenced a fellow George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan into a recent post disagreeing with some people thinking Paul Krugman is a kind of modern-day Bastiat only with a Keynesian perspective. Caplan wrote a highly readable, splendid Reason essay called "The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters (And we're all stupid voters.)"
Let me list a few takeaways:
- anti-market bias: "Joseph Schumpeter, arguably the greatest historian of economic thought, matter-of-factly spoke of 'the ineradicable prejudice that every action intended to serve the profit interest must be anti-social by this fact alone.' Probably the most common error of this sort is to equate market payments with transfers, ignoring their incentive properties. Yet profits are not a handout but a quid pro quo. Like profit, interest is not a gift but a quid pro quo. The second most prominent avatar of anti-market bias is monopoly theories of price. One specific price, the price for labor, is often thought to be the result of conspiracy."
- anti-foreign bias: "Adam Smith admonishes his countrymen: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry.” Economics textbooks teach that total output increases if producers specialize and trade."
- make work bias: "a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of conserving labor. Where noneconomists see the destruction of jobs, economists see the essence of economic growth: the production of more with less. The public qualifies this “naive” position [machines make life easier for human beings] by noting that machines also throw people out of work. Employing more workers than you need wastes valuable labor. Another controversy infused with make-work bias: hostility to downsizing."
- pessimistic bias: "As a general rule, the public believes economic conditions are not as good as they really are. But you can also be pessimistic overall, seeing negative trends in living standards, wages, and inequality. How can high levels of pessimism coexist with constantly rising standards of living? Natural resources are getting cheaper, population density is not bad for growth, and air quality is improving."
- summary on voters' bias: "They underestimate the benefits of markets. They underestimate the benefits of dealing with foreigners. They underestimate the benefits of conserving labor. They underestimate the performance of the economy. And in doing all that underestimating, they overestimate both the need for the government to solve these purported problems and the likely efficacy of its solutions."
I have a few bones to pick with Scott Rasmussen's discussion here--because there are a number of deceptive and disingenuous things being said by the progressives. For example, one particularly annoying soundbite deals with the tax burden which progressives will argue is the lowest, implying that the tax burden on business and individuals is much lighter comparatively speaking. (See a libertarian response here; basically, Edwards points out that business income tax revenue goes beyond the reported traditional "C" corporation income and is included elsewhere (i.e., a significant amount of business income has now shifted to the individual side of tax revenues) and the relevant basis for business investment purposes, say, opening a new plant, is based on the marginal tax rate, not the average effective tax rate, and the US has the highest marginal tax rate .) I feel like screaming apples and oranges all over the place, because they also aren't taking into account differences in government operations and transfer benefits.
Continuing on the lower business tax collection, we have this common talking point:
In other words, whatever the rate, corporations are actually paying less in taxes than they have in decades, yet unemployment remains above 9 percent. So, a lower tax burden doesn’t seem to be the sole factor in spurring job growth.That's definitely misleading. If you go by OMB data (Table 2-2), for the most part, corporate income taxes have ranged from about 6% to 11% of revenue, not surprisingly slumping, like more recently, during recessions, since 1982, except during Bush's second term (when they ranged from 12% to 14%). The author fails to note that a number of competitor nations slashed business tax rates since 1980, with no US competitive response (and the US fairly uniquely also tries to double-tax company earnings abroad). Lower rates as indicated generally occur during recessionary periods. But some companies, particularly domestic energy companies, do pay the highest bracket rate. There are a lot of costs involving a company's decision to expand, but taxes are a consideration. It is true that government also imposes indirect costs (e.g., regulatory compliance costs).
Rasmussen isn't distinguishing here between government operations and benefits/transfer payments. Some 60% of the federal budget deals with entitlements/benefits: retirement and health services for the poor and elderly. Other countries (e.g., Western Europe and/or Canada) have additional social welfare benefits. I make a distinction between government operations focusing on the common good (e.g., defense, diplomacy, judicial system and public safety) and individual benefit programs, starting with social security in the 1930's and LBJ's Great Society extensions of Medicare and Medicaid.
It is true that lower-earning individuals do pay for mandatory benefits programs like social security and Medicaid. But roughly payroll taxes (including employer match--15% of extended pay) and excise taxes account for 40% of tax receipts vs. the mid-40's for individual income taxes.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Kinks, "Come Dancing". This completes the end of my Kinks retrospective. My next series will focus on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
