Education Rheeform

Newsweek loves Michelle Rhee, the head of DC public schools. Since Mayor Fenty brought Rhee in last summer to fix up one of the lowest-performing and most costly education systems in the nation, Newsweek has written two full articles (here and here) on her projects and made at least one favorable reference to Rhee in separate commentary. What's all the fuss?

Rhee, of Korean descent, allegedly is using her outsider-status to conduct all-out warfare on ingrained systemic mediocrity. The workaholic already has fired one in four of DC's principles. She wants to abolish the tenure system so that under-performing teachers can be fired. Meanwhile she is allowing the regular public school system to shrink in favor of the growing public charter school system, which hires non-unionized teachers.

Newsweek suggests that the Rhee administration wants to make teaching into a high-paying, high-pressure career with 12-hour days and only a month of summer vacation. Rhee leads the way with 18-hour work days and a $275,000 salary.

You might say that Rhee is thinking like an economist: she focuses on productivity, with little or no regard to short-term costs to the individuals and communities involved. Rhee has been accused of acting with a lack of transparency, making hiring and firing decisions on her own without stating specific reasons for her actions. The teachers union has run radio ads against her. An entire blog is "Dedicated to Providing Important Information About Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Before She Destroys Public Education."

Only time will tell if the rabble she is rousing will lead to worthy results.

Fertility and Poverty II

This month the U.S. census bureau released a new report based on surveys done a couple years ago: Fertility of American Women: 2006.

The data, provided by a gazillion women between the ages of 15 and 50, support the well-known trends that women tend to have fewer children when they have more education and more income. But I will argue that the data suggests far more: poor women who have lots of children are poor primarily because of their decision to prioritize children over income, and the fact that they decided to have lots of children has little to do with their innate (genetic) potential to succeed in the quest for material wealth.

My claim rests on the relationship between this perplexing pair of facts:

• Women currently at a low income level are about 60% more likely to have had a baby within the last year as compared to women with much higher [household] incomes.
• Among women aged 40 to 44, the ones currently at a low income level had given birth to only 10 to 15% more children in the course of their entire lives than had women in wealthier income groups.

If poverty causes women to procreate -- and not the other way around -- than the first fact suggests that wealthy women would have far fewer births in a lifetime compared to poor women. However, the second fact shows that there is a very weak relationship between current income and how many births a 40-44 yrs-old women has had. In other words, the poverty of mothers (compared to the wealth of non-mothers) tends to last only as long as these women are raising small children.

The fact that women who have had lots of children do nearly as well financially in later years -- despite the lost income and hours of work during the most intensive parenting years -- suggests to me that these women might be even more innately prone to financial success than the less reproductive women. (Of course, financial success can come in at least two ways: through the development of a career or by a spouse's career.)

Do you think that this is a reasonable interpretation of the data? Check it yourself. Table 2 and 3 discuss lifetime fertility and last-year's fertility, respectively.

Economics and Community II

Marglin responds:

Thanks. I'm flattered to be the Wendell Berry of economists. I'd say you cut through my ramblings pretty well. I'd add that thinking like an economist is not only to emphasize algorithm but also to assume that everyone is a self interested individual whose only goal in life is more, more, and still more consumption and whose only community is the nation state. Moreover to think that this is our hard wired human nature. Thinking like an economist promotes markets and markets undermine community. That's the short version of the book. Steve Marglin

How does economic thinking undermine community?

You might well find the answers in Harvard economist Stephen A. Marglin's recent release, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community.

The primary provocative premise is given on page 1:

... over the past four hundred years, the ideology of economics has fostered both the self-interested individual and the market system, and has undermined, and continues to undermine, the community.

What is "the ideology of economics?" What is "the community?" And how to they conflict? Unfortunately, the Wendall-Berry-of-economists (just look at his picture!) declines to state a succinct argument, instead indulging in chapters deep in nuance and philosophical ramblings. That leaves me to give a stumbling shot at interpretation:

• A community of affinity is exemplified by the typical contemporary American church: members come and go based almost entirely on personal preference. By contrast, a community of need is exemplified by the feudal manor, the family unit (at least in the days before divorce was convenient), or the self-contained "village." The communities we're focusing on here are communities of need.
  
• Individual wealth and industrialization undermine the traditional communities of need. Health insurance policies make people independent of one another. Home equity serves as insurance against hard times for individuals. The banking and credit card industries give individuals the ability to store up and spend wealth without the protection or approval of a community. Personal wealth frees us (often from bondage) and isolates us (often from love).
• By contrast, "communal wealth" may refer to a good environment, strong relationships, strong habits and customs that enable people to live healthy lives without needing to be especially intentional about it.
  
• Personal wealth clearly undermines communities of need, but what does that have to do with "thinking like an economist?" It's awfully subtle. Here's some more terminology for ya:
  
• Algorithmic knowledge is math, statistics, science, the measurable, thing that can be published in a journal or a cookbook. Experiential knowledge includes not only our subjective "experience" of life, how we feel, but also the things we are able to do without following a recipe. A large portion of what we is learned by doing and improved by intuition. And a large portion of how we experience life is based on our context rather than our explicit (algorithmic) image of our context.
  
• To Marglin, economics is a dismal science because it completely ignores experiential knowledge, and in doing so, economics promotes the individualism embodied by algorithmic (explicit) economic models. They evaluate the success of an economic policy by its effect on the sum of all individual happiness, or "utility," without trying to interpret utility beyond saying that individuals get more utility as their personal wealth increases.
  
• Economists seem to be making the questionable assumption that individuals are at least as well qualified as communities to make the "value judgments" necessary to gain the most utility -- or any utility at all -- from their personal accumulations of wealth.
  
• Economists, with complete attention to the individual and little concept of community (other than communities of affinity, which individuals may buy into), focus primarily on creating policies which maximize the size of the "pie," or the total output of the economy, and leave it to the political process to determine the best way to distribute the pie, to decide whether to tax the rich enough to have free public health care, etc.
• In fact, the community just might be a far better mechanism for the distribution of pie than the state, thus justifying at least a slight reduction in the total size of the pie in favor of a return to communal power structures. For example, creating barriers to international trade might reduce the size of the pie, but might also shift power away from abstract international organizations towards local communities, whose vitality could possibly have intrinsic value above and beyond the ability of the community to provide materially to its members.
  
• The individualism of economics is not only a way of speaking: it shapes how people understand the meaning of their lives and determines where people look for value. Instead of inheriting a sense of place and purpose from a community, individuals immersed in Western economic thought subconsciously take on its individualistic creeds and seek fulfillment through the advancement of self. Until economists acknowledge the potential power and felt value of the commune, their quest for individual fulfillment may be dismal indeed.
  

Certifications: The degrees of the future

Charles Murray wins the Freakwenter Prize for excellence in opinion journalism.

Fertility and Poverty I

This is the first in a series of posts exploring the relationships between income levels and birth rates.

Why do poorer people tend to have higher birth rates than middle class people in the US?

Some guesses:
1. Poorer people may face much lower marginal costs for child birth, for two reasons.
1.a. Social transfers: Child birth costs for the poor are covered by medicaid, some subsidies exist for day care, and state universities are very cheap, especially for those in need.
1.b. Middle-class people are socially (if not primarily internally) obligated to provide for their children at a middle-class level, which is much more expensive per child than for poor people.
2. Poorer people may have a fundamentally different set of preferences and values than middle class. They may be less on-board with the societal materialism contest and more interested in family.
3. Poorer people tend to be the ones who are least equipped to act strategically in the modern world, so they may be more prone to having "accidental" births, or less thorough in thinking through the consequences of having more children.
4. Poorer people tend to work less hours per week (is this true?) and therefore have time to contemplate having children.

SmartCar of the Future

http://www.smartsrus.com/smart_car_prototypes.htm

Measuring Customer Service

After reading the current typist on Sears' Customer Service, I decided to try to get a big-picture of exactly how bad Sears' customer service is, and compare that to some similar big retail chains.

Let's start with some anecdotes:

• Sears has at least one blog devoted to its demise, consisting of exactly one entertaining story.
• One fellow converted to faith in Sears, but I'd say the credit for his good experience has more to do with his brilliant way of dealing with inept customer services than with professionalism on their end.

But everyone knows that anecdotes are only anecdotes. How can we measure the overall quality of customer service at a very large company? Consider the following:

Googling "Sears customer service complaints" (without quotes) gets 284,000 hits. The same for Wal-Mart gets 1,150,000 hits. For Target, 1,810,000 hits. For Ikea, 134,000. For Lowes, 388,000.

It wouldn't be fair to compare chains of different sizes, so we could partially correct for that by dividing these numbers by the 2007 annual gross revenue of each chain. So, dividing each of these number by the corresponding revenue, in tens-of-millions, gives the Freakwenter Index of customer satisfaction for these leading chains. Using revenue numbers posted on wikipedia, the first place prize goes to Wal-Mart (index of 29.6), second place to Ikea (46.9), third to Lowes (82.7), fourth to Sears (120.3), and dead last to Target (285.5).

Sloppy dealers and innocent buyers: What is fair?

The current typist's epic battle with Sears' customer service brings to mind a similar experience I had about 3 years ago, when I ordered a used textbook for about $60 from a private dealer through amazon.com.

My classes were starting just as the book arrived, but when it arrived I discovered that the dealer had sent me an outdated edition which clearly did not match my order, and would not have the homework problems that I needed for the course. I was obliged to purchase the book at a bookstore for the full purchase price of $120, having no more time to shop around for used copies.

I reasoned to myself that the dealer ought to bear that extra cost. I emailed him and let him know that I planned to leave poor feedback on his business's Amazon account, but I would refrain from doing so if he would quickly send me a check for $120. He responded with a vigorous email offensive, going so far as to contact my superiors in the graduate program (thankfully, they minded their own business). After some back and forth, involving me putting up negative feed back and pulling it back down, we both settled on me keeping the unwanted textbook and getting a full refund.

In retrospect, I wondered if I should have been more gentle toward the dealer. As the old West Virginian proverb states, "When in doubt, give the benefit." What if his mistake was genuine, and he was not particularly trying to get away with selling a useless book?

In general, how far should buyer-victims go in holding dealers responsible for the extended consequences of their actions in cases of sloppiness -- if there is not a strong reason to believe that the dealer was knowingly causing problems? Is there a set of guidelines or precedents on this topic?

A New God

Yesterday the Church of the Future addressed the question, "What is God?"

Even before you can meaningfully debate the existence of God, you have to have at least some concept of what God is - or would - be. As became apparent in our discussion yesterday, it can be exceedingly difficult for people to put an image of God into words.

There are lots of mainstream assumptions about God in my culture. To name a few,

• There is exactly one God.
• God likes people, or at least cares about them. God is good.
• God is infinitely powerful.
• God is everywhere.
• God is a lot like a person. Josh Turner sings that he and God are like "two peas in a pod."
• People can have two-way communication with God.
• God has desires.
  

The people of the Church of the Future did not emphasize these assumptions, but neither did they go out of their way to tear them down. Instead, they tried to talk about their deeply personal experiences of "God." They felt God out in nature, during Bible study, with close friends, and in scary situations.

The people of the Church of the Future also expressed considerable discontent with their lack of a more constant and deep experience of God. Why don't we sense the presence of God more often, they asked. At least to most of them, the experience of God was a rare thing, and a moment to be treasured and pondered.

I find nearly all of the mainstream assumptions about God to be repugnant at worst and unsupportable at best. And yet, I'm not convinced that the term "God" cannot be useful. In the words of Tolstoy,

How important the concept of God is, and how instead of valuing what has been given us, we with light hearts spurn it because of absurdities that have been attached to it.

But still, what is God? Is it possible to put this into words? And is it important to do so? I have no opinion. With great cluelessness and carelessness I hereby propose the following non-creed. Far from saying what is God, this non-creed gives some examples of how one might use the word "God" in context (its meaning only to be inferred), without attaching absurdities. Admittedly, this non-creed is vague enough to allow some other terms, most notably "consciousness" to fill in for God, so it could be developed more:

• God is beyond words. God is primarily felt, and to the feeler, a scientific description of God is mostly irrelevant.
• God is immediately and constantly present to every person capable of self-conciousness.
• God is in each person, and each person is in God (maybe).
• People who work together with shared purpose often experience an increased presence of God.

A New Job

Sometimes people sound resentful when they hear how much time I get to spend staring off into space or playing soccer while I'm at work. I agree, I tell them. If ever I'm president of the US, I'm going to crack down on government spending, eliminating most government positions like mine. But until that happens, I'm going to make the best of this opportunity. What would be the good in quitting, only to let the next-best slob take my place? Instead, I will pretend that I'm in graduate school on a fellowship. I will see how many problems I can work through in Statistical Inference, 2nd edition, before class begins in September.