An article by the Heartland Institute focuses on the adverse affects of the stimulus bill’s weighty legal lingo. The author claims that lawyers will have their hands full trying to find out ways for their clients to get a slice of the massive government check. Although the increased job security for laywers that this forest of verbiage enables was probably unintended, this may well catalyze a trend in which everyone scrambles for a piece of somebody else’s pie. And we’ll all end up paying for it later.
Bill Requires Inmates to Serve 85% of Their Sentences
An article in the Missourian highlights the negative affects of Sen. Kurt Schaefer’s prison sentence bill. The posititives:
- Sentences given out would be more accurate when compared to time served
- It would hold judges to more accountable for sentencing, avoiding sentence inflation
The negatives:
- Larger fiscal burden to the state
- Longer stays in prison could lead to furthering of criminal education/recidivism
- Demeanor of inmates may change once the possibility of early release for good behavior has been eliminated
Policy Pulse Powers Forward
Our first major, original piece created specifically for Policy Pulse is now up over at that site. It’s a newspaper-style story about AmerenUE and the construction-work-in-progress issue, written by Andrew Guevara. Check it out.
Earmark Vote in Washington, D.C.
Right now on KMOX, Mark Reardon is commenting — to put it mildly — about the vote today in the capital to include an enormous number of earmarks in the current omnibus spending bill. One Missouri senator voted with the appropriators, and one voted against them, along with Sen. McCain. It breaks my Republican heart to find out which was which, but Sen. McCaskill deserves a lot of credit for her stance on earmarks and pork. (Which are not always the same thing.)
But, since I just praised Ms. McCaskill, I can call her out for her nonsensical statement in an interview that Reardon just played. She ripped President Bush (deservedly so) for building up such a large deficit, and then praised President Obama for his commitment to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, while just ignoring the fact that Obama’s proposed budget has quadrupled (at least tripled) the projected deficit for next year. Mr. Reardon is a lot of fun to listen to right now. …
Charters Cause Chaos, Impending Doom
Spreading fear and anxiety is what charter schools do best — at least among traditional public school teachers and administrators. Edspresso links to this article about charter schools in New Orleans:
More than half of New Orleans schoolchildren attend charter schools, and more are on the way. That’s making teachers at some traditional public schools nervous.
The main cause of concern identified in the article is that children with disabilities and behavior problems will be left in the traditional public schools, while “better” students go off to charters.
If I were a parent of a disabled child, I would hesitate to send him or her to the Recovery School District. Can you imagine sending disabled children to a district where they’re considered a liability, to be “diluted” with “good” students to the greatest extent possible?
If the district is really worried that disabled children are being left behind, it should work to form more charters specifically for disabled students.
“The Bachelor” Reinforces My Faith in the Institution of Marriage
Don’t lie and tell me you didn’t know that last night, Jason — this season’s bachelor on the ABC show of the same name — asked one woman to marry him and basically changed his mind a few weeks later and dumped Melissa to try again with Molly. Admit it, you watched it last night, just like I did. Sadly, I watched it just as I usually do, as we have long been fans of the show. At first, the show rather appalled me, then I was helplessly drawn in, and now the show serves as positive reinforcement for the value of my own marriage and the marriages of others.
But the key thing is that it’s not the show itself that does this; rather, more exactly, it’s the show’s failure rate. There have been 17 seasons of either “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette,” and exactly one of them has led to a happy marriage, with one other that will likely result in a marriage at some point in the future. Think how depressing it would be if a situation where one man or woman meeting 24 members of the opposite sex and only given two months or so to get to know them had produced a dozen happy marriages. All ideas of romantic love and finding that special person who is just right for you would pretty much be replaced by the idea that you could have been plenty happy with a lot of other people — you just needed to whittle your final list down to 24 people or so, and to get rid of half of them within an hour.
So, David, what the hell does this have to do with economics or markets? Well, a lot, actually. There is a large body of knowledge about the economics of marriage and divorce, and some of it is well covered here and here in Slate. Of course, marriage is a much more rational institution than often viewed by romantics — whose mindset was beautifully destroyed by The Onion, not surprisingly. But, if it is ludicrous to believe that one bachelor would quickly find his soul mate among 24 women selected for him by TV producers (and it is), it is just as reasonable to assume that a large number of people will find their marriage partners out of the other members of their freshman class in college.
One stat you hear a lot, but that most people know is inaccurate, is that half of all marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate was quite high for a short period a few decades ago, but it’s lower now, and I really don’t care what the overall rate is as long as my own rate is zero. It just takes some very basic questions and math though, to get the odds of divorce down to around 10 percent. If you take a man and a woman (this isn’t New England, so, for better or worse, that is our only option) who love each other, and you can determine that they have similar education backgrounds, are a roughly similar age, didn’t get married out of pressure (pregnancy, etc.), didn’t get married too early in life (excluding some circumstances like military deployment), dated and were engaged for a normal period (eliminating Vegas quickie marriages), and are each getting married for the first time, then you can book them for about a 90-percent chance of a successful, permanent marriage. I don’t think you can add any variables in that will push it much past about 90 percent, because major life changes will occur for some (bankruptcy, loss of a child, etc.) that can make even the strongest marriages crumble.
On the opposite side, it doesn’t matter how much the 25-year-old cocktail waitress and the 60-year-old Ivy League financier might love each other when they say “I do” — the marriage almost certainly ain’t lasting.
Just for fun, here is the divorce calculator prepared by a “Freakonomics” contributor.
A Rock in Times of Trouble (As Long As It Has Enough Cash)
If you’re looking for entertainment, check out this op-ed in the Columbia Daily Tribune about the virtues of big government, and why we need it to overcome economic challenges:
The only beacon of financial stability is our government and its ability to react to rapidly changing situations.
But note this sentence from a few lines above:
Governments lacking massive amounts of money to adjust to changing economies, environments and fiscal structures are doomed to failure.
In other words, governments are great at adjusting to changing circumstances, as long as they have “massive amounts of money” to make it easier.
Rewards for Learning
Here’s a more interesting New York Times education article, this one about rewards for student achievement. I have some comments:
- I can see why the programs paying for good A.P. scores haven’t met with much success. A student’s grade on an A.P. test is dependent on how well he or she learned to read and write years before. You can’t take struggling students who lack basic skills and get them to do college-level work just by offering some cash.
- There are ways to reward students without sending the message that learning is a chore. Younger students could choose a more challenging book or math game as a reward for completing a lesson; older students could work on a self-directed research project that interests them. Those kinds of rewards are effective at the individual level, but they’re hard to put in place across entire schools for a randomized trial.
- One strategy is to ask the students themselves what would motivate them.
Charters Cause Chaos
Charter school opponents predict chaos if public schools are run by independent organizations. Then, when the charters gain market share, it’s funny to watch opponents search for the panic and confusion. This is the best they could come up with in the New York Times today:
Publicly financed but managed by independent boards, charters are not bound by the city’s calendar. Still, even though the parents might be accustomed to having class when the city system is on holiday, the cellphones of the school’s leaders were flooded with confused calls.
People didn’t know whether there was school or not because the calendar for charters isn’t standardized! Good thing the phone lines were still up. Charters haven’t managed to shut down all methods of communication … yet.
