Month: November 2016

Especially during election years one angle that politicians like to work is “family.” Vote for my party and the family unit will be strengthened.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari) says that it is the state and market economy that are inherently the enemy of family cohesion:

Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community. The state sent its policemen to stop family vendettas and replace them with court decisions. The market sent its hawkers to wipe out longstanding local traditions and replace them with ever-changing commercial fashions. Yet this was not enough. In order really to break the power of family and community, they needed the help of a fifth column. The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.’ Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins.

The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

The market shapes to an ever-greater degree the way people conduct their romantic and sexual lives. Whereas traditionally the family was the main matchmaker, today it’s the market that tailors our romantic and sexual preferences, and then lends a hand in providing for them – for a fat fee. Previously bride and groom met in the family living room, and money passed from the hands of one father to another. Today courting is done at bars and cafés, and money passes from the hands of lovers to waitresses. Even more money is transferred to the bank accounts of fashion designers, gym managers, dieticians, cosmeticians and plastic surgeons, who help us arrive at the café looking as similar as possible to the market’s ideal of beauty.

The state, too, keeps a sharper eye on family relations, especially between parents and children. In many countries parents are obliged to send their children to be educated in government schools, and even where private education is allowed, the state still supervises and vets the curriculum. Parents who are especially abusive or violent with their children may be restrained by the state. If need be, the state may even imprison the parents or transfer their children to foster families. Until not long ago, the suggestion that the state ought to prevent parents from beating or humiliating their children would have been rejected out of hand as ludicrous and unworkable. In most societies parental authority was sacred. Respect of and obedience to one’s parents were among the most hallowed values, and parents could do almost anything they wanted, including killing newborn babies, selling children into slavery and marrying off daughters to men more than twice their age. Today, parental authority is in full retreat. Youngsters are increasingly excused from obeying their elders, whereas parents are blamed for anything that goes wrong in the life of their child. Mum and Dad are about as likely to be found innocent in the Freudian courtroom as were defendants in a Stalinist show trial.

In the previous posting on this book I noted that the author refused to consider the possibility that there could be either a genetic or a work/effort basis for why some humans are wealthier than others. The only factor was being born into a rich versus a poor family.

This section is kind of interesting for the omission of the rise of no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce in countries around the world, nor of welfare system incentives to have children without a partner (or a job). There is no reference to statistics such as “Fewer than half of U.S. kids today live in a ‘traditional’ family” (Pew Research, 2014; noting that “Fewer than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage.”). People can disagree on what impact this is having on children but surely there must be some impact?

[Separately, the author shows a lack of acquaintance with the U.S. family law system and the U.S. welfare system. Searching for an example of an impoverished person, he uses as an example “an American single mother earning $12,000 a year cleaning houses.” If she got to be a single mother by having sex with a zero-income man she wouldn’t have to work because she’d be entitled to housing, health care, food, smartphone, etc. from the government (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession). If she got to be a single mother by having sex with a high-income man (Medicaid dentist?) she wouldn’t have to work because she should be getting $12,000 per month from the biological father of her child (see California, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, for example).]

Was the family all that important in the old old days? Maybe not.

some evolutionary psychologists argue that ancient foraging bands were not composed of nuclear families centred on monogamous couples. Rather, foragers lived in communes devoid of private property, monogamous relationships and even fatherhood. In such a band, a woman could have sex and form intimate bonds with several men (and women) simultaneously, and all of the band’s adults cooperated in parenting its children. Since no man knew definitively which of the children were his, men showed equal concern for all youngsters.

Such a social structure is not an Aquarian utopia. It’s well documented among animals, notably our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos. There are even a number of present-day human cultures in which collective fatherhood is practised, as for example among the Barí Indians. According to the beliefs of such societies, a child is not born from the sperm of a single man, but from the accumulation of sperm in a woman’s womb. A good mother will make a point of having sex with several different men, especially when she is pregnant, so that her child will enjoy the qualities (and paternal care) not merely of the best hunter, but also of the best storyteller, the strongest warrior and the most considerate lover. If this sounds silly, bear in mind that before the development of modern embryological studies, people had no solid evidence that babies are always sired by a single father rather than by many.

How did families get to be so big? It was the Agricultural Revolution:

With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow. Giving up the nomadic lifestyle enabled women to have a child every year. Babies were weaned at an earlier age – they could be fed on porridge and gruel. The extra hands were sorely needed in the fields. But the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted. As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for his or her porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality soared. In most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty.5 Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans kept having larger numbers of children. With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC.

How has the family changed in recent times? We have a lot more bedrooms!

Most Westerners today believe in individualism. They believe that every human is an individual, whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her. Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives. In modern Western schools teachers and parents tell children that if their classmates make fun of them, they should ignore it. Only they themselves, not others, know their true worth. In modern architecture, this myth leaps out of the imagination to take shape in stone and mortar. The ideal modern house is divided into many small rooms so that each child can have a private space, hidden from view, providing for maximum autonomy. This private room almost invariably has a door, and in some households it may be accepted practice for the child to close, and perhaps lock, the door. Even parents may be forbidden to enter without knocking and asking permission. The room is usually decorated as the child sees fit, with rock-star posters on the wall and dirty socks on the floor. Somebody growing up in such a space cannot help but imagine himself ‘an individual’, his true worth emanating from within rather than from without.

Medieval noblemen did not believe in individualism. Someone’s worth was determined by their place in the social hierarchy, and by what other people said about them. Being laughed at was a horrible indignity. Noblemen taught their children to protect their good name whatever the cost. Like modern individualism, the medieval value system left the imagination and was manifested in the stone of medieval castles. The castle rarely contained private rooms for children (or anyone else, for that matter). The teenage son of a medieval baron did not have a private room on the castle’s second floor, with posters of Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur on the walls and a locked door that his parents were not allowed to open. He slept alongside many other youths in a large hall. He was always on display

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Martin Lomasney was a Boston politician credited with coining the phrase “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”

“Harvard Men’s Soccer Team Is Sidelined for Vulgar ‘Scouting Report’” (nytimes) suggests that this lesson was not absorbed by the recent crop of Harvard undergrads. (The article also shows the sloppiness of the New York Times. The Crimson article on which the Times article is based says that it was Google Groups that got the young men in trouble; the Times reporter conflates this with the (generally private) Google Docs.)

Has anything like this ever happened before in Cambridge? Yes, but it was at MIT and the students did not make their documents public inadvertently. Susan Gilbert and Roxanne Ritchie, who lived in my old dorm (East Campus), actually did have sex with 36 men (unlike the Harvard students who considered the possibility) and then wrote “Consumer Guide to MIT Men” with full names, and it was published in a 1977 issue of a campus weekly (MIT Museum nomination page).

A common thread uniting these events separated by 35 years is that both were the fault of men. In the case of Harvard it was the fault of men for writing the report. In the case of MIT it was the fault of a man for publishing the report (the women who had sex with 36 partners and wrote about them were put on probation; the male editor was suspended).

[Separately, now that these Harvard guys can’t play soccer, will they get so bored that they crack open a book and study?]

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My Facebook friends are getting ever more vocal about the terrifying prospect of a Trump victory. One of the first predicted acts of the dictator Trump will be to abolish Congress. It turns out that folks in neutral Denmark have been preparing for this contingency and have stored a complete set of plans in a secure location. They’ve also made a bunch of duplicates of those plans, as I understand it.

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A friend expressed puzzlement over his former apartment-mate’s Facebook feed: “He used to be a Republican.” The feed contains, interspersed with family and gourmet food photos, links to various anti-Trump articles, e.g., coverage of a preliminary hearing in a recently filed civil lawsuit alleging that, back in 1994, Donald Trump had sex with a 13-year-old girl (“Any woman who wants to make money by suing a man would be well-advised to allege rape,” said one divorce litigator). Underneath the story about the now-35-year-old woman’s quest for cash through litigation is a photo of our former Republican voter shaking hands with Hillary Clinton hash-tagged #ImWithHer.

[The 35-year-old woman didn’t file a criminal complaint against The Donald, so the only remedy available to her is cash. Attorneys promise that an anonymous witness will come forward to say that she observed an anonymous 12-year-old girl being raped in 1994, said nothing, continued to work for the organizer of the rape (not Trump) for eight more years, and is just now ready to speak up, but only in the context of a cash-seeking civil suit.]

How did this former Republican turn into an apparently passionate and certainly well-connected Democrat? Subsequent to his apartment-sharing days he became a high-level executive in a Silicon Valley giant. Why would a rich person support a candidate that promises to raise taxes? “Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run” (Guardian) offers one possible explanation:

the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.

There are wonderful things to be found in this treasure trove when you search the gilded words “Davos” or “Tahoe”. But it is when you search “Vineyard” on the WikiLeaks dump that you realize these people truly inhabit a different world from the rest of us. By “vineyard”, of course, they mean Martha’s Vineyard, the ritzy vacation resort island off the coast of Massachusetts where presidents Clinton and Obama spent most of their summer vacations. The Vineyard is a place for the very, very rich to unwind, yes, but as we learn from these emails, it is also a place of high idealism; a land of enlightened liberal commitment far beyond anything ordinary citizens can ever achieve.

Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.

But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.

So there you have it! If he wants his kids to get a job ten years from now at a Manhattan-based non-profit, he needs to be at a Hillary fundraiser today.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari) has a great of putting the conquest of Earth by Homo sapiens into context:

The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish. … Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species. And why not? Today there are many species of foxes, bears and pigs. The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. It’s our current exclusivity, not that multi-species past, that is peculiar – and perhaps incriminating. As we will shortly see, we Sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings.

Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

most scientists agree that by 150,000 years ago, East Africa was populated by Sapiens that looked just like us.

What if we hadn’t wiped out our genetic cousins?

Whichever way it happened, the Neanderthals (and the other human species) pose one of history’s great what ifs. Imagine how things might have turned out had the Neanderthals or Denisovans survived alongside Homo sapiens. What kind of cultures, societies and political structures would have emerged in a world where several different human species coexisted? How, for example, would religious faiths have unfolded? Would the book of Genesis have declared that Neanderthals descend from Adam and Eve, would Jesus have died for the sins of the Denisovans, and would the Qur’an have reserved seats in heaven for all righteous humans, whatever their species? Would Neanderthals have been able to serve in the Roman legions, or in the sprawling bureaucracy of imperial China? Would the American Declaration of Independence hold as a self-evident truth that all members of the genus Homo are created equal? Would Karl Marx have urged workers of all species to unite?

Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. When Charles Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged. Even today many refuse to believe it. Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.

Our success is making us progressively dumber:

Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive, they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximise the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required information about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They needed to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, how to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and how to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Mastery of each of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the flaking properties of flint and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely. In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.

The book inadvertently shows the bounds of acceptable discourse in modern academia. The author is a professor of history in Israel. The book contains one example after another of genetics determining behavior, sometimes to the point that an entire species went extinct due to uncompetitive abilities. Yet there is one outcome that the author says cannot possibly be influenced by genes:

But the hierarchy of rich and poor – which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighbourhoods, study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in separate and better-equipped facilities – seems perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans. Yet it’s a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason that they were born into a rich family, while most poor people will remain poor throughout their lives simply because they were born into a poor family. … Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. … And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.

The work of Gregory Clark, ultimately published as The Son Also Rises, which suggests that there is a genetic component to success, is not referenced. Nor is the fact that intelligence is as heritable as any other characteristic and our modern economy values intelligent workers. Essentially an author who had fully accepted the dogma of modern genetics subscribes to Lamarckism when it is time to explain why some of us are more financially successful than others. (The economist Clark, in The Son Also Rises shows that it can’t be as simple as “rich people inherited money from their parents” because the generation-to-generation correlation isn’t strongly affected by the number of children (i.e., the number of ways in which an inheritance must be divided).)

More: Read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

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Due to the fact that my vote in Massachusetts doesn’t count and due to having predicted Hillary’s victory back in April 2015, I haven’t been paying too much attention to election news. Has anyone bothered to sift through the clutter to figure out what the practical policy differences might be between the two main candidates? Let me try to make an outline and then readers can fill in details.

Sources: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/and https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/

Taxes

Trump wants to cut rates, bringing them down closer to Singapore’s, Ireland’s, etc. Hillary wants to raise tax rates, bringing them closer to what France charges.

(Federal Reserve shows that actual collections as a percentage of GDP haven’t varied much since the mid-1950s, despite wildly different headline rates, which suggests that the only way for the government to get more money is via Americans becoming wealthier (per-capita GDP growth) or by expanding population (more people to tax).)

Immigration

Trump wants to cut back on illegal immigration and redesign legal immigration to favor those who are likely to earn a lot and therefore pay a lot in taxes? Hillary wants to continue the expansion of immigration, especially from non-Western countries, that began under JFK. Essentially everyone who is currently in the U.S. illegally will be able to become a citizen, perhaps without paying a fee? (“Hillary will work to expand fee waivers to alleviate naturalization costs”)

Foreign Policy

Trump wants to stop poking Russia with a stick. Hillary thinks that we are clever enough to use our military and economic power to bend foreigners to our will.

Nation of Victims

Hillary promises to assist Americans with disabilities (but we’re already the world leaders in collecting disability benefits).

Hillary promises to assist Americans who are victimized by their self-identification as “women”: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/womens-rights-and-opportunity/ says women will get paid more when they work, will get paid when they don’t work, and won’t have to divert any of this increased pay to contraceptives or abortions (which will be subsidized by taxpayers? But aren’t about half of them women?). [If identifying as a “woman” triggers the requirement for so much government assistance, wouldn’t an intelligent citizen simply identify as a “man”? Hillary promises to make changing your gender easier.]

Trump makes no corresponding promises.

Getting Taxpayers to Fund Your Kids

Trump says that anyone who can create or obtain custody of an additional child will pay less in taxes (see also Donald Trump’s child care tax deduction idea). He also promises some Federal money so that poor families can enjoy “school choice” (private schools, charter schools, magnet schools).

Hillary promises to pay parents for not working and the money will come from “making the wealthy pay their fair share–not by increasing taxes on working families.” (so a wealthy person can escape the higher taxes by having a W-2 job and being in a multi-person household? Or is that still not a “working family”?) Hillary promises free daycare (“preschool”) for all American kids starting at age 4. Child care will be limited to less than “10 percent of [family] income” (so a family with zero income can have 8 kids and park them in daycare 24/7 at taxpayer expense?)

Hillary leads with “no child should ever have to grow up in poverty” and then provides details. If we take her at her word, anyone can escape poverty by having a child since (a) the government doesn’t want to take kids away from parents, or at least not the mother, and (b) the child cannot be lifted out of poverty without giving the parent(s) an above-poverty-line lifestyle. Another implication of this philosophy is that people without jobs can have an unlimited number of children, assured that taxpayers will take care of these kids through adulthood (and beyond?).

Summary: Trump wants people with jobs to have more kids; Hillary wants people without jobs to have more kids.

Related: The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications (successful people tend to have successful children, but not because of inherited wealth)

Appointing Judges

Hillary will find liberal judges to bless everything that the Great Mother in Washington does for her children? Trump will let his sister (a Federal appeals court judge) pick boring, but competent, people?

Gun Nuts (subsection of “Appointing Judges”?)

Hillary promises to torture gun nuts with paperwork and regulation. Men who’ve been defendants in custody or child support lawsuits won’t be able to own guns because it is conventional for female plaintiffs to accuse them of domestic violence and Hillary says she will “stop domestic abusers from buying and owning guns.”

Trump says that he will appoint Supreme Court justices who will continue with the current interpretation of the Second Amendment (i.e., that ordinary citizens can have guns).

Health

Hillary will cure Alzheimer’s, Autism, and HIV/AIDS (see the top-level issues page), but mental health problems are too tough to be erased with Federal dollars? And cancer has already been beaten by Obama’s “moonshot”? (Not to be confused with Nixon’s “War on Cancer”)

Trump doesn’t promise any advances in medicine or science.

Business and Trade

Hillary will make it illegal for an American to get a job paying less than $15/hour (Labor). She will “say no to trade deals, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership…” Hillary will help small businesses (but not if they want to hire anyone at less than $15/hour) and radically change the American legal system for handling contract disputes, at least when it is a big company and a small company fighting (her plan). [Hillary doesn’t explain why a big company wouldn’t then just try to avoid contracting with small companies. Or perhaps have an overseas division contract with a small company overseas rather than subjecting themselves to the new tilted playing field.]

Trump also will bail out on “the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has not yet been ratified.” (Trade) He promises to harass China and Mexico (but not Canada?). He complains about Mexico having a value-added tax (but the U.S. will need one soon too given how we spend!).

Is that it?

Readers: Are the above the main substantive differences between what the candidates propose to do? If not, please add some more sections via comments below.

[Note that I’m specifically ignoring statements about K-12 education because there isn’t much that a federal politician can do about state-run schools. I’m also ignoring the questions about personal character that have been raised, e.g., Trump’s comments about what American women will do for guys who are rich and/or famous and the Clinton dynasty’s billion-dollar revenue stream from selling access and influence. The question is what these two would do as part of the job of President assuming that (a) one of them wins, and (b) whoever wins delivers on promises made to voters.]

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The local (suburban Boston) McDonald’s restaurants are begging for job applicants with prominent signs promising $12/hour in starting pay. As this is substantially above both the state ($9/hour) and Federal ($7.25) minimum wages it would appear that at least Eastern Massachusetts is effectively operating without a statutory minimum wage (like a bunch of countries). Yet people here are passionate supporters of anything proposed by Hillary Clinton, including a $12/hour minimum wage (this politician seems to have flip-flopped on the exact amount that central planners in D.C. would impose via regulation). Why the passion for a minimum wage that would have no effect here? I’m wondering if the answer is competitive advantage. New England has suffered a lot of job losses from factories moving to lower-wage union-rejecting areas in the Carolinas. If we can get central planners in Washington to make it more expensive to do business in the South and in rural parts of the U.S., won’t that boost the economy here in a crowded urban area?

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Massachusetts has a handful of charter schools, but most poor people have to send their kids to whatever school the local government chooses to supply them. Rich people here get to choose a school, of course. A ballot question would gradually raise the cap on charter schools, enabling some additional poor families to behave like the rich.

If you haven’t seen a unionized schoolteacher working past 2:50 pm you haven’t been to Massachusetts lately. Public school teachers, whose total compensation is at least double the market-clearing wage (as demonstrated by what private and charter schools pay), turn out to various evening events educating citizens regarding the damage that will be inflicted on their children if more charter schools are allowed. See saveourpublicschoolsma.com:

In 2017, charter schools will siphon off more than $450 million in funds that would otherwise stay in public schools. if Question 2 passes, that amount can increase by $100 million a year.

[the site notes that “Save Our Public Schools is a grassroots organization of families, parents, educators and students” but I have never seen anyone other that a union schoolteacher working at one of the events]

Most voters send their children to government-run schools. Most voters live in towns where government-run schools are, in fact, the only option for families that can’t afford, or don’t want to afford, a private school. The unionized teachers fighting this measure stick to one message: when a child switches to a charter school, the local public school will receive less funding and this lack of funding will result in a lower quality education for your children. The evening events explain the complex way in which even a district with no charter schools available might receive less money from the state.

I’ll be interested to see what happens, but if this works I think it will be the blueprint for the rest of the country. As long as the majority of kids are in public school, unionized teachers need only say “public school kids will do worse due to having less funding” and any initiative relating to charter schools will die.

From my (rich and charter school-free) suburb’s mailing list:

The Happy Valley Committee has weighed in with a clear and convincing argument for why we should vote “No on Question 2”. I will certainly follow their lead- voting no on 2!

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I am no fan of the “Common Core” Curriculum, and feel that we have yet to develop adequate reforms to ensure our schools remain competitive and beneficial, especially for students who are less privileged (by virtue of economics, race, native language, etc).

That being said, I agree with the School Committee: Question #2, if passed, would pull money away from our public schools and there would be a worrisome lack of accountability for the use of that money. This is deeply concerning.

As I see it; Question #2, even though well-intended, is not a recipe for reform but an abandonment of our responsibility to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity for a good education.

So, I will be voting “No” on Question #2.

[In other words, the “reform” process started 50+ years ago needs a little more time. Maybe we will catch up to the world leaders if we save the budget from predation by charter schools, except that our suburb has never had one!]

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I too am voting no. I understand and agree that children need the best possible education. I am a former teacher.

If #2 had come with funding it would be a different story. But I cannot vote for charter schools that decrease the overall budget for inner city public schools (schools that already are suffering from inadequate budgets) in order to allow for more charter schools.

I volunteer in a class in a public school in Roxbury that has awesome teachers and interested students and definitely needs more resources.

[She’s writing about the Boston Public Schools, which the U.S. Census Bureau says has the highest per-pupil spending of any large school district in the U.S. (and therefore perhaps the highest in the world?). Note that the headline $20,502/student number for 2013 doesn’t include capital expenses such as actually building schools.]

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The [officials who run a high school jointly with another town] Committee also voted unanimously in early October to oppose question 2 after a long, good discussion about equity and finances.

The Committee concluded that while the concept of Charters was not necessarily at issue, the funding, fundamental lack of local control over the governance of MA Charters, selective nature for admission and retention of students, and impact of outside (out-of-state) corporate interests in this campaign were all of great concern.

[Charter schools in Massachusetts are regulated by the state, apparently, so a local committee like this would lose influence.]

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Voting “no” on that question would leave the funding with the public schools, for newer equipment, more supplies, and fewer children per classroom. Opportunity to provide more attention to a struggling or special needs child, as well as to provide supplemental and thought provoking materials for the curious child. Let’s work to improve the neighborhood schools so every child can receive a good education, with the proper $$ and materials available to the teachers.

[I.e., if we work together we can reverse the 50-year process that left us where we are today.]

I do have to admire the optimism of the Millionaires for Obama regarding this issue. If the world’s most lavishly funded government hasn’t accomplished something after 50 or 100 years then surely it hasn’t been given a fair chance.

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A virtuous Hillary-supporting friend on Facebook posted a link about helping out at a Black Girls Code event. This generated a huge number of “likes” of course. I’m wondering why this works out as virtuous, though. I’m a volunteer tutor for children in our small suburb (currently working on 8th grade math and so far I’ve learned that nobody of average intelligence could possibly stay awake and motivated through public school 8th grade math). If I posted on the town email list “I am happy to tutor, but only if the child is of Race X and Gender Identification Y” (and if they change gender ID halfway through the school year, or through a tutoring session, what then?), I have a feeling that this would not put me into the virtue category. If it doesn’t work in the 1:1 context, why does it work to create an organization that sorts out and excludes children by race/gender?

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From my inbox… November is Transgender Awareness Month.

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