Grantcoulson's Blog

     “Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.” Robert E. Lee, CSA.

    Obama has created a panel to study the ballooning deficit.”The court would not have mercy on me, an orphan, simply because I killed my parents.” The panel hopes to find what is responsible for this mysterious deficit. I wish them luck.

    Perhaps that failed Keynesian “stimulus package”, which cost so many hundreds of billions, had something to do with it.

     Thanks to Marginalrevolution.com for the reference to this paper.

     “Thus, roughly 3.1 million public school teachers from kindergarten through secondary level are paid largely on the basis of years of experience and education level—two variables weakly correlated, at best, with student outcomes (Hanushek, 2003).” (Podgursky and Springer, 2007).

    This is not surprising and is supported by a lot of evidence. The reasons for pay advance in public schools is unrelated to student improvement.

…career advancement in U.S. public schools typically removes teachers from the classroom. (p. 921).

    This an incentive for political posturing, not good teaching. Administration is where the money’s at and we all know that a lot of administration is important (no it’s not). but public entities excel in increasing administration where there is rest, nice titles and lots of pay and perks. And that’s public service for you.

     “Studies of teacher turnover, for example, consistently find
that high-ability teachers are more likely to leave teaching than low-ability teachers, where ability is defined by a teacher’s performance on the ACT (Podgursky, Monroe, & Watson, 2004) or National Teacher Exam (Murnane & Olsen, 1990). This trend may be due to constraints on wages rather than the attraction of other market opportunities.

     A recent provocative study by Hoxby and Leigh (2004) found evidence that the migration of high-ability women out of teaching between 1960 and the present was primarily the result of the “push” of teacher pay compression which took away relatively higher earnings opportunities for teachers—as opposed to the pull of greater nonteaching opportunities. Although the remunerative opportunities for teachers of high and low ability grew outside of teaching, it was pay compression within the education system that accelerated the exit of higher ability teachers. To the extent that these high ability teachers were more effective in the classroom, a performance-related pay program likely would have kept more of them in teaching.” (p. 930).

    No comment needed. A real incentive system based on results will never, in any public system, be sustained over any appreciable amount of time. It will deteriorate in political posturing and endless propaganda.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

     Hanushek, E. A. (2003). The failure of input-based resource policies. Economic Journal, 113, F64-F68.

Michael J. Podgursky, Matthew G. Springer (2007). Teacher performance pay: A review. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 26, Pages: 909-949.

More from Sowell’s latest book: My comments in bold.

Sowell, T. (2009). Intellectuals and Society, New York, NY: Basic Books.

    “Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered. Given the greater cost of correcting surrogate decisions, compared to correcting individual decisions, and the greater cost of persisting in mistaken decisions by those making decisions for themselves, compared to the lower costs of those making mistaken decisions for others, the economic success of market economies is hardly surprising and neither are the counterproductive and often disastrous results of various forms of social engineering.”

     Surrogate decisions are usually mass (political) decisions where the decision-makers bear no consequences for failure or inefficiency.

       “If knowledge is defined expansively, including such mundane knowledge whose presence or absence is consequential and often crucial, then individuals with Ph.D.s are as grossly ignorant of most consequential things as other individuals are, since no one can be truly knowledgeable, at a level required for consequential decision-making for a whole society, except with a narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns.”

    One is bound to be more knowledgeable of those things which concern oneself.

       For example, it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.

    One of Sowell’s profound insights. Once you have power, the only knowledge that matters is the knowledge to keep and expand power.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

  The question is not, “Do you love your planet?” The question is, “How susceptible are you to hysterical fright-mongering?”

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

    A massive majority of professors in the social sciences in North American universities are socialists. Some would argue that this is so because socialism is the choice of the most intelligent members of our society. My favored interpretation is that socialism is the choice of those who cherish government jobs for life without performance requirements. An examination of most of the pronouncements of the favored ones is enough to demonstrate intelligence is not a factor in this career choice.

    Another interpretation comes from Milton Friedman who said, "I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there’s something wrong, pass a law and do something about it."

    "The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive."  Thomas Sowell

    "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."– Groucho Marx. So it turns out that Marx is an astute observer of political activity. Unfortunately for the academics, it is Groucho, not Karl. “At most only a tiny set of policies have been studied with even moderate care.” George J. Stigler, Nobel Prize Laureate, Economics. Pointing out errors is a complicated matter because the number of ways to do things wrong is practically infinite. The reason that these errors occur, and will recur,  is always the same.

   “The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition…is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.”
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Book IV Chapter V Section IV

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

      Here’s a perfect example of someone who, through incredibly hard work, by the way, was very successful in one area and is now branching out. Along with the fabricated disaster scenario, Mr. Gates has gone into predicting, a game without winners. The deadline for the thermal apocalypse varies among doomsayers, but it’s coming, a guy who made a lot of money from computer programs says so.

     “Gates said the deadline for the world to cut all of its carbon emissions is 2050. He suggested that researchers spend the next 20 years inventing and perfecting clean-energy technologies, and then the next 20 years implementing them.

     The world’s energy portfolio should not include coal or natural gas, he said, and must include carbon capture and storage technology as well as nuclear, wind and both solar photovoltaics and solar thermal power.”

      A group of monks in the Middle Ages, the story goes, were debating the number of teeth in a horse’s mouth. Some suggested the authority of Aristotle as the final arbiter, others suggested other authorities were more valid sources. A young monk, unschooled in cultish practices, suggested the debaters look in a horse’s mouth. He was immediately banished from further debate, and then, the monastery itself, for reasons self-evident. Lack of insurance doesn’t lead to death, but it does lead to political posturing and lying. This must join “The Superbowl causes violence to women and Himalayan glaciers are melting as hysterical lies serving political ends.

    This is from an article about looking at evidence in the debate about medical insurance, which is really a debate about treatment entitlement.

    “To my mind probably the single most solid piece of evidence is this:  turning 65–i.e., going on Medicare–doesn’t reduce your risk of dying.  If lack of insurance leads to death, then that should show up as a discontinuity in the mortality rate around the age of 65.  It doesn’t.  There are some caveats–if the effects are sufficiently long term, then it’s hard to measure, because of course as elderly people age, their mortality rate starts rising dramatically.  But still, there should be some kink in the curve, and in the best data we have, it just isn’t there.”

And this:

    “The possibility that no one risks death by going without health insurance may be startling, but some research supports it. Richard Kronick of the University of California at San Diego’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, an adviser to the Clinton administration, recently published the results of what may be the largest and most comprehensive analysis yet done of the effect of insurance on mortality. He used a sample of more than 600,000, and controlled not only for the standard factors, but for how long the subjects went without insurance, whether their disease was particularly amenable to early intervention, and even whether they lived in a mobile home. In test after test, he found no significantly elevated risk of death among the uninsured.”

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

     Global warming may be interrupted by decadal (a few decades of) cooling. If you can’t illuminate by facts, darken by jargon.

    This statement about cooling ranks with, “We can get through them in a day.”– Custer before the Little Big Horn. “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” General John Sedgwick before his fatal wound, Spotsylvania, Virginia.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — “Despite a torrent of high-profile recalls that have tarnished Toyota’s once stellar reputation, a study published Wednesday reveals that the automaker actually gets fewer customer complaints per car than the majority of its competitors.

     Edmunds.com reviewed more than 200,000 complaints filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) over the last decade and found that Toyota ranked 17th among the top 20 automakers in the overall number of complaints per vehicle sold.”

   Some Toyota executive will be forced to face Congress, a group whose livelihood is based on mendacity and spin, to explain how this horrible thing happened. The public humiliation done, the lawmakers will move on to doing useless and harmful things based on current illusions while the person doing useful things will be allowed to slink away, properly chastised by his betters. And that’s politics for you.

from the Book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

      In 1957, Standard and Poor’s examined the 500 biggest publically traded companies. In 2007, only 86 of these companies existed. Even the ones which did not go out of business were mightily transformed whether still existing or taken over. If one made up a list of 500 of the largest government agencies in 1957, the vast majority would still be sopping up public money while growing larger. Government agencies can never fail, thence,  never succeed.

    Universities become self-perpetuating centers of socialism as the search committees choose applicants in their own image. People who come from favored groups, are made full professors because of their ethnicity, gender and political views. These pampered elite, without any real intellectual accomplishment, especially in the social sciences where clever writing is so much more highly valued than accomplishment, accomplishment is practically excluded. The result is touted as evidence of “diversity”, “scholarship”  and academic “freedom”.

    Universities cost so much because they are run by those who are financially irresponsible and have the notion of social justice which means "keep the government money coming, we are proud tax consumers and, if you gave us everything you have, it would not be enough.". OR “The peasants should give the elite their money so it may go to those favored by the elite.”  They are also dedicated as “agents of social change” which is code for, “Socialism must prevail.” OR “Because we have such great love for the proletariat, We, The Enlightened must control their lives.” This top-down, command model represents much of what universities require to justify themselves. If  research found that people did best directing themselves, direction by the shepherding elite must be shown to be harmful.

    Many people described and predicted the inefficiency, incompetence, waste, corruption and patronage of governments long before the Romance With Socialism became the dominant set of assumptions of western academics and media. Europe is discovering that adding an extra layer of government reduces prosperity. Why anyone finds this surprising is beyond any possible belief, but, as McCloskey observes, "Impatience with calculation is the mark of the romantic…".(p. 189). Governments have been busily engaged for millennia providing special privileges, either by money, punishment of competitors, or both,  for favored groups, thereby diminishing the general standard of living. All of the mischief done by government agencies comes from the lack of responsibility enjoyed by those who have jobs independent of accomplishment who justify their actions by pretending INTEND-IS is DOES.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

McCloskey, R. Bourgeois Virtue, American Scholar, 63, 1994.

    On the distortion of U.S. Medicare by the wrong incentives:

     "We are not rewarding what we really want," he said. "We’re rewarding people for doing stuff that’s paid well. What we want to do is pay them well to do the right thing."

      "They are rewarded for more services, not better services. They are rewarded for more care, not better care," said Dr. Elliott Fisher, a lead researcher for the Dartmouth University Atlas of Health. "Most of the U.S. health system is paid simply for each service, regardless of the results of that service."

Generally speaking, people do what pays best.

    This is my review of Thomas Sowell’s new book: Intellectuals and Society

Sowell, T. (2009). Intellectuals and Society, New York, NY: Basic Books.

    This is Sowell’s best book, not surprising because it’s his latest, and he encapsulates his observations on the myths, chimeras and sacred cows of current intellectuals. Most of these beliefs are so remarkably untrue that, much like those of education, their opposites are true. Dr. Sowell uses many of the themes he has developed before such as the stark contrast between the vision(s) of the anointed (those who believe that strong government programs will produce Utopia) and those with the tragic vision (those who believe in the limitations of Human Nature).

    One of his best observations is the belief of intellectuals that theirs is such a difficult and specialized occupation that only the anointed can do it. “A sense of superiority is not an incidental happenstance, for superiority has been essential to getting intellectuals where they are. They are in fact often very superior within the narrow band of human concerns with which they deal. But so too are not only chess grandmasters and musical prodigies but also computer software engineers, professional athletes and people in many mundane occupations whose complexities can only be appreciated by who have had to master them. (p. 148).

    And, on giants of industry which “control” a large part of a market.  “Smith Corona, for example, sold over half the typewriters and word processors in the United States in 1989 but, just six years later, it filed for bankruptcy… Even at its peak, Smith Corona controlled nothing.” pp. 65-66). How well I remember the narrow window of the dedicated word processor where one could see a few lines of what one had written. The market took care of a good product by producing a better one. In government enterprises, such as education, things change, but don’t improve.

    Sowell gives dozens of examples of where intellectuals get things wrong. “The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.” Like the mighty Brooklyn Dodgers, “Wait’l next year.”

    He also points out that all of the repressive regimes in Germany, Russia and Cambodia have had the backing of the majority of a country’s intellectuals.

    Highly recommended.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies