Month: September 2012

As measured by student test scores and adjusted for budget ($13,000 per student (source)), Chicago has some of the world’s least effective schools. The teachers earn an average of $76,000 per year, but with health care, retirement, and other benefits, the true cost is probably closer to $150,000 per year (more than $200,000 per year for a teacher working a standard full-year schedule rather than just for nine months). A Teach for America graduate can be hired for as little as $25,500 per year (source) and will do at least as good a job (see this Stanford study). It would appear that Chicago thus has a golden opportunity to shed crushing pension and health care obligations by spinning off and decentralizing its public school system.

Chicago could simply create a non-profit organization for each school, give the administrative jobs within that school to existing administrators (presumably they are not on strike), fund those new non-profit organizations with $13,000 per student, and let the administrators hire whatever teachers they can find (including hiring from among the currently striking teachers) at market-clearing salaries and with a standard defined contribution retirement plan (rather than the defined benefit plan that has led to the Chicago Public School’s billion-dollar deficit). Now that Obamacare is available, give employees higher salaries and let them purchase health insurance from the Obamarkets.

For students in the Chicago schools, obviously the biggest problem is that they aren’t learning much. For childless taxpayers, however, the biggest problem is that an aging workforce is owed health care and pension benefits that could only be affordable in an economy with real per-capita GDP growth of 5 percent annually (instead of the 0-1 percent that we have). It would seem as though there is no better time to declare the experiment of a centralized school system run by the Chicago city government to be a failed one and, in doing so, spare the taxpayers from future ruin. A decentralized system of publicly-funded non-profit schools would provide at least as good an education, in the very same buildings, at a fraction of the current cost. After that it would be possible to try to do something for the kids, i.e., attempt to ensure that they are receiving an actual education.

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Harvest season is upon us in New England and with it the opportunity to buy organic locally farmed produce for 2-4X what Costco charges to drag the same vegetable or fruit up from Mexico and dump it into your minivan in Waltham.

A variety of analyses on whether or not locally produced food is truly good for the environment have been made, e.g., http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local-food/

I wonder if a simpler analysis would not apply. Let’s assume that every dollar we spend does a relatively constant amount of damage to the earth. If I give a person or a business an extra dollar, a fraction of that will be spent to buy gasoline, buy new manufactured products and discard old ones, buy electricity that will result in fossil fuels being burned, etc. There are some minor variations in how much damage will be done depending on the person or business that I give the dollar to, but in nearly all cases the more money spent the more damage will be done to the planet.

Thus if I buy local food for 4X the cost of food produced in Mexico, I am paying for New Englanders to drive around in cars, heat their houses with oil, purchase new smart phones and tablet computers, etc. Had I instead bought the produce from Mexico, I would have supported Mexicans who walk to work, heat just one room of their house and only when necessary, and make do with devices that they already own.

This analysis seems simplistic, but I am not sure that it is wrong. What do readers think? Is someone who buys local food at high prices hastening the destruction of the earth?

[Obviously there are other reasons to buy local food, such as taste, but this posting is purely about environmental damage.]

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I had dinner last night with a 28-year-old Spanish computer science researcher who is visiting a lab here in Boston for two months. He said that the economic situation in Spain is terrible. I asked what the root of the problem was, in his opinion. “We are a country of 47 million people but we’re broken up into 17 states, each of which has its own parliament. So there are a total of 18 parliaments. There are a huge number of politicians and each politician has a large collection of advisers. When construction was booming there was enough tax revenue to support all of this government, but now construction is finished and there isn’t enough money. The government has raised the value-added tax on everything to 21 percent. Previously it had been anywhere from 5 to 18 percent. This has driven a large portion of the economy underground and people will accept only cash in order to escape the 21 percent tax. People with university degrees are leaving to take jobs in the U.K. and Germany, which is a huge loss to Spain because their education was massively subsidized. I paid only 600 euro per year for my university education. You can fly back to Spain from Germany once per month for 50 euro each way.”

I thought that the conversation was interesting because it highlights the fact that the European Community coupled with airline deregulation has made it much easier for skilled workers to move around. A country that got in trouble in the old days could count on the fact that most of its young educated people would stay around to help dig out of the mess. Today those young people can scatter very quickly, each one taking a $200,000+ state investment in education with him or her.

[http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/05/spain-very-different-fiscal-crisis.html has an interesting chart.]

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I loved this New Yorker story about a Michigan dentist who managed a surprising meteoric rise in marathon performance. Web server IP address analysis plays a role, a detail that I appreciated. The article has become more timely now due to the fact that Paul Ryan apparently claimed to have run a three-hour marathon (story).

It is tough to feel proud of one’s achievements in a country where politicians and government workers claim credit for everything! (e.g., Al Gore invented the Internet, President Obama tells business founders that they owe everything to infrastructure built 100 years ago, and now Ryan turns out to be a running superhero)

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_stillman?currentPage=all is a worthwhile New Yorker magazine article on how the government coerces young people accused of minor drug crimes into serving as police informants, sometimes at the cost of their lives. To me this is an illustration of why the excitement around the current presidential election is misplaced. When there is something truly going wrong with our society, generally both parties support it.

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Harvard is complaining that 125 students cheated by collaborating on a take-home exam in a course called “Introduction to Congress” (syllabus), part of their Government department. As this was the final exam, however, could it be that the students simply had absorbed the lessons of the class? It is unclear whether or not the career of Ted Kennedy was covered, for example, but he was surely one of the most successful members of Congress and, in 1951, he sent a friend to take a final exam in Spanish for him (Harvard suspended Kennedy for two years following this infraction).

Cheating does not work well in a competitive marketplace. Customers eventually figure out that a product does not do what was promised or that an alternative vendor has a superior product. But cheating can be very effective for government workers and politicians. My old home of Montgomery County, Maryland has close to the lowest crime rate in the state (source), yet 77 percent of the police officers retire with a service-related disability (source). Members of Congress can make money via insider trading (see this article on Peter Schweizer’s book) Voters expect politicians to lie to them, promising stuff that cannot possibly be delivered.

After learning all of this, is it reasonable to expect students to take the high/difficult road?

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If you’re in Manhattan this week, don’t miss a 29-minute sound installation work running continuously at the Park Avenue Armory (at 67th). The building itself is worth a trip if you haven’t been inside. The “sound art” consists of roughly 100 B&W speakers placed in various locations within a cavernous darkened space. With so many speakers, some of them well above the audience, it is possible to create very realistic illusions of, for example, birds flying overhead. The piece, by Cardiff and Miller, ends on Sunday, September 9th. Note that the work is marred by a woman reciting what is supposedly a dream. This is reminiscent of Sarah Silverman’s routine about having a dream of a shark coming out a swimming pool wearing braces and that therefore Martin Luther King’s dream was nothing special. Except that Silverman was funny.

In the evening, don’t miss Harrison, Texas, a Horton Foote play, at 59 E. 59th Street, an intimate theater. Closes September 15.

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