Home » Monthly archive

August 2009

Why aren't The Belgians in the Congo and the Kenyan* in the White House very much alike?

Submitted by Thomas Sewell on Sat, 08/22/2009 - 01:00
Posted in

I have a longer entry to discuss some of his ideas planned, but I couldn't resist sharing a quick preview from Mencius Moldbug's recent post on colonialism:

But fine. We'll start with the worst. Or after it, anyway. Our case study in colonialism: the Belgian Congo, aka Zaire. There is no defending the Congo Free State - but 1960 minus 1908 is quite some time. Observe the sinuosity with which this propagandist redacts an inconvenient half-century:

Government as a system of organized theft goes back to King Leopold II, who made a fortune [in the Congo] equal to well over $1.1 billion in today's money, chiefly in rubber and ivory. Then for fifty-two years this was a Belgian colony, run less rapaciously, but still mainly for the purpose—as with colonies almost everywhere—of extracting wealth for the mother country and its corporations. The grand tradition was continued by Mobutu Sese Seko...

In other words: skip from Leopold to Mobutu as fast as possible, noting only that the Congo under Belgian administration was... gasp... profitable. Sacre bleu! Another of those nitroglycerines, nurse - I think my heart just skipped a whole bar. Profitable government! Why, it's practically a second Holocaust.

Especially since I read that juxtaposed with the news that the White House has jacked up their deficit estimate by:

$2,000,000,000,000 (Two Trillion Dollars)

That's right. Turns out that the ever popular image of Obama's deficits was optimistic. Now that's spare change we can believe in™!

  • Thomas Sewell's blog
  • Read more
  • Share this

Why would you want to?

Submitted by Thomas Sewell on Thu, 08/20/2009 - 20:20
Posted in

During a recent discussion of using a specific technology to manage class papers, one teacher wrote briefly that she had a couple of questions:

1. How do you grade them?
2. How do you keep the students from working ahead?

I thought it would be a little rude to respond, "Why would you want to?!?!", especially when I sadly already knew the answer to the question.

I've spent so much time in the last few years working with a school that doesn't assign letter grades and requires students to learn as fast as they are able (you know, "working ahead"), that it was a jolt to remember how totally clueless many teacher college graduates are about education. They've been taught the one true modern factory educational method and it's so ingrained into them that how to apply it to tools that are new to them is completely outside their imagination.

Letter Grades
Most Americans are used to letter grades. In brief, the student completes a piece of work and it is evaluated, usually by the teacher or a proxy, and the teacher assigns a letter grade, generally based on some percentage of a possible point total. As part of that system, it is considered acceptable to do poor work and to not actually learn anything. What is important is what score the student got, not what they did or didn't learn.

I know, incredible, isn't it?

It usually doesn't matter to the system how well or poorly the student understands what is taught. What is considered important by the system is that the teacher "got through the material" in the allotted time. That's what the teacher gets paid for and that's where the incentives exist. Many times it matters to the parents of the student, but their only recourse is to put pressure on a unionized bureaucracy that is very good at resisting pressure to do anything differently.

When is the last time you heard a teacher in a traditional district school complaining that they were worried about their job because their students weren't learning enough. Compare that to how often you hear parents complain about their children not learning enough. There's obviously a disconnect there somewhere....

I submit that the important thing is to measure that a student has learned a concept, skill, or set of knowledge and then help them learn another once they're done with that. That it's not acceptable to simply shrug and say "It's the student's fault!" if they get a D or an F on an assignment and then turn around and expect them to quickly learn the next concept presented without the necessary foundation of knowledge from the last one.

Sometimes people wonder how a student can get so far behind that they graduate from High School functionally illiterate. The grading system is primarily to blame. It sets up results where students are allowed to fail. Parents start complaining that their kids are failing? No problem, we can give them all passing grades while still covering the material. All we have to do is lower standards, then rinse and repeat.

See how the system works and the school staff stays happy?

Working Ahead
Of course, if the objective is to get through a set amount of material in a set amount of time, beside students that fall behind you're going to have students that already know something or can figure it out faster than the others. If your primary method of instruction is to lecture to a classroom of kids, some of those kids are going to be unable to understand what you are talking about and some of those kids are going to be bored out of their mind as you tell them things they already know. Some will be bored and unable to understand, and some will just be bored. Among other things, that's a natural result of the well known Bell curve.

In the profession this phenomenon is called "glaze" after the look in the poor kid's eyes. There is a lot of glaze in a traditional classroom.

Traditional educators have found that while some students could "work ahead", when they do their education stops being under the teacher's control. Suddenly they want help with stuff that the teacher hasn't taught yet. The farther ahead they get, the more bored they are with the teacher's lectures. We can't have that! So while the objective is to try and help the kids that are behind catch up a little, the unspoken (to parents) objective is that none of the kids get too far ahead, either. Besides, if they get too far ahead they'll just be even more bored next year, right?

Here's an idea! Encourage, nay, demand, that the students learn as quickly as they can, but no faster than that! Teach them as if they are all individuals and not parts in the assembly line in a factory.

Yes, that requires teachers who are smarter than those that score well below average on the SAT. You might even need to have teachers that can mentor a student individually and teach without lecturing. Many teachers try. Usually the newer ones that the system hasn't burnt out yet. The teachers that stay more than 4-5 years in a traditional school system have generally adapted to that system. The process of indoctrination and adaptation started in their educational college.

Most of all, you need to replace the current traditional system with one that rewards school staff based on the learning their students do. With a system that measures and reports on the concepts and knowledge students have, instead of reporting on whether they did or did not turn in the worksheet their parents did for them last night.

Sound impossible? It's been being done in practice for over 100 years now.

Montessori
Actually, she had more than just two questions. After numbering those two, she added in parting, "Does anyone do something different that works for them?"

Yes, yes we do. Refer to the Montessori Method for details.

Pull the plug on "Your Life, Your choices"

Submitted by Thomas Sewell on Thu, 08/20/2009 - 13:55
Posted in

Jim Towey, founder of Aging with Dignity, brings up an interesting point in the Wall Street Journal. Health care reform advocates like to point to the VA as an example of an existing system similar to the proposed public option, but the VA has their own version of the "Death Panels" idea, a planning document called "Your Life, Your Choices".

Apparently the VA has found it necessary to do a little subtle cost controlling by influencing veterans towards a "life is not worth living" and "don't be a burden" mentality.

Read it for yourself on the VA's web site.

A large portion of the document consists of describing various horrible health situations in detail, then asking the veteran if in that situation, would life be difficult, just barely worth living, or not worth living. After that cheery thought, they list possible treatments and are asked to check a box if they'd rather die naturally or receive each treatment. The only treatment that is pre-checked for all the questions is "Comfort care', meaning painkillers and cleanings.

That isn't the only way to present this information and get people thinking about their options and wishes. Compare "Five Wishes". It's shorter, more focused, and much more positive.

So why has the VA chosen to use one over the other? After all, under the Bush administration the VA stopped using "Your Life, Your Choices" because of some of these very issues. The Obama administration started using it again.

It would be interesting to hear the discussion that led to that decision. Did it include a discussion of steering veterans away from expensive life-preserving treatments in favor of a "natural death" and how much money the VA could save as a result?

We don't need government health care providers trying to convince veterans that life may not be worth living.

We certainly don't need new government health care providers.

What we need is more freedom for individuals to contract for their own care and options. The progressives need to stop using regulations to stop people who want to do something different than the "experts" have decided is best for them. That's one of the problems with political solutions to economic problems. One size must fit all.

Unusual and Fun Charitable Opportunity

Submitted by Thomas Sewell on Wed, 08/19/2009 - 21:44
Posted in

Charity begins .... in Nigeria? On the Internet?

Most email users are familiar with the 419 scams they get with their morning spam, typically variations on the advance fee fraud.

There is an unusual charitable organization dedicated to fighting these scammers by wasting their time. The tactic is called scambaiting.

It's not an organization in the sense of being an IRS non-profit, but it has evolved into a society that provides assistance and advice to it's members, has rules about recognition, awards, and a code of conduct.

The membership has used an incredible range of creative tactics to focus the attention of the scammers on themselves instead of on the gullible. Go read their forums for an hour or two and laugh at the delays that poor english and desperate scammers can lead to. Everything from responding to scams as a dead person who just needs the scammer to contact their estate lawyer in order to get their payment processed, to pretending to be a rival scamming gang that is impressed with their work, has stolen the scammer's customers, and wants to hire them to work full-time for a percentage of the take. Many times the scam baiters will convince the scammers to send photographs, or even film a Monty Python sketch!

You might think that the amount of time that scammers waste dealing with this group is trivial. In contrast, you may notice that there are awards for how far you can get a scammer to travel while trying to close a deal. Bonus points depending on how many national borders they cross in the process.

Why do they do it?

"It has been estimated that there are well over 250,000 scammers involved in 419 scams worldwide and that they reap in over US$1.5 billion annually. The average victim pays out US$20,000."

The members spend some time helping victims of the scammers directly, but they are also into prevention. The time and resources a scammer spends with an experienced baiter is time the scammer can't spend on creating a real victim. They also turn bank account and other scammer details over to the proper authorities in order to get them closed down.

Scambaiting is charitable activity to benefit some of the least able to protect themselves on the internet, the gullible and soft-hearted. It's not just financial scams. Some victims are lured in by the idea that they are going to be adopting needy children, or a million other excuses.

It's a fun game for the baiters that they can play in their spare time on the internet. Setup a free email account, publish your new email address so that you get plenty of spam, then adopt the persona of a someone who wants to know more. The rest falls into place quickly.

It's also a modern economic war of attrition, waged across the internet. Regular police agencies like the FBI or Interpol don't spend the time and resources that would be necessary to investigate all the reports of 419 scammers that come flooding in. When the scammers are sending millions of emails a day to try and lure in a victim, the police are unable to investigate them all.

Just like if a burgler shoots you in your home, by the time the police investigate, it's too late for the victims. In scammer cases it's even worse. All they can do is take a report and maybe see if a scammer ever visits the victim's country to be arrested.

That means the scammers have a key advantage over the police. They have the numbers and the inexpensive labor (as well as labor-saving computers) to overwhelm the current police response. There are more of them then there are of the police.

Hence the need for volunteer help. The volunteers aren't vigilantes. They don't go out and arrest scammers, and there is a strong ethic against doing anything illegal while baiting them.

What they do is become unpaid police informants in the one job that really can be done anonymously over the internet. They spend their free time and leverage it against the scammers in the same way the scammers are able to leverage their time against the police. That turns the economics of the situation back around, slowly making the cost of being a scammer higher and higher.

Charity begins at home!

Don't Compromise on Government Health Care

Submitted by Thomas Sewell on Wed, 08/19/2009 - 00:42
Posted in

Make no mistake™, the current push for "health care reform" is a push for the government to take over and create socialized medicine and a single-payer system. In Obama's own words:

"I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately."

"There's going to be potentially some transition process."

"I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That's what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we've got to take back the White House, we've got to take back the Senate, and we've got to take back the House."

Well, they took all that back and it's apparent that changing the health care system is a major priority for the Dems. The basic problem they realized is that the public doesn't support a single-payer system. That makes congressmen who have to face elections next year pretty nervous. In fact, even with a "public option" proposal, they wanted desperately to get it pushed through quickly so that enough time would elapse before the next elections in the hopes that people would forget. Instead, people are debating it and dwelling on it.

It's to the point where some Dems are now going to be willing to compromise and even drop the "public option" if they can get the federal control part of the plan passed.

They're calling it a federal health care exchange. What it exchanges is the current choices people in most states have for forcing everyone into federal insurance standards that are very similar to a few states. You know, the states traditionally controlled by the progressives, where health insurance rates can be double what they are in more conservative states.

It's bad enough that the states can be very restrictive in limiting health insurance offerings and choices, but now they'll use federal mandates to require certain insurance coverage nationally to drive up the price of health insurance. Then they'll use that as the next excuse to try again for a public option that drives out private insurers and leads to a single-payer system.

That's the new fallback position for when they can't get everything they want through the Senate. Don't let them have that either. It will invariably make the insurance market more expensive and worse for regular people, giving them the excuse they want to try this all again in four more years. Just like they'd like to use that plus government "insurance" to either drive the insurance companies out of business or else turn them into government controlled insurers.

So don't let your congressman or Senator agree to vote for a "compromise". It will lead to anything but!

Market Substitutes For Unemployment Insurance

Submitted by Thomas Sewell on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 23:33
Posted in

David Henderson at Econolog talks about the myth of market failure in regards to unemployment insurance. He makes some excellent points and there are more in the comments.

Something not addressed is that unemployment insurance has a superior substitute good.

To understand what a substitute good is, you might consider that attendance at plays goes up when movie prices go up, or sales of margarine go up when butter is less expensive, or cheaper cell phones lead to a drop in people purchasing plain old telephone service.

A substitute good for unemployment insurance is "safe" investments. It would be difficult to pay someone else enough to support you AND monitor that you lost your job and can't get another one through no desire of your own (the inherent moral hazard) and have them be able to pay you more in benefits than if you took your unemployment insurance premiums and simply invested them safely.

Essentially, you are self-insuring. You are the most efficient at that, because no moral hazard exists when you have perfect information on your own motivations and desires.

The next best option is a mutual assistance society that is run by people who know the members and can decided on benefits. That means there isn't a faceless bureaucrat deciding if someone deserves benefits, but rather someone in a much better position to determine exactly what is really needed and exactly how much work the someone is able to do in return for their benefits.

There are still some mutual assistance societies, but many of them vanished when the government "took over" their market and drove them out by using mandatory taxes and deficit spending to under price them. The ones that remain tend to have another primary function.

For example, the LDS church (among many other things) functions as a private welfare society. In their example, they reduce the inherent moral hazard in the situation by having those seeking welfare interviewed by the volunteer leader of their local congregation to determine exactly what help they need, but more importantly what they REALLY need (not money to eat out, or to live in a mansion), and what they themselves can contribute. It's not unusual for an LDS member on welfare to clean up the church grounds or work at a welfare farm if they are able to while seeking new employment, while someone sick may not be asked to do anything at all.

That sort of differentiation and local personalization is what a federal government program is unable to match.