Maggie's Farm

Modern-Day Prohibition - The eternal temptation to ban things that give people pleasure. Stier begins:

The new Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition is a five-and-a-half-hour missed opportunity to demonstrate why bans on substances are doomed from the start. Fortunately, for those who want to understand the irresistible lure of all types of prohibitions, there is Christopher Snowdon’sThe Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800. Although Snowdon’s comprehensive history will never reach as many people as the PBS series, The Art of Suppression makes the case that Burns seems to go out of his way to avoid: that prohibition of products that people desire, whether alcohol a century ago or Ecstasy today, is bound to fail miserably.

The world is full of cranks and zealots who want to make you do whatever they think they should do. From my standpoint, I tend to want people to make up their own minds, and if they want to spend their lives half-stoned on heroin or pot, or fat from ice-cream and pastries, so be it. It's their life and their body.

The list of things of which I disapprove is long, but the list of things I would chose to apply power to prohibit is very short. Murder and theft, for starters.

Have you ever bothered to see what happens to your town's recycling? Those bins and things you put out there - where do they go? And are you charged for this extra effort of yours?

In my home town, we have to lug cardboard to the dump excuse me, recycling center. Newspapers, too. We are also supposed to separate glass from metal, and colored glass from clear glass, and plastic from glass.

For all of this self-applauding virtuously annoying pleasure, my most recent research reveals that ours all goes to a landfill in upstate New York, some is trucked to West Virginia to be dumped in a swamp or something, and some is burned by a subsidized power plant. There is no market for this "garbage" other than the marketplace for meaningless virtue. Glass, plastic, and newspaper, for starters, are far cheaper to make new than to recycle. Who is making money from this scam which makes naive soccer moms feel better about themselves?

Do me a favor and find out the facts about your local recycling - where does it all finally end up, and whether you pay extra for the privilege. Let us know. I think there's a news story in it.

Charles Murray on Belmont Vs. Fishtown, about social class in America and the Founding Virtues: marriage, industriousness, honesty, religiousness.

It's a major essay. One quote:

...if you live in an affluent suburb, an upscale neighborhood of a large city, or in a college town, you do not need to read (David) Brooks to know what I’m talking about. You live in that culture. But it is also possible (depending on the circumstances in which you grew up) that you are no longer familiar with what everywhere else in America is like. The problem is not the lifestyle of the members of America’s new upper class, which in many ways is attractive, but the degree to which the new upper class has become sealed off from the rest of America.

Sometimes the isolation is geographic as well as cultural. In major cities and their surrounding areas, those top-ranked zip codes in which the members of the new upper class live are surrounded by other top-ranked zip codes that form elite clusters consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, creating large bubbles within which life can go on without reference to anywhere outside the bubble. Even when the geographic isolation is not extreme, the differences in culture often are...

Study the whole thing. It rings true to me. Even in a small town where we know all sorts of people, we tend to hang out with people who play tennis and golf, own guns, read lots of books, discuss Plato, Marx, Freud, Adam Smith and Hayek, go to church, have gardens, and love opera. Otherwise, what is there to talk about except the weather? It's not defined by financial status, but rather by common interests and, sometimes but certainly not always, similar backgrounds and similar world-views (but excluding political views, generally, untiil one is clear about where one's companions are coming from).

"Pat Moynihan once encountered Nixon in the hall of the White House and said ‘Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say.’"

The Sinatra of Social Science:

... if you do good research on how the world really works, if you have the right data and the right assumptions, and you make the right arguments, and (even) if you do this in a nonpartisan and objective way, it will lead in the great majority of cases to conservative conclusions, because good research amplifies that the world operates, when it operates successfully, on principles that conservatives embrace. It reinforces our commitment to free enterprise, personal freedom, and military strength.

A piece from author and Harvard Prof David Weinberger on his new book: To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data. A quote:

The problem -- or at least the change -- is that we humans cannot understand systems even as complex as that of a simple cell. It's not that were awaiting some elegant theory that will snap all the details into place. The theory is well established already: Cellular systems consist of a set of detailed interactions that can be thought of as signals and responses. But those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them. The science of such systems requires computers to store all the details and to see how they interact. Systems biologists build computer models that replicate in software what happens when the millions of pieces interact. It's a bit like predicting the weather, but with far more dependency on particular events and fewer general principles.

Models this complex -- whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic -- often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave. At their most complex these are sciences of emergence and complexity, studying properties of systems that cannot be seen by looking only at the parts, and cannot be well predicted except by looking at what happens.

This marks quite a turn in science's path.

It's generally a good idea not to over-train one's palate, if only because life becomes too expensive if you do. Fine wine, for example, or fine dining and fine ceegars.

I did have an excellent cup of after-dinner coffee recently, and was advised that it was Royal Kona. "Not Kona - Royal Kona."  They made it with a French Press. Coarse grind only, for the French Press.

I drink coffee black and hot. Chef told me that Royal Kona is the best coffee in the world, and Jamaican Blue Mountain is second. I see that they can be purchased online.

I'm not particular about coffee, but that was damn good, with just the right touch of bitterness.

What coffees do our readers drink? Our sponsor's Dunkin? Maxwell House? Whatever the minimart has in the pot? Royal Kona? Or, God forbid, Starbucks? (I know we have some closet Starbucks fans out there.)

My Doc, a fine fellow, a med school Prof, a solo practitioner, and a non-golfer, is getting frustrated with the direction of medical practice these days and, along with that, feels a little frustrated with his patients too. He has too many of them, but just wants to be an old-time doc and friend to his patients instead of an Obamacare industrial doc on an assemby line.

She Who Must Be Obeyed forces me to get a "physical" every three years or so, just to annoy me. A gallon of blood, a total body scan, stress test, colonoscopy, fully poked and prodded, finger up the butt, etc. Costs a fortune. Doc also insists on a half-hour interview about how my life is going, Diet, happiness quotient, work, friendships, exercise, sex life, how are the kids, future plans, fun and recreation. Thinks he's a shrink, and likes to talk to people about their lives, while I would rather leave my body off for a check-up like leaving the car at the shop.

Actually, I think he's a very fine, caring Doc who happens to hold the strange, idolatrous and heathen belief that health is life's priority. (Plumbers feel the same way about your plumbing, don't they?) He does a good job at never appearing to be in a hurry, so I feel lucky to have him in case I develop a problem. We all will, sooner or later. Eventually, it will be a fatal problem. We can all count on that.

I put it all off as long as I can because I am allergic to doctors, much as I respect them. Anyway, last week he told me that, for my age and build, he wanted me to achieve a 36" waist. He also said, in all care and kindness, something like "If you don't want to follow my advice, I invite you find another doctor." Almost that, anyway. He was also rough about my cigar pleasure, but figured that 2/day was OK with him. Maybe 3. When I pressed him, he confessed to a few per week himself.

My question is always "What good is one's health if you don't have a fun, stimulating, adventurous, satisfying, and somewhat decadent life?"

And I am not even Medicare age. He opted out of Medicare a couple of years ago. He says Medicare reimbursements cannot cover his staff's wages as a solo guy. What it means is that he'll still take on Medicare-age patients, but they will have to pay him themselves from their piggy-banks. If truly poverty-stricken, he'll offer a break but no freebies. He doesn't "take" any insurances either.

He also told me that, when he decided to opt out, Medicare patients comprised 30% of his practice population, consumed 90% of his time, and comprised 25% of his income. He figures he donates a day per week at a teaching clinic, and that that is enough charity for him. How many people donate 20% of their work time and income to charity?

Like most doctors these days, he prefers not to bother with people who do not want to take decent care of themselves. The price you pay to have him available to you if you get in trouble is the occasional exam and sanctimonious health lecture. For me, every few years, stretched out as long as possible.

New Hampshire Ends Affirmative-Action Preferences at Colleges:

Roger B. Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which opposes racial and ethnic preferences, said, "When these things come to a vote, and people have to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, I think a lot of politicians conclude that they do not want to be on record as favoring this kind of preferential treatment."

I am strongly in favor of preferential treatment for skills, talents, achievement, and potential.

Everybody knows what they are doing. They are trying to run a guild in a post-guild society. One aspect of that is keeping prices high - the prices for the schools, and worse, the prices for the poor clients and to hell for those who cannot afford a lawyer but are not poor enough to get a cynical, burned-out Legal Aid person.

Justice is exorbitantly - and unjustly - expensive and, as I have often said here, I think a better case could be made for socialized legal coverage than for socialized medicine, because equal justice is an American ideal, but illness is just human fate. In my view, the American legal system is a broken and often piratical mess run for the benefit of the lawyers (most politicians are lawyers). Just consider how many people settle unjust and annoying claims simply to avoid legal fees.

Via Bader in Minding the Campus:

... there is simply no reason to require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam. As law professor Paul Campos notes, legal education is a rip-off, since the typical law professor "knows nothing about being a lawyer. Hence, he must bullshit -- he does not lie to his students about how to be a lawyer (doing so would require him to know how to be a lawyer, while attempting to deceive his students regarding the substance of that knowledge); rather, he 'talks without knowing what he is talking about,'" when it comes to discussing the legal system or how to be a lawyer.

Law schools' lack of interest in preparing students to be lawyers is illustrated by Tulane's recent decision to give a murderer a scholarship to attend its law school, even though he most likely will never be admitted to the Bar given his criminal record. Law schools lie about whether graduates find jobs: two law schools are being sued for fraudulentplacement data. Law schools have increased tuition by nearly 1,000 percent since 1960 in real terms.

Meanwhile, student loan debt is rising at an exponential, ever-increasing rate, harming students' ability to buy homes (and thus, the housing market), and increasing federal spending on student loans is driving up college tuition and also harming the economy in other ways.

Of course, if you want a Big Job in a Big Law Firm, you will want a Big Degree. It's just one more example of greedy Big Education's monopoly on credentials. Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Government, Big Education, Big Farming, Big Tort Law. Same old story. Just follow the money.

Some readers felt that my last post about Maine was Maine-bashing. Not at all. I am simply curious about their politics.

This scenic and rugged rural (woodsy and rocky, post-glacial or should I say "pre-glacial") state, often proudly referred to as "The West Virginia of the Northeast," has more welfare recipients than taxpayers. 

That is a problem, isn't it? I wondered whether it was an official policy. A legal vote-buying policy. It sounds like it is.

From recent morning links, I get the impression that the goal of the Maine legislature is to put everybody in the state on Welfare, and to have nobody working except them.

Well, as if a job in a state legislature were "work." Let's face it - it's a title, not a job.

They happen to have elected a semi-revolutionary governor. That might help. Politically, Maine is a strange little state. It has papermills, gigantic tree farms aka forests, a bit of lobstering, marginal potato farms and berry farms, a hundred dead old mill towns, the town of Portland which contains more doctors than people (big retiree town for Yankees who reject Florida ways), a fancy recreational coastline for prosperous New Yorkers and yachtsmen. Fair fishing and hunting, too.

Nobody moves there except drug dealers. And our friend theEditor of the Rumford Meteor. Perhaps he can explain to us the state of mind of the State of Maine sometime.

The government of the state would be in fine shape if they could tax meth and pot.

Love that photo. All anybody needs for a good wedding.

Miniter envisions a world without schoolteachers. 

Tutors or parents, plus a Kindle, may be all that is necessary:

... the simplest tutoring approach often works magic. Years ago, a twelve-year-old foster child arrived in our home essentially unable to read after six or seven years of classroom "special" education. To the point where he didn't even know how to use a dictionary. Our oldest son, a prolific writer, happened to be visiting us at the time, saw the problem, and came up with a fix. He handed the boy the newspaper he read each morning, told him to sit on his bed, read it aloud, and circle every word he couldn't pronounce or didn't know the meaning of. Then, later, the two of them went over the circled words together. The first day, every fourth or fifth word was circled, but it wasn't very long before the number of circles began to decrease, and something clicked in the boy's mind. "Hey," he seemed to say to himself, "this is not such a mystery. I can get this reading and writing thing working on my own." And he went on to other material. Then, when he was ready to begin high school, the state and local school district sent a team to evaluate him in order to design a classroom program that met his "special needs." Only there wasn't any, because they were shocked to discover that he tested at or above -- and in a couple of subjects, far above -- his grade level.

A rambling and interesting essay by David Wemyss: Collectivist Dreams - The Russian Soul - A Turbulent Priest - Marx and Engels - Insouciance and Despair. One quote:

...charity and compassion are always the actions of autonomous people acting as individuals. And, however much intellectuals try to argue otherwise, socialism in the end has to trade on envy and resentment, just as surely as tentative lovers discover that they cannot after all confine themselves to just holding hands, or a stolen kiss. Soon enough people are taken to be good or kindly only if they espouse the correct socialist opinions - we see this all around us in the present age - and human sympathy gets redefined in doctrinal terms.

Yet although left-wing assumptions have captured the intellectual elites of the western world - the humanities are almost dead - they have had limited impact on older people untouched by the bureaucratic and academic caste.

In my little old conservative Connecticut town, people help eachother every day. In fact, we do everything we can to assist eachother.  The beauty of collectivism, charity, mutual help, etc. lies in its voluntariness, its mutuality, and in its local-ness. When there are guns and jails behind it (as via government), all of the beauty and love are lost and it just devolves into political power and into legal, armed plunder.

Infantile utopian dreams, in real life, quickly turn into real nightmares. They scare the heck out of me.

Image is via our friends at Western Rifle Shooters

Tax the heck out of the 1% to reduce inequality? As a person happy to be in the 1%, albeit in the lowest reaches of it, I wonder how many people would simply decide that working doesn't pay? When 50% of your income is taken, are you really still working for yourself and your family? Or are you simply subsidizing political campaigns?

As Viking comments:

I suppose the Tiger Woods could retire for the year after winning a single golf tournament. Brad Pitt could make half-a-movie.

Or Derek Jeter could play in four games. In Canada, doctors have income caps but lawyers and accountants do not. Docs quit working for the year when they hit them, and open other businesses on the side. I have heard that wine shops are popular with them.

I see that the economics-challenged Charles Blow is on the same trail, agonizing over the data that most Americans are neither particularly envious of, or angry with, the prosperous. He also wants to tax the heck out of the prosperous, not for the cash, but for fairness. It would be more fair to lobotomize the rich. Why not?

Well, here's some similarly arithmetically-handicapped news, Shock: Half of Americans live below the median income level! By golly, the government ought to fix that.

My views are more like those of Jeb Bush in "Capitalism and the Right to Rise - In freedom lies the risk of failure. But in statism lies the certainty of stagnation": make it easier for people to pursue their dreams by getting the government out of the way. If it's lots of money a person wants, fine. Why should I care? Or whatever else they dream of doing with their lives.

I recently posted about the desirability of attrition in colleges due to substandard performance, expressing the view that low graduation rates are a good, not bad thing, and that they lend some credibility to an expensive piece of paper.

Competitive and highly-selective graduate schools, however, probably should have lower attrition rates as their standards for entry are so relatively high.

Here is some info on Medical School Graduation and Attrition Rates

Here's Law School Rankings by 1L Attrition Rates

A groundbreaking study of New York schools by a MacArthur "genius" challenges the typical understanding of what makes a good school.

It's a major short essay. Weissman begins:

Think of the ingredients that make for a good school. Small classes. Well-educated teachers. Plenty of funding. Combine, mix well, then bake.

Turns out, your recipe would be horribly wrong, at least according to a new working paper out of Harvard. Its take away: Schools shouldn't focus on resources. They should focus on culture.

Read the whole thing. Schools aren't about money. Excellent education is inexpensive, except for technical levels of science. All it takes is a heated room, a blackboard, a demanding and interested teacher, and some curious kids.

But where does the money go?  Not to faculty salaries.

Not to salaries in the Liberal Arts, anyway. A quote:

In general, the parental costs of college are spiraling upward, but the increases are largely not going into the pocket of the full-time faculty member. We drive a Honda Accord and a VW Jetta, respectively, and most of my colleagues drive similar cars.

The BMWs, the Lexuses, the Infinitis, and the sports cars belong to the students, at least those whose high-end parents most typically bemoan the costs of sending their students to us.

BMWs in college? That's lame. I sent all of my kids to college with Ferraris, didn't you? For their self-esteem.

Readers know that I am opposed to mortgage interest deductions. As I view it, these are mainly an indirect subsidization for the construction industry, with incidental apparent benefit to the homeowner - paid for by renters.

I say "apparent" because it is no real benefit to mortgage-holders. After all, without that tax deduction home prices would necessarily be lower to be affordable by your price range.

Same thing applies to all products: subsidies, subsidized loans, grants, favoring policies, etc. distort markets and make things more inefficient and, in the end, more costly more everybody. It's the Law of Unintended - Intended - Consequences.

Here's an example in the news: Real-World Evidence Showing that Unemployment Insurance Benefits Increase Unemployment. Big surprise there, right? I am not opposed to unemployment insurance, but my point is that markets, including labor markets, still work like markets no matter how much they are distorted by policies. Just boulders in the river until they become dams. If people want to take a lengthy sabbatical on unemployment, they will take it until it runs out. That's quite rational and legal, if undignified and exploitative.

Higher ed is a great example. Student loans, grants, and favoring policies simply make it feasible for schools to charge more and to spend more. But where is that money going?

You know where it is going. It's payola to schools. It is going to burgeoning highly-paid admin staff, slick new dorms, mindless PC programs, marketing, and other baloney which has nothing to do with the education which is supposedly being bought by feckless and sacrificing parents, and state-taxpayers.

Hot tubs and basketball teams? Give me a break. College is not supposed to be either High School or babysitting.

Sol Stern in City Journal:

NCLB’s accountability system led to another distortion, this one harming top students. Because the law emphasized mere “proficiency,” rewarding schools for getting their students to achieve that fairly low standard, teachers and administrators had an incentive to boost the test scores of their lowest-performing students but no incentive to improve instruction for their brightest. Robert Pondiscio, communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation and a former New York City Teaching Fellow, describes how the process worked at his South Bronx elementary school. “Eighty percent of the kids in my fifth-grade class were scoring at the two lowest levels on the state reading and math tests,” he recalls. (Each student in New York State receives a test score from 1 to 4, with 1 signifying performance far below grade level, 2 below grade level, 3 grade level, and 4 advanced.) “Early in my teaching career, an assistant principal told me that the kids in my class already scoring a 3 or 4 ‘are not your problem.’ In other words, my goal should be to move the kids scoring at the lower levels up a few points on the scale. I was not specifically ordered to do this, but the message was very clear. My job was to get more kids over the lowest two hurdles, because that’s how the school was rewarded for good performance in the city’s accountability system.”

As a result, Pondiscio says, the few gifted minority students in his class didn’t receive any extra attention—attention that could have given them a better chance to pass the rigorous test for admission to one of the city’s elite specialized science and math high schools. That’s especially sad when you learn that the percentage of black students passing the admissions test for top-ranked Stuyvesant High School has dropped steadily over the past decade. Last year, it fell below 1 percent.

 

The classic Steve McQueen movie immortalized three tunnels at Stalag Luft III PoW camp, now astonished archaeologists have discovered a fourth called George  Good pics.

From Tigerhawk's Mitt Romney's frugality as an example for the rich :

...the frugal wealthy understand that it is not wealth per se but rather its flamboyant display that erects barriers between the rich and the rest. Gated communities, private jets and the mass promotion of ridiculously expensive luxury goods -- all widespread only in the last generation -- have done more to provoke class division and remove the rich from contact with ordinary people than the actual increases in their wealth.

In the last generation, but also at many times in history. Let's face it. We have vulgar rich, vulgar poor, and vulgar in-between. There is no cure for vulgarity.

And from PJ O'Rouke, mainly about the economically-retarded Zero Sum Fallacy in If the 1% had less, would the 99% be better off?:

...it's upsetting that some people have so much while other people have so little. It isn't fair. But I accept this unfairness. Indeed, I treasure it. That's because I have a 13-year-old daughter. And that's all I hear, "That's not fair," she says. "That's not fair! That's not fair!" And one day I snapped, and I said, "Honey, you're cute, that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off, that's not fair. You were born in America, that's not fair. Darling, you had better get down on your knees and pray that things don't start getting fair for you."

Having the luck to be born in America is the most unfair thing of all. Where else on the planet do you have a wide open field to plan a life according to your own lights, interests, abilities, and desires, and run for it? Freedom of pursuit, but no guarantee of results on this planet. And still, some people bitch like babies.

Dalrymple's Barbarians on the Thames - A postmortem of the British riots.

No, it's not about the Moslem immigrants; it's about government-enabled cultural change. His piece contains too many good points for me to pick just one quote.

They won't - and they dare not, because it blows their credit rating. No, They Can't Renege on Student Debt.

One must be very careful and calculating about taking on debt, whether for school or anything else. I have seen many lives crushed by unnecessary debt.

Jim Manzi at NRO: How Elite Business Recruiting Really Works.

Sounds about right to me. Top 40 competitive schools, top SATs, top grades in the most challenging and rigorous majors.

Would You Kill One Person to Save Five? New Research on a Classic Debate.

Always an interesting topic, but I doubt any study can tell what people would do in the real situation.