Wherever Occupy Wall Street says it will go, there go hundreds if not thousands of police officers. If Occupy Wall Street were a confrontational organization bent on occupying space, or more directly, limiting access to institutions like the stock exchange, or more generally disrupting people's commute (as they appear to be planning to do in DC), it seems to me they'd just have to announce that they would be there. The ensuing police presence would certainly create an obstacle, even if the protesters never showed.
But, as my friend Mrs. E points out, it's not really about blocking anything or limiting access or anything so shrewd. Which is why the protesters need to appear in person: It's about being photographed.
If your goal is to be photographed confronting a police officer while holding a sign about how "We are the 99%," the most important thing is to stage your visual dramatically. Maybe you extend out your arms, weep a little if you can manage, this kind of thing. It appears the strategy is that these pictures will persuade the hard-hearted among us to join up with the cause. But if your strategy is one focused on persuasion, you need to also not make people hate you just to get a good picture. Protests in parks are one thing -- few people are disrupted, you can just walk around. It allows each protestor to convince him or herself that he or she is making a difference, while they seek out a reporter or blogger to take their picture and watch them playing at rebellion.
But blockading a busy thoroughfare is not a message of suasion, it's a confrontational message. The strategy, ultimately, is confused. Do they want me to hate them, or love them? Are they wide-eyed collectivists or cynical anarchists? Are they an unstable amalgam of both? And is this discord in strategy a sign that perhaps things are falling, finally, apart?
I've often cast aspersions on the OWS movement. Thoughtful aspersions, mostly, emphasizing my disagreement with what they appeared to be trying to stand for, but some less thoughtful aspersions as well. I read a friend's account of the clearing of Zuccotti Park today, and he mentioned that the Occupiers chanted, "This is what a police state looks like." And on that, I do have to strongly disagree. In a police state, dissenters like the Occupiers would have been jailed or killed for expressing their views as strongly and overtly as they did. In fact, in a regular non-police state they might still be in jail for trespassing, disturbing the peace, using drugs, and the violent crimes we've heard about. But here in America, we err on the side of free speech and there they were for a few months, camped out in Zuccotti park, stinking up the joint (see what I said about less-thoughtful aspersions? that was one).
But at the same time that I disagree we live in a police state, we may be coming closer to a redistributive one. And here is where I can relate a bit to OWS' outrage. Public corruption is never acceptable, and these days we have become almost comically blase about those who have taken liberties with the public trust and the public fisc (Rod Blagojevich on celebrity apprentice!?!). And corruption is even more dangerous when our government becomes larger, and the policies of the administration become bolder. With fewer and fewer funds to pay for this increasingly totalizing vision, and a public ambivalence towards corruption, where are we headed but a confiscatory and non-accountable state? This is part of what happens when we shift from ensuring equality of opportunity to attempting to ensure equality of outcome. And this is my main area of disagreement with OWS: the goal of the state cannot be to ensure equality of outcome for all.*
*(And if you haven't re-read Harrison Bergeron in a while, now's the time! Go on, it's short.)
I have no personal problem with the fact that a small group of people make an immense amount of money. If one day I'm graced with an idea or skill that I could monetize like that, you bet I would. And we all feed into the success of the successful: we buy their products, use their services, and even work in the jobs they create. But jealousy is not a policy platform. I don't get to knock down people who are good at capitalism, even if I'm bad at it.
People say "life's not fair," and maybe they're right in terms of the vagaries of fortune seeming occasionally unjust (or cruel... see, e.g., cancer). But life is America is fair in one key sense: whatever modicum of talent you were born with, you will be able to use for your own purposes, to carry yourself as far as you can. The state will keep you out of abject poverty with social support programs like welfare and housing subsidies and food stamps, but beyond that we stand back. And though this is not equal, it is fair: none of us can know ex ante what gifts we might be born with, but surely none of us would choose to limit the most brilliant among us, holding back progress and growth, in order to make sure that the least gifted among us need not be jealous (limiting an individual is part of why racial discrimination is so stupid--you could be holding back immense potential...what if Einstein was black?). Imagine if great innovators like Steve Jobs were told from the start that because their colleagues might be jealous, they could not benefit from their innnovations or share them with the marketplace. I have a hard time imagining that such a base drive as jealousy could really be the motive for effective public policy.*
*(And before you tell me my policies are based on greed, let me just say that greed is a distinctly solitary vice but wealth cannot be generated in a vacuum.)
So while OWS is right, that public corruption is incredibly dangerous, and that we should be skeptical of the way that power is distributed by the government, the problem is not that it could be distributed better - the problem is that power and economic success are being *distributed* at all.
If the federal government had not impaired the functioning of the free market by hepling create the housing bubble, and propping up the current student loan bubble, picking winners and losers in the market (albeit perhaps with the best intentions), perhaps the protesters in Zuccotti Park would have had jobs to go to.
The President recently announced that, under his new program, student loan payments will be no more than 10% of your disposible income. I was sure that I, as a first year associate at a large law firm, wouldn't qualify for such leniency-- but apparently, I do! They'd like to lower my loan payments. How kind.
This is just another perpetual debt trap, and students caught with massive student loan debt should not fall for it. The President's plan is functionally an offer to let you make "minimum payments" on your debt for the next 25 years, as the high, fixed interest rate continues to work its magic.
Instead of letting loan recipients spiral into perpetual debt, it is time to support a real plan to help people do the responsible thing and pay their debt. This is why, instead of offering this specious program, the President should support a modification of the tax code to allow loan recipients to make loan payments out of pretax dollars. This program should be uncapped, available to anyone regardless of income, and put into place immediately. Because there is no cap, it incentivizes aggressive repayment by allowing you to repay yourself into a lower tax bracket.
This program does what a responsible government should do: reward good behavior, namely, repayment of loans. The President's current program, in contrast, just extends the prerogative of perpetual indebtedness to the individual American, where it was previously the exclusive prerogative of the government.
Student loans are obscene. My USAA credit card interest rate is only slightly higher than the fixed rate on my federal student loans. My USAA credit card is in the last position in a bankruptcy and might never recover if I default, but student loans are non-dischargeable. The interest rate on student loans is price gouging, a lulu from the government to itself. This arrangement is downright abusive: if student loans continue to be nondischargeable, their interest rate ought to be capped at 5%.
But that's a big suggestion, and might take some time. So I'll go back to my small suggestion: student loan payments should come out of pretax dollars.
I love TED talks, and in my post bar-exam I watched this great video on TED:
... and it raised for me an interesting question. Normally, I'm pretty aggressive in demanding performance metrics from public policy proposals. However, the more "life-and-death" the proposal, the more there is a real moral hazard: how many people are denied the effective aid in the name of verifying that the aid works, by being a member of a control group?
I'll take an example that Duflo cites here of deworming schoolchildren as an incentive to attend school. In order to determine the efficacy of this proposal, there would be groups of children not dewormed and groups dewormed. Worms are not fatal, so the moral hazard here seems lower-- the next year, the children from the control would be likelier receive deworming because the study determined it was effective.
This hazard is different from the one raised by pharmaceutical drug trials. In that instance, people may be a member of a control group receiving the current standard of care. In another group, people assume a certain amount of risk by receiving a treatment which may be curative... or exacerbate their condition, or create additional unanticipated conditions (see, e.g., DES).
Here, the control group definitely receives a substandard outcome-- and the test group definitely receives at least some benefits derived from additional capital and resources invested in their community, right? I'm aware of the hypotheses that suggest that the group receiving investment may in fact have a substandard outcome--e.g. that aid replaces organic development of economic capacity on a large scale, and that aid more intangibly creates a culture of subsidy, or imports culturally irrelevant preconceptions. But I also believe that raising a question raises awareness, so in the example of malaria nets, even if distribution of free nets DID decrease net usage when purchase was mandatory, it also necessarily raised the awareness of the possibility that if you purchase a malaria net you will not get malaria.... right? There are many more educated than me on that question, and I welcome comments, but for these purposes I'll say neither side is a slam dunk.
Duflo's talk mentions glancing "political difficulties" and "ideology" that cloud the use of proper control-group testing of social policy. This moral hazard is clearly contained in that category. This isn't simply a matter of favoring "science" over "ideology." It's also about weighing immediacy and individual gains against the value of positive outcomes for those being helped. The most efficient might not be the most desirable--especially for politicians. Let me explain.
Politicians operate on an electoral cycle, and budgeting is also cyclical. Data takes far longer to gather than proposals do to generate. Even when data is generated, the outcome may not be positive or the results may be inconclusive. Therefore, it is more politically appealing to offer an immediate program, where no data is available because it cannot be proven you're funding an ineffective program. It is more advantageous from an individual would-be do-gooder to not collect data, and not prove whether the program works at all. So, for politicians and workers at the programs themselves, data is not necessarily an advantage. And even if you DO care about the outcome of the program in itself, or helping for helping's sake, the value you place on helping immediately, versus helping in the most efficacious way possible, might be so high that it is still not in your interest to gather data. This rears its head most clearly in attempting to solve social problems that are pretty quickly fatal or debilitating, but is present to some degree in all of them-- after all, what motivates us to help is the same thing that motivates us to help NOW.
In order to bridge this divide, there are a few options. One option is purer efficiency focus on the part of program funders, perhaps most directly achieved through capitated funding based on outcome. Another option is to just wonder at the complexity of it all, and do nothing. A third option is messy, but allows us to phase-in efficiency while addressing the (perhaps mostly emotional) need to help NOW, rather than helping efficiently-- increase the proportion of funding that is capitated based on efficacy over time, reserving funding for messy strategies that would allow innovation to continue (and avoiding the "this hasn't been done therefore it can't be done" problem). This might even be what we have now, given the hodgepodge of funding policies in the poverty arena.
As Duflo says, there is no silver bullet, even where science is applied. If nobody cared, nobody would help, but because they care, they want to help now. The rational, in that case, has limited effectiveness. Data is not the panacea, but is an important piece. I usually get on people who ignore data, in the name of "caring"-- but that's only a part of the picture.
I was going to write about the Harvard Law E-Mail debacle of 2010, complete with my own denouncement of the politics of personal destruction and the necessity of tipping sacred cows in the spirit of rigorous debate.
However, after reading the thoughtful postings over at Volokh, I will abstain. Much of what needs to be said has already been well-put, and just because I have a blog doesn't necessarily mean I have something to add.
What if public school teacher salaries were tax-free for the first $60,000 of income?
I like the idea of using a tax cut to invest in public schools, and I do think that public schools should be able to pay teachers more to attract talent to the jobs. But even if we functionally gave every public school teacher in America a raise, this wouldn't begin to solve a major innovation block: the union.
I want young, educated people who graduate college to think there's a future in teaching, a career that will allow them to advance with their talents and develop professionally and personally. I know we should pay qualified individuals to be teachers. But I only want to pay good teachers. I don't want to give bad teachers a raise, and I don't want to give them tenure and benefits. I want bad teachers to get sent for remediation, some kind of "remedial student-teacher term." If they don't get better, I think they should be fired. Continuing professional education should be a hallmark of the profession of education as much as it is a hallmark of the profession of medicine or law.
I guess what I'm saying is, I want to cut taxes on teachers' salaries in order to give them a very large raise in their take-home pay. But I only want to give it to good teachers.
Is it possible that in exchange for this massive increase in compensation, teachers' unions across the country might introduce more effective termination standards and procedures, and a continuing professional education requirement? If not, why not?
The stars these days in Washington seem to range from
partially to totally nude, and given that politics is Hollywood for ugly
people, I’m not happy about it.
First we have Massa, who was apparently only nude in the
snorkel area.Why do I know that? Because
the art of innuendo is lost on political reporters.
Then we have Reille Hunter, who is partially nude and
shocked about it.Apparently she
believed pants would be airbrushed on.
And finally we have the healthcare bill, which is totally
nude, but to protect the legitimacy of the process we will pretend that the
bill is wearing some substance.Why does nobody care that we do not know what is in the bill yet, or
even the subject of negotiation?Is the public option in the skeleton bill a real public option or are
the drafters “just kidding”?Is this
real clothing or is this the emperor’s new clothes?
I don’t need to know whether Massa was naked, I don’t care
whether Hunter is naked, but I need to know the substance of the health care
bill. And I care very much how much it will cost.Because nothing is ever so expensive as when it is “free.” Just like nothing is ever so clear as
when it is “transparent”—I of course mean the word as the current usage.Reform might be ugly, but that’s no
reason to shunt it in a back room.After all, it can’t be nearly as ugly as the naked Massa.
There's a great post over at NDN blog today, summarizing what I've been saying here and on American Maggie-- young people are disproportionately affected by the bad economy, and dramatically strongly support the President, yet the President doesn't address their agenda.
But the President isn't the only one who has missed the memo from youth. In speaking with a senior Republican a few weeks ago, he said that he thought the largest issue facing youth was probably something in the area of technology or the war.
The NDN article highlights the important connection between the economy and education-- the issue facing young people is one of permanent derailment. When we cannot finance or otherwise afford our education today, it impacts our ability to earn for the next fifty years. Incidentally, this impacts our ability to finance the debt on all these fancy spending programs the President has in mind.
The most important issue to young people is the economy.
