Government: The No. 1 Political Fantasy in America Today

About Paul Ryan's vote against Simpson-Bowles debt reduction commission's proposal as an example of political fantasy:

Ryan was willing to sacrifice the good for the sake of the ultimate.

In order to get this ultimate solution, though, Ryan was betting that three things would happen. First, he was betting that Republicans would beat President Obama. Second, he was betting that Republicans would win such overwhelming Congressional majorities that they would be able to push through measures Democrats hate. Third, he was betting that a group of Republican politicians would unilaterally slash one of the country's most popular programs and that they would be able to sustain these cuts through the ensuing elections, in the face of ferocious and highly popular Democratic opposition.

To put it another way, Ryan was giving up significant debt progress for a political fantasy.

Ryan's fantasy happens to be the No. 1 political fantasy in America today, which has inebriated both parties. It is the fantasy that the other party will not exist. It is the fantasy that you are about to win a 1932-style victory that will render your opponents powerless.

Every single speech in this election campaign is based on this fantasy. There hasn't been a speech this year that grapples with the real world -- that we live in a highly polarized, evenly divided nation and the next president is going to have to try to pass laws in that context.

It's obvious why candidates talk about the glorious programs they'll create if elected. It fires up crowds and defines values. But we shouldn't forget that it's almost entirely make-believe.

In the real world, there are almost never ultimate victories, and it is almost never the case (even if you control the White House and Congress) that you get to do what you want.

In the real world, leaders have a dual consciousness. They have a campaign consciousness in which they argue for the policies they think are best for the country. But then they have a governing consciousness, a mind-set they put on between elections. It says: O.K., this is the team the voters have sent to Washington. How can we navigate our divides to come up with something suboptimal but productive?

Paul Ryan has a great campaign consciousness, and, when it comes to things like Medicare reform, I agree with him. But when he voted no on the Simpson-Bowles plan he missed the chance to show that he also has a governing consciousness. He missed the chance to do something good for the country, even if it wasn't the best he or I would wish for.

For more, see Ryan's Biggest Mistake by David Brooks, August 23, 2012 at NYTimes.com.

Mind: Everybody's an Expert

Old but important ...

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock's new book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us.

... Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted [experts] are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert's predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.

He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends ... By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable.

And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. Experts in demand, Tetlock says, were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.

Expert Political Judgment is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate. There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists' diagnoses were no better than the secretaries'.

Tetlock's experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn't fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review.

Tetlock found that ... experts routinely misremembered the degree of probability they had assigned to an event after it came to pass. They claimed to have predicted what happened with a higher degree of certainty than, according to the record, they really did. When this was pointed out to them, by Tetlock's researchers, they sometimes became defensive.

Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who know one big thing, aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who do not get it, and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible ad hocery that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.

Tetlock did not find, in his sample, any significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes. (Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.) He also did not find that his foxes scored higher because they were more cautious—that their appreciation of complexity made them less likely to offer firm predictions. Unlike hedgehogs, who actually performed worse in areas in which they specialized, foxes enjoyed a modest benefit from expertise. Hedgehogs routinely over-predicted: twenty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs claimed were impossible or nearly impossible came to pass, versus ten per cent for the foxes. More than thirty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs thought were sure or near-sure did not, against twenty per cent for foxes.

The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you're right you can be really and spectacularly right. Great scientists, for example, are often hedgehogs. They value parsimony, the simpler solution over the more complex. In world affairs, parsimony may be a liability—but, even there, there can be traps in the kind of highly integrative thinking that is characteristic of foxes.

Tetlock also has an unscientific point to make, which is that we as a society would be better off if participants in policy debates stated their beliefs in testable forms—that is, as probabilities—monitored their forecasting performance, and honored their reputational bets. He thinks that we're suffering from our primitive attraction to deterministic, overconfident hedgehogs. It's true that the only thing the electronic media like better than a hedgehog is two hedgehogs who don't agree. Tetlock notes, sadly, a point that Richard Posner has made about these kinds of public intellectuals, which is that most of them are dealing in solidarity goods, not credence goods. Their analyses and predictions are tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good—more white swans for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an exclamation point added to an analysis.

For more, see Everybody's an Expert by Louis Menand, December 5, 2005 at The New Yorker.

Ethics: Political Philosopher a Star in China

[Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political philosopher is] a rock star in Asia, and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him.

Sandel's popularity in Asia reflects the intersection of three trends. One is the growth of online education, where students anywhere now can gain access to the best professors from everywhere. Another is the craving in Asia for a more creative, discussion-based style of teaching in order to produce more creative, innovative students. And the last is the hunger of young people to engage in moral reasoning and debates, rather than having their education confined to the dry technical aspects of economics, business or engineering.

At Tsinghua and Fudan, Sandel challenged students with a series of cases about justice and markets: Is it fair to raise the price of snow shovels after a snowstorm? What about auctioning university admissions to the highest bidder? “Free-market sentiment ran surprisingly high,” Sandel said, “but some students argued that unfettered markets create inequality and social discord.”

Sandel is touching something deep in both Boston and Beijing. “Students everywhere are hungry for discussion of the big ethical questions we confront in our everyday lives,” Sandel argues. “In recent years, seemingly technical economic questions have crowded out questions of justice and the common good. I think there is a growing sense, in many societies, that G.D.P. and market values do not by themselves produce happiness, or a good society. My dream is to create a video-linked global classroom, connecting students across cultures and national boundaries — to think through these hard moral questions together, to see what we can learn from one another.”

For more, see Justice Goes Global by Thomas L. Friedman, June 14, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Politics: The Unwisdom of Elites

The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe's single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?

Well, what I've been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it's mostly the public's fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate's foolishness.

So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn't just self-serving, it's dead wrong.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren't responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

Let me focus mainly on what happened in the United States, then say a few words about Europe.

...

For his the rationale, see The Unwisdom of Elites by Paul Krugman, May 8, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Health: Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

Attention, programmers (and the rest of you) ...

Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. [Surprisingly] some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight.

We measured everything, thinking we were going to find some magic metabolic factor that would explain why some people didn't gain weight, explains Dr. Michael Jensen, a Mayo Clinic researcher who collaborated with Dr. Levine on the studies. But that wasn't the case. Then six years later, with the help of the motion-tracking underwear, they discovered the answer. The people who didn't gain weight were unconsciously moving around more, Dr. Jensen says. They hadn't started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn't.

Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting, says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

The posture of sitting itself probably isn't worse than any other type of daytime physical inactivity, like lying on the couch watching Wheel of Fortune. But for most of us, when we're awake and not moving, we're sitting. This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse, Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream, as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20% higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40% higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.

Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. Excessive sitting, Dr. Levine says, is a lethal activity.

For more, see Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? by James Vlahos, April 14, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Economics: California Budget Balancer

It's simple. Just increase gasoline taxes.

Try your hand at eliminating the red ink in California's budget.

...

We've provided a wide range of options — spending cuts and tax increases — that cover most of the proposals made by Democratic or Republican lawmakers. It's not easy, but it can be done.

Try it at California Budget Balancer by Anthony Pesce, Shane Goldmacher, Evan Halper and Maloy Moore, January 10, 2011 at Los Angeles Times.

Government: The Achievement Test

Which is more important: good government or small government?

National destinies are not shaped by what percentage of G.D.P. federal spending consumes. They are shaped by the character and behavior of citizens. The crucial issue is not whether the federal government takes up 19 percent or 23 percent of national income. The crucial question is: How does government influence how people live?

Over the past few decades, Americans have waged political war as if all that matters is the amount of money going into federal coffers. The fights have been about cutting government or raising revenue. But amid this season of distraction the entire society suffered a loss of values and almost nobody noticed until it was too late. Both business and government started favoring consumption and short-term comfort and neglecting investment and long-term growth.

This hasn't been a case of government corrupting capitalism or vice versa. The two have worked hand-in-hand. The government has erected a welfare state that, as Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, spends vast amounts on consumption (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt) and much less on investment (education, research, infrastructure), while pushing the costs on future generations. Meanwhile, the private sector has encouraged a huge increase in personal debt to fuel a consumption bubble. The geniuses flock to finance, not industry.

For more, see The Achievement Test by David Brooks, January 3, 2011 at The New York Times.

Climate: A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.

By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.

The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?

For much more, see A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning by Justin Gillis, December 21, 2010 at The New York Times.

Society: A Visualization of Life Expectency and Wealth by Country Over Time

Very nice. Click the lower right "button" to watch it full screen.

From Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - the JOY of Stats - BBC Four November 26, 2010 at YouTube. Thank you, David Brooks.

Mind: Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

In one of the most amazing developmental studies ever conducted, Walter Michel of Stanford created a simple test of the ability of four year old children to control impulses and delay gratification. Children were taken one at a time into a room with a one-way mirror. They were shown a marshmallow. The experimenter told them he had to leave and that they could have the marshmallow right then, but if they waited for the experimenter to return from an errand, they could have two marshmallows. One marshmallow was left on a table in front of them. Some children grabbed the available marshmallow within seconds of the experimenter leaving. Others waited up to twenty minutes for the experimenter to return. In a follow-up study (Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990), children were tested at 18 years of age and comparisons were made between the third of the children who grabbed the marshmallow (the "impulsive") and the third who delayed gratification in order to receive the enhanced reward ("impulse controlled").

The third of the children who were most impulsive at four years of age scored an average of 524 verbal and 528 math. The impulse controlled students who scored 610 verbal and 652 math! This astounding 210 point total score difference on the SAT was predicted on the basis of a single observation at four years of age! The 210 point difference is as large as the average differences between that of economically advantaged versus disadvantaged children and is larger than the difference between children from families with graduate degrees versus children whose parents did not finish high school! At four years of age gobbling a marshmallow now v. waiting for two later is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores than is IQ. [Emphasis added].

From Stanford Marshmallow Experiment by Arnold Kling, October 5, 2007 at Library of Economics and Liberty.

Taxes: Who Needs a Tax Cut?

More on income inequality ...

The [following] chart shows the change in the various groups' pretax income since 1980. A household that has been at the 99.99th percentile of the distribution over this period — that is, making more money than 9,998 out of 10,000 other households and less money than one out of 10,000 — has more than quadrupled its pretax income. Today, this household is making $9.1 million. Income for a household at the median has risen only 13 percent since 1980. Today, it is making about $50,000. [Emphasis added].

And what about tax rates? They have aggravated the trends in pretax incomes. Not only have affluent households received the largest pretax raises, but they've also benefited from a much larger cut in their tax rates.

The following shows the total federal tax rate for different groups (including the income tax, the payroll tax, the estate tax and investment taxes).

For more, see Who Needs a Tax Cut? by David Leonhardt, December 3, 2010 at Economix Blog, New York Times.

Politics: Goals Worth Fighting for

Indeed ...

Facing all these challenges at once, Obama did what seemed natural. He turned to his outsized Democratic majorities in Congress and said essentially, "Folks, I need you to fix this."

The Democrats on Capitol Hill were eager to respond, but they did so in the way that they always will. Instead of acting promptly and with discipline, they dallied and used the delays to bargain for better benefits for their constituents and contributors.

What began as a sound economic stimulus, along with health-care and energy bills, became a swollen, expensive and ineffective legislative monstrosity.

Somewhere along the way, Obama lost sight of his campaign pledge to enlist Republican ideas and votes. Maybe they were never there to be had, but he never truly tested it. And the deeper he became enmeshed in the Democratic politics of Capitol Hill, the less incentive there was for any Republican to contribute to his success.

The president's worst mistake may have been avoiding even a single one-on-one meeting with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell until he had been in office for a year and a half. To make up, the outreach to McConnell and likely House Speaker John Boehner should begin at once and continue as a high priority.

Obama tried governing on the model preferred by congressional Democrats and the result was the loss of Democratic seats and his own reputation. Now he should try governing his own way. It cannot work worse, and it might yield much better results.

For more, see Goals Worth Fighting for by David S. Broder, November 4, 2010 at The Washington Post.

Politics: The Day After Tomorrow

As Paul Ryan and Arthur Brooks put it in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, “The road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America's enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.”

Ryan and Brooks are two of the most important conservative thinkers today. Ryan is the leading Republican policy entrepreneur in the House. Brooks is president of the highly influential American Enterprise Institute and a much-cited author. My admiration for both is unbounded.

Yet the story Republicans are telling each other, which Ryan and Brooks have reinforced, is an oversimplified version of American history, with dangerous implications.

The fact is, the American story is not just the story of limited governments; it is the story of limited but energetic governments that used aggressive federal power to promote growth and social mobility. George Washington used industrial policy, trade policy and federal research dollars to build a manufacturing economy alongside the agricultural one. The Whig Party used federal dollars to promote a development project called the American System.

Abraham Lincoln supported state-sponsored banks to encourage development, lavish infrastructure projects, increased spending on public education. Franklin Roosevelt provided basic security so people were freer to move and dare. The Republican sponsors of welfare reform increased regulations and government spending — demanding work in exchange for dollars.

Throughout American history, in other words, there have been leaders who regarded government like fire — a useful tool when used judiciously and a dangerous menace when it gets out of control. They didn't build their political philosophy on whether government was big or not. Government is a means, not an end. They built their philosophy on making America virtuous, dynamic and great. They supported government action when it furthered those ends and opposed it when it didn't.

For more, see The Day After Tomorrow by David Brooks, September 13, 2010, at The New York Times.

Economics: Less Large Tax Cuts for Top-Earners?

For much more, see Conservative Media Cry "Class Warfare" At Prospect of Less Large Tax Cuts for Top-Earners by M.F.B., September 8, 2010, at MediaMatters.

Mind: Ewwwwwwwww!

What if our moral judgments are driven instead by more visceral human considerations? And what if one of those is not divine commandment or inductive reasoning, but simply whether a situation, in some small way, makes us feel like throwing up?

This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments. Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn't return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

... even doing the research in the first place is a radical step. The agnosticism central to scientific inquiry is part of what feels so dangerous to philosophers and theologians. By telling a story in which morality grows out of the vagaries of human evolution, the new moral psychologists threaten the claim of universality on which most moral systems depend — the idea that certain things are simply right, others simply wrong. If the evolutionary story about the moral emotions is correct, then human beings, by being a less social species or even having a significantly different prehistoric diet, might have ended up today with an entirely different set of religions and ethical codes.

Human beings are uniquely squeamish creatures. Even if we eat meat, we're willing to ingest only a minuscule proportion of the world's edible animal species. We're repelled by unfamiliar grooming habits, physical contact with strangers, and even our own bodies — their odor and hair, their adipose tissue and shed skin cells, and every bodily fluid except tears. Not to mention the quease-tinged aversion many people feel toward manipulating genes or cross-dressing or whole categories of sexual activity.

More recent work has turned to the role disgust plays in attitudes about right and wrong. For example, Bloom, working with the psychologists David Pizarro and Yoel Inbar at Cornell University, found that people who score higher on a disgust sensitivity scale (sample question: “I try to avoid letting any part of my body touch the toilet seat in a public restroom, even when it appears clean”) also tend to be more likely, all else being equal, to believe that gay marriage and abortion are wrong.

Studies by other psychologists suggest an unconscious mental link between immorality and actual dirt and infection. In a much-noted 2006 study, Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist found that thinking of a past immoral deed made people want to clean their hands with a disinfectant wipe, and that doing so actually made them feel better afterward about their transgression. Zhong and Liljenquist called it the “Macbeth effect,” after the guilt-stricken hand washing of Lady Macbeth.

Issues like abortion and gay marriage, of course, intimately implicate the body, so it's less surprising that disgust would play a role. But other researchers have found the emotion at work in more abstract moral judgments.

In a study published early last year in the journal Science, a team led by Hanah Chapman, a psychology PhD student at the University of Toronto, looked at disgust and unfairness. Test subjects who played a game and considered the results unfair, the researchers found, reacted with the exact same instinctive facial expression as those exposed to more straightforwardly disgusting stimuli. Unfairness, it seems, can disgust us.

“People don't make that facial expression in anger,” Chapman says, “It's really limited to disgust.”

Haidt has done studies in which he primed people to feel disgusted and then asked them to judge the morality of certain actions. In one study, he had some of his unfortunate test subjects respond to four vignettes related to moral judgment while sitting in a room that had been infused with an ammonium sulfide “fart spray.” The stink, he found, made them harsher judges, not only of body-related questions like whether first cousins should be able to have sex and marry, but whether people should drive to work when they could walk or whether a movie studio should release a morally controversial film.

In another study, Haidt found an even more dramatic result. Using posthypnotic suggestion, he got his subjects to experience a flash of disgust at neutral words (“take” for half of the experimental group, “often” for the others). They then read a short description of a thoughtful, open-minded student council president named Dan. If the description contained their disgust word, however, the subjects took a deep dislike to Dan, and found reasons to condemn his behavior and justify their aversion, reasons that had no connection to the description they had read — “Dan is a popularity-seeking snob,” one said. “It just seems like he's up to something,” said another.

To Haidt, all of these results buttress his belief that moral reasoning is simply an after-the-fact story we create to explain our instinctive emotional reactions, in this case a strongly held but arbitrary feeling of disgust. “Moral reasoning is often like the press secretary for a secretive administration — constantly generating the most persuasive arguments it can muster for policies whose true origins and goals are unknown,” he wrote in a 2007 paper in Science.

Plenty of psychologists and philosophers are not yet willing to consign moral reasoning to press-secretary status, however. Developmental psychologists in particular have long studied how children and adolescents learn moral behavior, and they tend to be skeptical of claims that behavior is driven by emotions like disgust. To them, arguments like Haidt's wildly overgeneralize from a few suggestive studies.

For more, see Ewwwwwwwww! by Drake Bennett, August 15, 2010, at The Boston Globe.

Education: Who's Teaching L.A.'S Kids?

This is what professional reporters are needed for ...

The students study the same lessons. They are often on the same chapter of the same book.

Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall. The difference has almost nothing to do with the size of the class, the students or their parents.

It's their teachers.

In Los Angeles and across the country, education officials have long known of the often huge disparities among teachers. They've seen the indelible effects, for good and ill, on children. But rather than analyze and address these disparities, they have opted mostly to ignore them.

Most districts act as though one teacher is about as good as another. As a result, the most effective teachers often go unrecognized, the keys to their success rarely studied. Ineffective teachers often face no consequences and get no extra help.

Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.

In coming months, The Times will publish a series of articles and a database analyzing individual teachers' effectiveness in the nation's second-largest school district — the first time, experts say, such information has been made public anywhere in the country.

This article examines the performance of more than 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers for whom reliable data were available.

Among the findings:

• Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year. There is a substantial gap at year's end between students whose teachers were in the top 10% in effectiveness and the bottom 10%. The fortunate students ranked 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math.

• Some students landed in the classrooms of the poorest-performing instructors year after year — a potentially devastating setback that the district could have avoided. Over the period analyzed, more than 8,000 students got such a math or English teacher at least twice in a row.

• Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.

• Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students' academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.

• Many of the factors commonly assumed to be important to teachers' effectiveness were not. Although teachers are paid more for experience, education and training, none of this had much bearing on whether they improved their students' performance.

Other studies of the district have found that students' race, wealth, English proficiency or previous achievement level played little role in whether their teacher was effective.

Value-added analysis offers a rigorous approach. In essence, a student's past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student's actual performance after a year is the "value" that the teacher added or subtracted.

A small number of states and districts already use value-added scores to determine which teachers should be rewarded and which need help. This summer, one district took a harder line: Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee fired 26 teachers based in significant part on their poor value-added scores.

Prompted by federal education grants, California and several other states are now proposing to make value-added a significant component of teacher evaluations. If the money comes through, Los Angeles schools will have to rely on the data for at least 30% of a teacher's evaluation by 2013.

For much more, see the 9 pages of Who's Teaching L.A.'S Kids? by Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith, August 14, 2010, at Los Angeles Times.

Economics: Try Balancing the Federal Budget

Try your hand at "balancing" the Federal budget. The questions are at a high level so it takes only 10-15 minutes, but unfortunately that also means you can't really tell whether the choices you make would help or ruin people's lives.

At the end you can submit your results to contribute to the discussion, but this didn't work in my version of FireFox. Perhaps another browser?

Try it at Budget Simulator by The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Economics: House Budget Plan? A Dereliction of Duty

... the House of Representatives passed a one-year budget resolution rather than the normal blueprint committing the government to a fiscal plan of at least five years.

The terrible irony in all this? More and more people are seeing that what this agonizing situation requires is a limited and temporary measure to pump more life into the economy and create jobs, along with a serious commitment to impose real spending discipline and hold down deficits in the long term -- exactly what a five-year budget resolution could provide.

Gregg and Conrad agree that such a resolution could "unleash huge energy back into the economy," because corporations are hoarding $1.8 trillion in their treasuries and consumers are sitting on billions more.

Of all the times for Congress to abandon its responsibility for long-term fiscal planning, this is the worst.

For more, see House Budget Plan? A Dereliction of Duty by David S. Broder, July 8, 2010, at The Washington Post.

Economics: The U.S. Is Still the 8th Freest Economically

About the conservative Heritage Foundation's 2010 Index of Economic Freedom study of 179 countries ...

The US ranks 8th by measure, even after TARP and other massive government bailouts, and even after that non-existent "government takeover of health care." And you want the real irony? All of the Western nations above the United States on the list have far more socialist health care systems and larger social welfare systems than we do -- I mean by a long shot, it's not even close.

The top seven are Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Switzerland, and Canada.

See So Much for the Impending Communist Doom by Ed Brayton, April 7, 2010, and Ranking the Countries by The Heritage Foundation.

Economics: Encouraging Employment Data

This chart shows job losses (and a few gains) per month from January, 2008 thru March, 2010.

See Encouraging Employment Data...Sort Of by Tom Schaller, April 2, 2010.