Jon Taplin's Home Page

How, if at all, are the 8 steps ordered? I would put #8 first, as most of the others won’t make a blip on the radar while that noise is on the screen. -al

I’d agree on all but #6. After 1 year, it’s WAY too early to claim success for any education program.

By all means local school boards should be able to figure out how to allocate money, but
we are moving towards a national educational curriculum – that means that our children’s education gets out of the hands of the Texas board of education and all the local school district pinheads who think their job is to fight culture wars instead of to build an educated, informed citizenry?

I agree with al – #8 should be the first priority. Lessig has a recent TED talk on the subject – http://lessig.blip.tv/file/3945764/

@al: True but once the corporations and unions are out of it, the churches rule. There is a storm brewing on that front because of the SF justice ruling yesterday. As my father in law lectured me, you have to have your own networks.

@jonathan: Pot, kettle, black. Homogeneneity isn’t the answer. Texas rules the roost because they have the biggest market and the sources of texts are concentrated into a small set of publishers.

Aside: Even on FB you can create subgroups of your network. RTFM. The problem of the social media companies is they believe they are inventing this stuff. Any half-wit nightclub owner can tell you that you shouldn’t mix cliques (aka, social networks) and they design the club and pick the bands accordingly.

# 2 I suggest reading Jawbreaker by Gary Berntsen, and War by Sebastian Junger. After doing so, and even after weighing the consequences of pulling out vs the importance to Afghan women of having an outside force to deal with the Taliban’s brutality, nobody could possibly argue the case for continued war and/or nation building. I personally prefer the Jawbreaker approach – special forces and targeted killings, which is apparently the preferred approach by Obama and his gang as well.

The education one (#6) is tough, for the reasons outlined over a decade ago in James Loewen’s “Lies my teacher told me”. In essence, Loewen argues that, despite attempts to create a national identity, American history (and therefore, history education) is still largely parochial. This means that there will always be efforts like those in Texas to erradicate “unamerican” elements from American history, or like those in Pennsylvania a few years ago to eradicate evolution from science classes.

I’m usually for more local control, but as an educator, having students come into my lecture halls and arguing with me about the rightness of intelligent design, or about the insignifance of slavery to US history makes it more difficult. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be local control, and maybe it works well as a bullet-pointed platform, but the tension between ideologically parochial education needs to be explored.

#4 Apparently, the drive for renewable energy has completely overshadowed the one resource that we have in super abundance – natural gas, including coal bed methane gas. We are the Saudi Arabia in gas, and yet only one state in the US has made it easy for those who want to convert cars to natural gas usage. Why? Your goal of reducing dependency on oil, easily achievable with natural gas. Tom Friedman et al should use their media platform to push for immediate development of the use of gas.

You may be right, Jonathan, and that’s exactly the problem, since this state of affairs is what’s likely to become entrenched.

But again, none of this can take place under national, or even state regimes. Indeed, if Geoffrey Canada’s example counts for anything, it’s the hyper-local, block-by-block approach that works best.

1. If local rule prevails, where do they buy textbooks?

2. If local rule fails, is home schooling the only option left and how well does that work for the majority?

3. Is web publishing of curricula and text books a viable alternative (cue Morgan Warstler).

Apparently, the drive for renewable energy has completely overshadowed the one resource that we have in super abundance – natural gas

Given a non polluting means to get at it, perhaps, but so far the results of frakking have been spectacularly polluting and dangerous.

Many of the items on Jon’s list are interrelated. Get rid of union power in politics (including teacher’s unions) and get rid of the lobbying power of the big textbook conglomerates and you make room for that local control of the market. So much of the basics of teaching reading, writing, math has not changed in the last 100 years that for elementary schoolers, I would imagine that material could be drawn from the public domain (one excellent use for broadband in schools).

Oh, and how about a double whammy of getting rid of the lobbying bucks AND removing the tax-exempt status of churches who fund candidates directly or indirectly?

@Quentin – that’s what admissions offices are for.

And believe me, if colleges with reputations for graduating smart, capable students started focusing less on (easily gamed) systems like grades and test-scores, and focused more on essay questions that placed a premium on actual reading, thinking, and writing, then you’d end up with a lot more students who preferred asking questions to shouting out answers.

Yeah, unfortunately easily gamed = easily judged. Much easier to look at a score than to read and evaluate an essay. It sucks, but it’s true. But what both of you say (Alex & Quentin) makes sense.

Haven’t seen Morgan in a while, but I’m wondering if the generational increase (the ‘something’ effect, sorry, I need more coffee) in IQ scores also reflects the fact that as a society, we’re simply becoming better test takers.

All of which gets back to Step 0: Somehow bringing about a moral and spiritual revulsion against the MORE-ism that’s got the species where it is, and a New Affection for all the circumscriptions that are in all of the prescriptions, not only those but all the other Great Ideas floating around out there (with the possible exception of the brain-sucking pipe dream of Pure Randianism.)

Your list of good things to try to change seems to me pretty close to right on what’s needed, and it’s a waste of time to debate the order of importance although gutting the MIC and doing something about the squatting toad with the long sticky tongue that the Capitol has become might oughta get a little preference. The pragmatic question is how do you overcome the massive inertia and momentum of The System. My preference might be to do a re-make of the set-building for “Escape From New York.” Wall and moat, razor wire, and I hear there’s a couple of companies peddling “auto-guns” that combine silicon, steel, lead, copper and combustibles to make the nascent versions of the Terminator, clear some fields of fire and let them keep the grasping SOBs REALLY “inside the Beltway.”

There’s a few seeming examples of maybe real eleemosynarianism, maybe just enlightened self-interest by people who have little armies of security to protect them against what could so easily become a violently unruly mob — BillandMelissa Gates comes to mind. Wonder if he and Jobs and other Rich Hippies From The ’60s, and folksy guys like Buffett who is of course getting very long inthe tooth, could be induced to spend some of their massive financial and intellectual capital and credibility as “successes” here in the Homeland to jump-start a different kind of “movement.” One that goes past the revulsion and rejection that automatically springs forth when anyone dares to talk about “limits,” that being apostasy in the face of the secular National Church of Unlimited Exceptionalism.

It would take some very generous, future-of-the-species-minded souls to take the spiritual leap that leads people like Nelson Mandela to real greatness. From my dung-beetle perspective in the litter and rot down here on the jungle floor, I don’t see too many such butterflies winging through the treetops. But hey, if you are stuck with compound eyes, you can pick up gross motions but maybe not all the fine detail.

That and sharper cheaters, Amber.

One of the UN papers I’ve been reading on elites points out that the royal road through a meritocratic hierarchy is education but that the effect of preferred culture on student selection reinforces the existing hierarchies of wealthy families. IOW, it really is true that anything worth having is worth cheating for and the meritocracy that emerged after WWII actually defeated it’s own goals eventually.

An aside I found illuminating is that in America, the road is paved for lawyers, in Europe, economists and in China, engineers. A mastery of all three is the same as an actor who can dance, sing and write.

@Amber (and others)–In Massachusetts, Mitt Romney’s MCAS, which was introduced to produce “efficiency” and “break the stranglehold of the teacher’s union” has the effect of making students great standardized test-takers, and capable of little else in the way of critical thinking, scientific inquiry, organizational skills, or other things that I think make good citizens and workers.

Of course, this is a funding problem as well, since state higher education budgets have shrunk every year since the 1980s. It’s a lot cheaper to pay an adjunct to teach 500 students with a standardized rubric and multiple choice tests than to reduce class sizes, increase student-teacher interraction, and utilize more critical and engaged pedagogy.

@jon:

Working Paper No. 2010/05
Globalization and the Emergence of a
Transnational Oligarchy
Elise S. Brezis*
January 2010

http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/working-papers/2010/en_GB/wp2010-05/

A side effect is the number of top universities that are the gatekeepers grew smaller and more homogeonous which narrowed the topical thinking. As a result, these schools teach more or less the same thing to the transnationals and as a result of that, innovation has been strangled. Any wonder why some of the top innovators/entrepeneurs quit their universities and set out on their own?

The entire collection of papers at that site is an eye opener. One begins to understand why concentration of wealth and international diplomacy are coupled to produce bewildering chaos.

Whoops. Reviewing my notes, one errata: Europe and America both favor lawyers. It is the emerging transnational elite that favors economists. For those who don’t have the time, the following paragraphs are extracted from the cited paper. Again, the collection of the working papers are worth purusing.

Working Paper No. 2010/05

Globalization and the Emergence of a
Transnational Oligarchy

Elise S. Brezis*

January 2010

Examine the evolution of recruitment of elites due to globalization. In the last century, the main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for theirrecruitment.

Although meritocratic selection should result in the best being chosen, we show that meritocratic recruitment may actually lead to class stratification and auto-recruitment. Due to globalization, the stratification effect will be even stronger. Globalization will bring about the formation of an international technocratic elite with its own culture, norms, ethos, and identity, as well as its private clubs like the Davos World Economic Forum. We face the emergence of a transnational oligarchy.
At the time of Plato and Aristotle, it was emphasized that the recruitment of the elite is a crucial element in finding the optimal political structure. Aristotle stressed that a city should be ruled by the best (‘aristoi’ in Greek), and government should be in the hands of the most able members of society. These men should be highly intelligent and educated, as well as brave and temperate citizens.

Despite this enlightened view, over the centuries, recruitment of the elite was actually carried out via heredity, nepotism, and violence, and the word ‘aristocracy’ came to describe the hereditary upper ruling class. Hereditary monarchy was for centuries considered the most legitimate means of the recruitment for rulers, based on the assumption that morality and intellectuality are hereditary, according to God’s will.

The twentieth century witnessed a major change in the way the elites were recruited. Meritocracy became the basic factor for recruitment of elites, and education and success at exams have been used as prime criterion for recruitment. In consequence, post-World War II, elites are recruited through education in elite universities to which admission was conferred following success at meritocratic exams.

Education is indispensable to becoming elite. Education, therefore, has become essential for belonging to the elite, and is the entry ticket into the business and political elite. Is there a clear specific training path that can be demarcated to become a member of the elite? It seems there is no clear pattern for the training of elites. In England, where business leaders come from economics, law, sciences, or the arts, it is not clear what ‘ticket’ is best for advancement; while in France, engineering was clearly the necessary training; and in Germany, it was either law or the sciences, although over time, we see some sort of convergence in the training of the elites (Figure 6).

In the recruitment of the national political elites, there is no doubt that networking leads to concentration of specific training. In the United States, the political elite are trained as lawyers (Obama, Clinton, Joe Biden, Leon Panetta). Moreover, over half of U.S. senators practice law. This is also the case in many other countries of Europe. For instance, in Germany, a third of the Bundestag’s members are lawyers, and in France, nine of 16 members of French cabinet of President Sarkozy were lawyers. It seems that in democracies, lawyers dominate. But, this is not the case in China: The Chinese political elite are mostly trained as engineers.

The training of the transnational elites presents a different pattern (Figure 7). The political elites are mostly trained in economics and law. It is quite striking that 38 per cent of them have a degree in economics. The business elite are trained mostly in Business and Management (39 per cent). An MBA seems to open the door to the top. However, it is not clear whether over time, there will be a clear pattern, and whether there is an optimal training path for the elites.

The second point is that elites started to be educated in elite schools during the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time that a ‘democratization’ of higher education took place, reflected by an enormous increase in the number of university students, there was a concurrent emergence of two channels of education: one for the elite and the other for the rest.

It is striking that this selection is even stronger for the transnational elites. Among the political elites in the world, 35 per cent of them are recruited in elite universities, which we define as the 50 top universities in the world (the list is presented in Table 1). For the business elite, the recruitment is even tighter: 47 per cent of them have graduated from an elite university. Focusing only on OECD countries, we can observe that 50 per cent of the business elite come from elite universities (Figures 8-11). This very thin recruitment base of elites is striking. It means that there is one obvious way to enter the elites, either political or business: that is by getting a degree from the top 50 universities in the world.

However, despite the wish to democratize selection, over time, it became clear that scores were correlated with family education and wealth. Meritocracy did not mean democratization and opportunity for all. The unrealized dream of the virtue of meritocracy as opposed to aristocracy, has been emphasized by Temin. He has shown that the United States economic elite is still overwhelmingly made up of white Protestant males, a significant number of whom were educated at Ivy League institutions. The picture has not changed significantly from c. 1900: ‘The American business elite come from elite families’, just like in France or Britain. The fundamental irony of the American meritocracy is that the system finally favored the elite’s children. The wish that America would become a classless society through the use of aptitude tests did not come true: meritocracy led to aristocracy.

Meritocracy is a sort of particular system of picking people for the elite based on one set of abilities, while affirmative action is trying to twist the dials a bit to get more minority representation into the meritocratic elite.

Recruitment by entrance exam still encompasses a bias in favor of elite candidates, because this type of exam requires a pattern of aptitude and thinking that favors candidates from an elite background. Although meritocratic selection should result in the best being chosen to enter the top ranks of public service or business, elite schools and universities have a tendency to recruit in a non-diversified way, resulting in certain classes being over-represented. In other words, our model emphasizes that despite meritocratic recruitment, elite universities actually recruit from the ‘aristocracy’, and we get a resulting ‘stratification’ of recruitment which is much stronger due to globalization.

Tests are not perfectly objective, but reflect a culture related to the milieu of the elite with which the examiners for a school are associated. Therefore, students with an equivalent ability, but who are born to the elite and raised in this milieu, will perform better on tests. (Insider knowledge of elite behavior). A very small cultural bias will lead to a strong effect on class stratification.

Globalization leads not only to the creation of global elite universities, but to a clear path of uniformity among societies and cultures, for example, we all read the same books and see the same movies. Comparing Paris to London or to Prague, the cultural life has become similar. Of course the baguette is still French, and pizza is still Italian; Notre Dame is still in Paris and Ponte Vecchio is still in Italy; yet these are constructions of the past. The Bilbao Museum and the Pompidou Museum could be interchanged without a blink; culture today is transnational. The past has left us a specific culture; the present proposes a unified one. There are therefore universities that transmit knowledge that is transnational. Whatever the country and nationality, the elite can be educated in a top international university in the United States, since there is no longer a specific and idiocratic behavior, except for few minor norms.

A monolithic group leads to the stagnation of ideas and attitudes, which in turn may prevent the adoption of major technological breakthroughs (Bourdieu 1977). It may also be that belonging to an elite group has consequences for the behavior of the chosen; it might perpetuate the role of their peers, place importance on hierarchy, and lead to conformist behavior, rigidity, and archaism.

The second line of thought argues that the lack of competition in a monolithic, powerful group generates corruption, with harmful consequences for growth. Indeed, wealthy elites with enough political power to block changes will not accept adopting institutions that would enhance growth, since the latter might compromise their power.

Today, due to globalization, the elites are recruited through international elite universities, leading to homogenization of the elites. More than 40 per cent of the business and political elites of the developed countries have attended one of the top 50 universities in the world – the international elite universities. In consequence, we face today a scenario where the elite of the world become uniform. They obtain the same education, move in the move in the same milieu, and imbibe the same culture. They use the strategy of distinction which permits them to enter the top elite universities, where they develop their own habitus.

In consequence, in the twenty first century, we face the formation of a transnational oligarchy with its own norms, ethos, and identity. It is not only harmful for social mobility, but is also not without negative effects on world economic growth.

Here’s an alternative vision, though complimentary in many areas, Jon.

ABOVE ALL, we should have the monetary authority adopt nominal income stabilization. That means, keep nominal GDP flat. This will, in my view, suck the bubbles out of wall street, allow productivity gains to be real income gains for normal American workers, and dramatically flatten (if not eliminate) the business cycle.

Environmentally, this policy will minimize the kinds of cluster of investment errors that squander our scarce resources. The housing boom was an economic catastrophe. Trillions worth of raw materials have been lost to nonsense.

Now onto your/my new list:

#1. Replace our current tax code entirely with a flat consumption tax with no exemptions and an inflation-indexed subsidy for the poor. Any environmentally friendly tax system should be discouraging consumption and ENCOURAGING PRODUCTIVITY. That mean no taxes on capital, which are largely double-taxation to begin with.

The whole Bush tax cuts argument is nonsense. Government revenue grew under Bush. It was spending that grew faster, which is the REAL problem. And, you may remember, the Clinton boom was a cheap-credit fueled bubble that burst and left us facing deflation in early 2000s. Hardly a sustainable model.

#2. Bravo. Pull out of all the warmachine nonsense. Afghanistan is a complete fraud. End it.

#3. Forget empty promised about getting off foreign oil. Let’s do one thing: STOP SUBSIDIZING OIL. PERIOD.

Your #4 and #7 are completely contradictory. “Public-private partnership” is a fraud. It’s just a corporate welfare boondoggle. According to what track record should we expect Obama’s bets in energy to be the right ones? He campaigned hard for the ethanol boondoggle. It’s a sham. This whole battery deal is nothing more than corporate welfare to the politically powerful UAW. Period.

#5. BRAVO. End the warfare state. DOD should be FOR DEFENSE. as for the wind-turbines… sell that stuff off and let the market pick winners and losers. Government picks losers like ethanol every time and you KNOW IT.

#6. BRAVO. Obviously, I want the Feds to get out of education all together 100%. End the DOE. It’s worthless. Dismantle any and all government supports for 1-size national “Standards”. They’re a farce and a fraud.

#7. Bravo. Seriously. This is the big one. End corporate welfare of all kinds. Period. That means: STOP ALL ETHANOL MANDATES AND SUBSIDIES NOW. The government’s schemes are a fraud and none is more transparent than the Ethanol boondoggle.

#8. Never going to happen, and shouldn’t. Whereever there is power to pick winners and losers, money will follow. Campaign finance laws have STRENGTHENED incumbents by erecting byzantine rules that only the experienced players can deal with using their expensive lawyers. Decentralize the power. That is the answer. Shrink the government and you’ll shrink the amount of dead-weight-loss to lobbying.

Case in point. Microsoft didn’t have a presence in DC prior to the faux “anti-trust” case, which accomplished nothing and was driven by Orin Hatch on behalf of Novell, NOT consumers. Now they spend big time and lobby hard. The line of causality is clear.

Takes some serious eggs to propound a definite 8-point platform, Jon, especially in midterm, but I like it and admire its idealism; that is, its abandonment of sheer winning in favor of winning back a meaning of Liberalism of which we could be proud, win or lose.

The DNC customarily asks electeds and their senior staff to nominate Party planks and prospective, overarching themes. DNC does this in presidential years and sometimes in the off season, depending on how things are going. (In other years the Clinton-led DLC ran a parallel questionaire to this effect). Presumably the GOP does this also, but I wouldn’t know.

In the ’80s and ’90s I consistently recommended, quite sincerely, that the Party should structure its planks around the concept of “democracy”, in keeping with its name, with social and economic justice, with promising models of civic engagement and with more grassroots approaches in the workplace and school site, etc.

No go. The DLC once sent an expression of interest after Gingrich took the House, but nothing more came of it. It wasn’t until some time later that I learned, the hard way, that our parties labor not for ideals but for perpetuation, that political self-preservation knows not of party and that liberalism is to the Democratic leadership as conservatism is to Republicans: a stalking horse.

Were I presumptuously to attach a single descriptor to your 8-point platform, I guess I’d call it “Sustainability”. That strikes me now as a worthy theme for the party, however vacuous and illiberal it may be, as a theme more appropriate to Democrats than to Republicans, and befitting Liberals more than it does either party.

I wholeheartedly support your call for local educational control (with concessions to central authority), as parochial experiment, adaptation and rebellion are necessary antidotes to the unhelpful concentrations of education power that have plagued Austin and Sacramento. The federal alternative is exacerbation, massive concentration in the hands of transitory winner-take-all Jacksonians. The cross-cultural comparison to Old Europe is pathetically un-American (and I husband that term judiciously).

My own experience in the education system:

In 7th grade, I was placed in an advanced math class with other 7th and 8th grade students, studying geometry, which was traditionally taught in 9th grade. For the first week or so, we had a young, dedicated teacher who supplemented the textbook with his own notes and who wrote his own tests. Unfortunately, the test was difficult, and the class of “talented” students and their parents were upset because they didn’t all get top scores.

Shortly after, I came to class to find that we had a new teacher; many of the parents had convened, talked to the school board, and had the previous teacher fired. The new teacher was exactly what the parents wanted, and what I fear many of the people here would be happy with as well – she strove to “engage” the class, and instead of exams, we would often have “projects” that went outside the focus of the textbook.

While this may sound nice, the class ended up being a complete joke. The projects were infantile, on the level of a student presenting a video game he liked to play and saying, essentially, nothing more than the fact that the video game loosely involved geometry. Without exams, no one had any incentive to really learn any actual principles of geometry. Of course the students were happy because the class was “fun” and the parents were happy because everyone was getting good grades.

As for the original teacher, obviously being fired does not do wonders for one’s resume, and so this hard-working and diligent teacher was more or less consigned to taking odd substitute teaching jobs, which to me was the most egregious part of what happened.

So that’s my concern with “engaging students” and “local control”, that standards and rigor will potentially get thrown out the window. While this example was an extreme case, my general experience throughout high school was that, the more a class deviated from a set structure and incorporated more “engagement/enrichment” activities like projects and games, the less rigorous it was and ultimately the less I learned from the class.

And I’m delighted to see JTM’s call for a rejection of “MORE-ism”–so in keeping with Sustainability–yet I doubt that even the libertarians here would want to curtail the More Model as it applies to services, especially health or education. Too bad. Don’t expect a DNC reply on that one.

@JP: “Shrink the government and you’ll shrink the amount of dead-weight-loss to lobbying.”

How will you go about achieving that when the money in the system is often against shrinking the government? Consider this example that Lessig gives:

“One year into his administration, Vice President Gore gave a speech at UCLA, laying out the Clinton-Gore vision of the National Information Infrastructure (a.k.a., the Internet). Among the many proposals Gore sketched, one seemed small and technical: Gore proposed recrafting the Communications Act to add “Title VII.” Title VII was intended to deregulate Internet infrastructure. It would have removed DSL from heavy FCC oversight, and provide one consistent regulatory bucket, which would give Internet infrastructure providers a relatively free hand.

Gore’s team took this idea to Capitol Hill. As described to me by a member of his team, the reception was not favorable. “‘Hell no,’ we were told.” The concern? Translated: “How are we going to raise money from those guys if we deregulate them?””

more here – http://lessig.org/blog/d4i-outline.html

Len, thanks for the great reference. Re Ms. Brezis, “Yeah, what she said.”

Social homeostasis, earlier Chinese style:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholar-bureaucrats

“The entire premise of the scholarly meritocracy was based on mastery of the Confucian classics, with important effects on society.” Wonder which texts (Texas School Board?) will become the New Confucian Classics?

The outcome is sad, JtMc. To keep the transnational circuits functional, they have to keep the national circuits forceably connected to their circuits. The more one tries to localize, the harder they will work to keep them destabilized.

The important wingnut sounding observation is the transnational institutions of government don’t really exist except for the banking groups. It isn’t that a conspiracy is required; it is that emergence of one world government in some form becomes inevitable as long as the transnational elites control the currency exchange.

Weird, eh? Buffet is starting to look better and better because he at least is thinking about what to do with the wealth lest it become inheritable.

Hey Jon, how about we just elminate Item #6, acheive the other 7 goals and see what effect all of that has on the education system and the level of self-education of our citizenry? If Carlin was right (and I think he was) then big .gov and big .mon don’t want thinking people. If we remove their influence, move towards equality and sustainability, maybe those who are capable of being educated will get educated in one way or another instead of merely consuming this big Chinese superbuffet of misinformation.

Mc–there’s a thought experiment for you!

Hugh, I been batting my gums about “sustainability” here and elsewhere for quite a while, but then i have no Idea how to amplify my output beyond sarcasm and ineffectual rage. Marks me as a Failure, I guess. I wonder if it’s off to Purgatory, or straight to Hell?

As a toiler in the deep furrows of the health care, er, Medical Services Unsurance and Delivery field, I would like to renew another pitch for centralized actual health care “services.” What we got now does not “work,” and there’s no public-private partnership that is going to ever change the mess except for the worse. There might be hope if true “fiat” were possible, but that ain’t happenin’ either. Huge amounts of lost motion doing “unsurance company”-required documentation, “re-prior authorizations” for needed chronic meds, ah, it makes me sick just to think about it.

I went out to the VA hospital today, after a visit a week ago where my primary clicked the keys and presto! I had an appointment for a consult and then a schedule for a diagnostic procedure. My meds are cheap. And while I can’t really sue my doctor, he’s not so overworked by having to do bulk, ever-less-compensated transactions in order to make his monthly nut that he can’t pay a little more attention. (Everything devolves back to the skills and level of care, in the empathic sense too, of individuals.)

Our Ruling Elite had a chance to grab the gold ring for us, but they chose to just nab it and put it in their already overstuffed pockets. And a moiety of us stupidly went along with the Palin-drone about soshulized meduhsin. A lot of those same folks are going to be surprised when they need a new knee or hip or non-emergency gall bladder surgery, to be shoved on an airplane (powered by combustion of petroleum, with attendant carbon footprint) and zapped to Costa Rica or Mumbai for Dr. Shastri, trained at the University of Socialized Education, to do the surgery or perform the treatment in National Health Care Hospital. And then have to try to get Dr. Barnard at Baylor to pick up the after-care.

It would be so nice if people could keep the Categories distinct in their little brains, when it comes to complicated issues having to do with Efficiency and Sustainability and all that jazz.

Not gonna happen. Wouldn’t be prudent.

len, sticking with my favorite analogy-producing area, some folks experience seizures so often that the simple act of muscular contraction and neuron firing uses so much energy that they can literally starve. If they don’t drown on their own secretions.

One therapy has been a semi-hemi-frontal-lobectomy, basically just excising the misbehaving tissue. Wonder if the same operation would benefit the Body Politic, Worldwide?

Usually, Dan, I have to deal with huge numbers (e.g. CA now has 9 milllion school wards, so just imagine the cock-up of a fully federal one-size-fits all, and imagine too the state legislators in TX who come from the classroom or the school board accustomed to spelling “Million” without the “B”), so I bracket anecdotes like yours. But as my methodogical training is historographical I dig also the telling anecdote. Yours is one of them.

In years past we used to say that “one must not legislate curriculum”. We said that partly because former educators-turned-lawmakers could’t anymore make the micro- to macro- transition than they could resist the scope of their cocksure, new powers; partly because their dictatorial content management frustrated efforts to professionalize teaching by recognizing the special expertise of frontline educators; and partly because the counter-grassroots trend ultimately trended toward hyper-centralized, over-politicized, exceedingly facile and impermanent federal control. (One of several disturbing implications, besides, is that there is no shortage of educators who will agree to teach 10th Graders the same curriculum of West Point plebes, provided you avert your gaze whilst the urban educators sweep 50% dropout rates, as well as massive failure rates, under the rug)

I don’t mean to be negative here, but merely real. You clearly want young people to enjoy the best of what you once saw without their suffering the decadent experimentalism that raged then an still does so. OK. Let me ask you to try something on. It’s partly metaphorical, but please mull it and let us know whether it shows some promise to get past this 30-year feud of local v. state v. federal, standards/assessment/accountability, drill ‘n’ kill pencil tests, teacher v. parent, etc.

Permit me to draw your attention to the scout’s sash, to embroidered, certainly won merit badges. I mean this as a metaphor, so please ignore that I myself was never a Scout; ignore recent ACLU controversies regarding the BSA’s and GSA’s exclusionary policies; ignore Baden-Powell’s putatively pederastic proclivities, etc., and just focus on the merit badges as metaphor.

Let’s say we have a figurative 100 badges to achieve, some mandatory and some elective (the Hutchins Model). Let’s give the Feds 4-6 core competencies, grouped around fundamemental literacy and modern numeracy. Let’s then allow the states about 10 manditory competencies to demand. Let’s further permit local, and locally elected, educational authorities to elect 10 or 12 further competencies particular to the genius locus–the genius of that place–and then leave it up to individual learners, with the guidance of their elders, to decide and choose how to fill out their sashes.

Does this even begin to work for you? I could list a number of advantages over the present put-up…

Friends

As one who adds little of value to these discussions, I would like to say this is a thread worthy of its contributors. You have risen above iSpeak. Thank you, and congratulations.

T Bone

Just an aside to JP on “causality” and Microsoft lobbying efforts. As I remember it and as i look up the articles on it, Microsoft leadership took the attitude once taken by Engine Charlie Wilson of GM: “You can’t mess with us; we are Too Big And Too Important.”

Desperate to both defeat and retain the protections of RuleofLaw, Gates and his minions found they had to at least pay tribute to the Tribunes and Solons if they wanted to continue their business practices with less “lost motion.”

There’s a ton of stuff on this bit of higher stakes games-and-brinkmanship, but here’s just one little interesting selection from the commentary: Learning From Microsoft’s Error, Google Builds a Lobbying Engine.

And now of course MSFT is trying real hard to backstab and backdoor Google who is trying to cut the nuts off MSFT and back and forth, all of which is Supposed To Be Good For The Nation And The People. http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/microsofts-secret-screw-google-meetings-in-d-c/19143135/ and lots of other Financial Gossip Pages stuff. GaGa over Google?

Some days I wished I’d a continued playing the Legal Game… Just not smart and sharp and mean enough, though. I’d rather give enemas, and clean up the results, that do lunch with a Congressperson. My personal failing, of course.

@jtmc:

Big Brother Uses A Mac.

len — smart fella, Jobs thanks him for his service.

@jtmc: Jumpin’ the shark of the topic, but ya gotta be creative. Doc Swenson was complaining about the coyotes on his farm and asked how to deal with them. A friend suggested he call a coyote in Arizona and order a truckload of undocumented road runners.

Back on topic, from the NTY via Robert St John on FB (the beauty of the web is to have the same conversation on multiple sites with different players):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/nyregion/05hunter.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

Gary,

I apologize for addressing the earlier post to Dan instead of you. It was indeed meant for you, and I apologize for such a stupid mistake. Years of scholastic experiment have left this lab rat with gaping caverns where the frontal lobe should be…

JTM,

Granted that the term Sustainability, like the term Meliorism, is an invitation to mischief. To use these words we must define or at least delimit and exemplify them, but that’s such a tiresome epistemological exercise, and I for one lack the knack for definitional witticisms a la Ambrose Bierce or Will Rogers. I mean sustainability in the sense of replenishment improving in both quality and rapidity, and I’d meant meliiorism in the simplest sense of getting and doing better, of individual and collective betterment (the former in service of the latter). I’ve some illustrations in mind but I’d prefer not to belabor it, in part because, as you must know, we’ll almost certainly fall into counterexemplification, naming the many things we don’t mean by those terms and unnecessarily alienating folk who do embrace those other meanings. See wot I mean?

JP,

With regard to #8, I’m suspect you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Obviously, you’re on the honor system here (i.e. no Googling), but can you actually summarize the essence of the Fair Elections Now Act for us?

Heck, I’ll narrow it down; can you describe – briefly – what single feature included in this bill separates it substantially from every campaign reform effort that’s preceded it?

I’m not asking whether you agree with it, but the way, or have reason to believe that it won’t be effective. I’m just wondering if you can say what it is.

“topic” is such an elastic concept, at the dinner table…

Speaking of iCrap, here’s one little iNugget from the iWSJ, the Voice of iDom: Tech Gadgets Steal Sales From Appliances, Clothes

And of course, more apropos of the strands of this Thread, before it is cut off by old Clotho or whatever her name is: U.S. Super Rich to Share Wealth , U.S. Only-Grossly-Wealthy Tell Everyone Else To Eat Cake And Fuck Themselves.

Do they hear the approaching sound of tumbrels rumbling over the cobblestones? Or the stink of burning buildings and burning HERETICS and TRAITORS? Do they remember what Beirut and Baghdad and Ulster looked like and may yet again, if the Armed Rabble once start moving? Is Melinda For Real? Does “Charity” include anything more than symphony orchestras, museums and public polo grounds?

Enquiring minds want to know!

And Hugh, I have neither brief for nor beef with you on any exegesis of words that ought to have as much currency and freight of meaning and power as “Tea Party” and “Don’t Tread On Me!” and “Enemy!”, but don’t, for all the usual reasons. My heart knows that Stability and Sustainability and Betterism are attainable, I just don’t know if the path has to pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Megadeaths before it comes to the place where there’s milk and honey enough for everyone to have their Needs filled. And enough social pressure to keep the Wants under tight rein. And where it would be a violation of the RuleofLaw to be named “Jones.”

Correction: ‘I’ suspect. I may be suspect too, but that’s for others to say.

The challenge to you, JP, remains the same.

JTM,
,
I don’t know, either, about the parade of horribles.

Separately, JT, that paper is wonderful. Those of you who haven’t read it should know that it extends the “I have a dream vs. a nightmare” perspective with gems like these;

So long as the siren call of denial is met with the drone of policy expertise — and the fantasy of technical fixes is left unchallenged — the public is not just being misled, it’s also being misread. Until we address Americans honestly, and with the respect they deserve, they can be expected to remain largely disengaged from the global transformation we need them to be a part of.

When you look at the long string of global warming defeats under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, it is hard not to conclude that the environmental movement’s approach to problems and policies hasn’t worked particularly well. And yet there is nothing about the behavior of environmental groups, and nothing in our interviews with environmental leaders, that indicates that we as a community are ready to think differently about our work.

The arrogance here is that environmentalists ask not what we can do for non-environmental constituencies but what non-environmental constituencies can do for environmentalists. As a result, while public support for action on global warming is wide it is also frighteningly shallow.

The unmentioned irony in all this is that the environment is a quintessential system-of-systems. And yet environmentalists are some of the narrowest, and most parochial policy advocates out there. That leads to a big problem with credibility, and an even bigger problem with currency.

Interestingly, the diagnosis from Shellenberger & Nordhaus is terminal

“We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.”

That ‘something’ isn’t a environmentalism at all. It’s something much bigger that counts environmental harmony as a form of social validation.

@Gary,

Gore’s team took this idea to Capitol Hill. As described to me by a member of his team, the reception was not favorable. “‘Hell no,’ we were told.” The concern? Translated: “How are we going to raise money from those guys if we deregulate them?”

Wow, what a great find.

I have no idea how to unwind the predator state. My guess is that it will take insolvency. In fact, that’s not a guess. It’s happening now in Europe, whose silly socialism has bankrupted them. Sweden has private roads and national school vouchers.

So, give it time. Maybe 16 years of Bush/Obama will finally bring the empire to it’s knees.

Len,

The excerpts from Elise S. Brezis are historically hinky and even spurious, but the omniscient voice of the UNESCO types comes through loud & clear, and pitch-perfect. Please don’t think that I make light of your study of transnationalism or of the importance of mass education in achieving covert, elite ends. It’s just that I know the “International Education” crowd well and they’ve always had their heads up their arses as they fart together in Brussels and Paris and New York. A few of them have been really visionary but as a rule they think they’re the choke-chain on the guard dog when really they’re fleas on the smelly, remaining tail. Not one of them foresaw the key role of Westernized education in the dissolution of the Soviet, the normalization of China or the destabilization of Iran. They still miss the causal linkages and still privilege education as indoctrination. Indeed it is indoctrinating, just not substantively, as they suppose. It is, indeed predictably reproductive, but mainly structurally, not substantively. Globalists don’t begin to construe its basic structure, which they disastrously assume is culturally neutral, so they consistently miss its dangerous edginess while meanwhile they make their idiotically portentous pronunciamenti.

Meanwhile the knowing ones usually lose, sometimes hideously. As always, the sycophants win by flattering the powerful in the pandering language of powerlust. So be it! It’s a godsend!

Alex,

Thanks. I wondered what becamE of the “Dream Speech” metaphor. Do you see how liberalism, especially on the environmental-IST Popular Front, could resurge without it’s alleviating popular fears about governmental intrusion into spheres held as “private”–that is, beyond the reach of governmental arms? Best I can see, this is the big barrier against voter support for environmental sacrifice and stewardship. The cocky smartass generational nannyism. Get rid of that, and we’ve got miles to go before we sleep…

The fair elections act doesn’t seem too bad, though the levels in it all spear arbitrary.

It also utterly misses the point. Elections aren’t where the action is, because our elected “representatives” are a bunch of cowards who pass the buck on all hard choices to bureaucrats. Witness the handoff of all decision making to unelected regulators in the finance bill.

So the REAL decisions will be made by the regulators. The real lobbying will happen there.

Go ahead. Pass that election act. It’ll solve very little about he problems I see. Good luck getting it signed by a guy who didn’t accept public funding for his presidential election by the way.

A grand discussion indeed. If you believe the models discussed here we will soon be forced by circumstances of peaking just-about-everything in to, at best, a steady state economy.

If you want to be radical about it, paying interest on debt forces continual growth as the capital borrowed must generate more than the debt payment. Pension funds have fallen badly afoul of this with their allocation assumptions of being able to obtain 6% to 7% growth in their portfolios. Doing a linear extrapolation of what will most likely be an S-curve economic growth was a bad mistake and means many retirement assumptions will be out the window. The Greeks are discovering just how much this annoys people. Mind you, the concept of retirement in a post industrial society is rather meaningless, particularly as lifespans have extended so much despite the pollution of our precious bodily fluids by nasty chemicals.

I would like to add an even more radical item:

#9. All laws should have a way of measuring what they are trying to solve attached. Laws that do not solve what is intended are be eliminated.

It is much easier to create a law than it is to remove one. Let’s make it symmetric. Naturally, this would never happen…