Today's Links of Interest

Economists Can't Be Trusted on Tax Plans: Laurence Kotlikoff

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan is a case in point. My last column pointed out that his plan would hit the superrich -- those with lots of wealth, but little or no labor earnings -- right in the solar plexus, dramatically lowering their sustainable living standards. The day after the column appeared, the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, released a widely quoted study suggesting exactly the opposite.

I’m not surprised. The Tax Policy Center has first-rate economists, but they knowingly use wholly inappropriate distribution analysis also employed by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service and the Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis.

All five groups of tax experts take annual income as a measure of a household’s economic standing and evaluate the progressivity of tax proposals by dividing annual taxes by annual income. This is problematic, in large part because people don’t live for just one year. Their incomes and the taxes on that income change over their lifetimes. 

An interesting analysis follows. Is he right?

What's Your Kid Getting From College? A snippet:

Even so, these figures don't touch the most important question: Are students getting fair value in return?

Anne Neal has been trying to help families answer that question for years. As president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, she believes students should leave college with a broad base of knowledge that will allow them "to compete successfully in our globalized economy and to make sense of the modern world." By that ACTA means universities should require a core curriculum with substantive courses in composition, literature, American history, economics, math, science and foreign language.

"The fundamental problem here is not debt but a broken educational system that no longer insists on excellence," Ms. Neal says. "College tuitions have risen more than 440% over the last 25 years—and for what? The students who say that college has not prepared them for the real world are largely right."

At WhatWillTheyLearn.com, students can click onto ACTA's recent survey of more than 1,000 American four-year institutions—and find out how their colleges and universities rate. Two findings jump out. First, the more costly the college, the less likely it will require a demanding core curriculum. Second, public institutions generally do better here than private ones—and historically black colleges such as Morehouse and service academies such as West Point amount to what ACTA calls "hidden gems."

And one more, because it's fascinating:

Intelligence Operative's Letter, Sent to Son on Hitler's Stationery

In what will likely go down as one of history’s mysteries, the CIA Museum in McLean, Va., has obtained a letter from former intelligence operative Richard Helms written in 1945 on Hitler’s stationery. Helms’ son, Dennis Helms, had received the letter when he was three years old and gave it to the museum this year.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Illegal Students

Michael Flaherty at the WSJ has an article titled, The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School:

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they "belong" at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep "illegal students" from entering their gates.

Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides "the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document" children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company's rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students.
Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.

In August, an internal PowerPoint presentation from the American Federation of Teachers surfaced online. The document described how the AFT undermined minority parent groups' efforts in Connecticut to pass the "parent trigger" legislation that offers parents real governing authority to transform failing schools. A key to the AFT's success in killing the effort, said the document, was keeping parent groups from "the table." AFT President Randi Weingarten quickly distanced her organization from the document, but it was small consolation to the parents once again left in the cold.

At the same time, many American schools are forced to accept the children of illegal aliens, and to even suggest that they shouldn't results in strident accusations of racism and heartlessness.

I am all for public schools educating the children of illegal immigrants. The children are not at fault, and not only would it be morally wrong to deny them an education, it would also be reckless from a utilitarian perspective. However, since those expenses have been incurred due to the deceptions and irresponsibility of the federal government, I also strongly believe that every school which educates these children should be paid to do so by the federal government. (I also believe this is the correct way to handle the local and state incarceration expenses for illegal aliens.)

For similar reasons, the AFT and other organizations that act to destroy educational choice and quality in the American public schools should be forced to pay for the consequences. That, however, would be impossible; you cannot reimburse someone for giving them an inferior education during their childhood. Consequently, these organizations should be abolished.

Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years

An interesting article by Mary Grabar. Here's the opening paragraph, and the rest is well worth the read:

After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested  in teaching students to write and communicate clearly.  The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against “marginalized” groups and restrict self-expression.

Links of Interest

Two articles well worth reading in full. They are both about education, but from different angles.

The Management Myth:

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

Gales of Creative Instruction:

The electron cloud is already taking us from new Oxford back to old Oxford. After all, how can the old inconvenient and expensive system survive the onslaught of free?

I can move to England, pay the non-subsidized foreigner tuition rates, rise early, go to class and take my chances on an Oxford professor. Or I can sit in my pajamas and have an Oxford prof of my choice teach me about critical thinking or the literary legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien. I can avoid the same old green gunk or socialist screeds.

Want to learn more about the Austrian School of Economics from which Dr. Schumpeter derived his doctrine of creative destruction? Here’s a free course. Want to read Adam Smith’s comments about education and virtually every other topic under the sun, here’s a free searchable e-book,  and here’s a free version for your Kindle. Feel you need some help understanding Smith? Here’s a podcast course from George Mason University’s econ talk.

Looking for a Schumpeterian take on current economic events? Try Intelligent Investing With Steve Forbes. If you like your free market economic commentary in daily doses, I find the Cato Institute’s daily podcast quite refreshing. For a little more depth, here’s their weekly video.

Links of Interest

Been sitting on these for a few days thinking I would write up something about one or the other. But, facing the truth, I have to say I don't have time to write an essay on them right now. So, I shall tuck them into this cubbyhole for future reference.

Hope. Change. Nixon. Don Surber notes some similarities, and that others are noting them as well.

The Leiter Side of Union Thuggery. James Taranto takes on unions and a pro-union philosopher.

The Limits of Common Sense. A follow up post by Taranto. (Mug tip here to Instapundit.)

Longhorns 17, Badgers 1. Iowahawk puts the funny down for a post to teach Paul Krugman about statistics and education (and why education outcomes in non-unionized educational systems are as good as or better than those in unionized systems). He follows up with answers to questions about statistics and methodology in Badgering the Witless.

And an interesting reprint of an article on cultural revolution in the art world (or, at least, a revolutionary group): Adieu to the Avant-Garde.

Will College Pay Off?

I've always been told that college graduates earn more than those who only finish high school, but after I got my BA I began to wonder. Surely, which major you pick plays a big role in how much you earn, right? There is also the issue of causation. Does earning the degree cause the rise in pay, or do the qualities that helped you earn the degree pay off?

Here's a snippet from the WSJ's Mary Pilon on the topic:

One problem he sees with the estimates: They don't take into account deductions from income taxes or breaks in employment. Nor do they factor in debt, particularly student debt loads, which have ballooned for both public and private colleges in recent years. In addition, the income data used for the Census estimates is from 1999, when total expenses for tuition and fees at the average four-year private college were $15,518 per year. For the 2009-10 school year, that number has risen to $26,273, and it continues to increase at a rate higher than inflation.

So, there's a different problem altogether. Income estimates should certainly take major into account, and unless we track some other factors, it should be noted that this data is merely correlative.