Thursday, July 03, 2003
A POOR CHOICE OF WORDS
From the Federalist:
“I’m not sure where Arnold [Schwarzenegger] gets his political instincts. People often say that for Kennedys, it's in the water.” –Sen. Ted Kennedy
. . .
NEW BLOGS
Well, new to me anyway. First is South Dakota Politics. Those state-based blogs are just popping up like seedlings after a fresh rain! Lots of interesting tid-bits there.
And not one, but two, new Iowa-based bloggers. Inappropriate Response appears to be new to Iowa. He calls me a worthy citizen, so naturally he goes under the Iowa Bloggers portions of the blogroll. What’s the saying? Oh yeah, flattery will get you everywhere.
I also received a nice email from a gentlemen named Ting Yun who has just moved to Iowa City, or, as I fondly refer to it, the People’s Republic of Johnson County. Actually, it is Professor Ting Yun as he is a prof at the esteemed University of Iowa Law School. And I’m still muddling through my dissertation…siiiighhhh. Anyway, we have one other thing in common: We both moved out here from California. So welcome aboard my blogroll Professor Yun! (P.S. He has quite a funny post on being new to Iowa. I’d recommend reading it even if you don’t live in our fair state.)
. . .
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
GAY ADOPTION?
My new column at the American Spectator.
. . .
SAME SEX MARRIAGE, DOPE SMOKING, OPPOSING THE IRAQ WAR, AND UNIVERSAL HEALTH-CARE = ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
I know this because the Des Moines Register editorial page said so. In my last screed against a Register editorial promoting silly economic development ideas I asked “I wonder what the Register will think of next?” To my delight, it didn’t take long to find out:
Iowa worries about losing its young people to other states. But after recent events in Canada, perhaps the entire United States should be similarly concerned. Young people could be drawn north of the border.
Same-sex marriage is now legal in Ontario, and the rest of the country is expected to follow suit. That comes on the heels of talks that Canada plans to decriminalize marijuana for personal use. The country opposed the Iraqi war and already has universal health care.
Many in the younger generation like to gravitate to places where the government and the people are perceived as progressive. The latest theory in economic development has communities vying to attract young members of the "creative class," who are said to like a diverse, somewhat bohemian atmosphere.
Compared to Canada, the United States is starting to look like an old fogy.
Ideas for universal health care get nowhere here. Anything resembling a program designed to help those who need help is stamped "socialist." This country has failed to enact meaningful legislation that would provide gay couples equal rights and protections. Many companies don't recognize same-sex unions for benefit purposes. And forget about the legalization of marijuana.
At some point, our northern neighbors might start looking pretty attractive to the young and creative among us. Then the exodus of young won't just be Iowa's problem; Canada will be sucking up young workers from every state.
I emailed the Register editorial board asking what economic development theory they were referring to. They referred me to Richard Florida’s book “The Rise of Creative Class.” In an article by the same name, Florida explores what he calls the “Creative Class,” a new breed of young, college-educated professional who works in knowledge intensive industries. They prefer to work in areas that are diverse and open to people of different lifestyles:
For instance, in 1998, I met Gary Gates, then a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon. While I had been studying the location choices of high-tech industries and talented people, Gates had been exploring the location patterns of gay people. My list of the country's high-tech hot spots looked an awful lot like his list of the places with highest concentrations of gay people. When we compared these two lists with more statistical rigor, his Gay Index turned out to correlate very strongly to my own measures of high-tech growth. Other measures I came up with, like the Bohemian Index---a measure of artists, writers, and performers---produced similar results.
Talented people seek an environment open to differences. Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates. When they are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in particular is a sign that reads "non-standard people welcome here."
While I haven’t read Florida’s book (I’ll put it on my reading list), his article does not mention things like same-sex marriage, marijuana, universal health-care, or opposition to the Iraq war. The Register editorialists simply took Florida’s idea of what kind of community attracts the creative class, and morphed it into the “progressive agenda.” From there they said, “Progressives like us approve of gay marriage, decriminalizing dope, government-run health care, and oppose the war-monger Bush. Therefore this agenda will attract the creative types that are conducive to higher rates of economic development.” I believe the psychological term for this is projection.
Want another laugher? Florida constructed “creativity rankings” for various cities, and then divided up the cities into large, medium-size, and small-size. You can see the rankings in the article. I highly recommend you look at the chart for small-size cities. Guess which city is ranked 2nd on the creativity index? That’s right, Des Moines, Iowa! Makes you wonder why the economy in Iowa has such sub-par performance. Also makes you wonder just how far the Register will push this “creative class” theory of economic development in the future.
Last thought: The Register’s view of the creative class suggests that they are a bunch of weed-smoking, government-sponging, peaceniks. Are we really worried that these folks will leave the U.S.? I say let Canada have them.
. . .
TO PRIVATIZE OR NOT
The Des Moines Register once again pans the Bush plan to “privatize” Medicare:
The House and Senate each passed legislation last week that would add a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare. Now it's time for negotiations for a final plan. That means America is one step closer to having a drug benefit for seniors that doesn't control costs, leaves gaps in coverage, promises a financial burden for generations to come and will be of no help to millions of seniors.
President Bush remains high on the idea. Bush urged lawmakers to pass a bill that will "work better for America's seniors." He added, "When health-care plans compete for their business, seniors will have better, more affordable options for their health coverage."
This reiterates the misguided notion that increasing the role of private providers will drive costs down.
Not true.
Private plans have been available in Medicare for several years in the form of Medicare+Choice. The result has been millions of seniors left without coverage when insurance companies abandoned the program. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on these plans. It would have been cheaper to cover those seniors under the traditional Medicare program.
Of course, what they don’t tell you is that the reason Medicare is cheaper is that Meidcare’s payments seldom cover the full bill. Responding to a similar charge from Senator Tom Daschle, Robert Moffit wrote:
He doesn't note that Medicare's payments don't come close to covering the full bill or that the average Medicare patient pays roughly $2,000 per year to cover the shortfalls. He doesn't talk about the crisis situations that have erupted in some cities because doctors refuse to take on new Medicare patients.
Moffit also notes that Bush doesn’t want to privatize Medicare so much as offer seniors a benefits program similar to the one enjoyed by federal employees.
Nevertheless, there are two ways we can go on the health-care front. We can continue with a third-party payer system in which a third-party, be it an insurance company or government programs like Medicare, covers health care costs. Under such a system the consumer has no incentive to hold down costs, since someone else is paying the bill. This will ultimately result in rationing and Medicare-style price controls.
Or we can switch to a system involving Medical Savings Accounts, in which consumers are directly provided the funds to pay for their health-care. The funds in MSAs would cover everything except catastrophic care. What a consumer doesn’t use in a given year can be rolled over to the next, or invested in stocks and bonds to be used for care later on in life. MSAs would provide consumers incentive to hold down costs since they would impose limits on what they could spend. Such a system wouldn’t be perfect; but it is a much better alternative than the path we are currently on.
. . .
DEAN HAS A CHANCE?!?!
Andrew Sullivan’s website is among my first stops along the internet each morning. While his commentary is usually quite insightful, his post yesterday on Howard Dean seemed odd, to say the least. First he suggests that, as a campaign strategy, Dean get tough on federal spending:
If I were him, I'd make fiscal responsibility my main platform - as long as it contains some serious proposals for real spending restraint. This is Bush's weak point: the damage he has done and continues to do to this country's fiscal health. Bush's answer to this - that deficits don't matter - doesn't persuade any but a handful of true believers. Right now, his prescription drug benefit will add more untold billions of debt to the next generation. At some point, when the deficit reaches the stratosphere, this issue will come back to haunt the White House. And fiscal responsibility combined with social liberalism is a great way to appeal to the center.
I can’t imagine that Sullivan has failed to notice that Dean is proposing a big government health-care program funded by rescinding the Bush tax cut. Since such a program will add untold trillions in long-term liabilities to the federal budget, how would Dean have any credibility if he were to propose spending restraint? He could of course abandon the health-care proposal once he is out of the primaries, but that would likely anger his base to the point that a significant portion of it might fail to turn out in November—or vote for Nader. It would also give him an image as a craven opportunist, which is not likely to appeal to moderate voters.
Next Sullivan states "Dean could even, I think, benefit from being ahead of the curve on equal marriage rights."
Perhaps in an alternate universe. Thus far, the public is evenly divided on issue of giving homosexual couples the same rights as married couples. I suspect that, at best, the issue would be a wash for Dean.
Finally, he argues "If Dean can get over his unelectable foreign policy - a massive if, of course - he could be a real player.."
Changing “massive if” to “impossibility” would be more accurate. Even if Dean could somehow change his foreign policy position—again, he risks angering his base—there is not a snowflake's chance in Hell that the Bush Administration would let him get away with it. When asked about the liberation of Iraq, Dean replied “I suppose that’s a good thing.” Currently, he is running ads in Iowa touting his anti-war bona fides. That scribbling sound you hear is the Bushies writing ad copy for next fall.
This is an uncharacteristic post for the very savvy Sullivan. My guess is he’s letting his enthusiasm for Dean’s support of gay marriage cloud his judgment a bit.
. . .
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
AUTHOR OF DMRWCE ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Rekha Basu celebrated the recent SCOTUS decision with the predictable result:
The ink was barely dry on the Supreme Court's affirmative-action ruling Monday when Ward Connerly - who helped get California's Board of Regents to bar the use of race in college admissions and voters to pass California's anti-affirmative Proposition 209 - was vowing to do the same in Michigan.
Let him try.
Before Basu takes such a cavalier attitude toward Connerly, perhaps she should remember that Connerly not only was successful at overturning race-based preferences in California, but also Washington. And his effort was outspent in both instances. If I were Basu, I wouldn’t be too smug that Connerly will fail in Michigan.
But, of course, she is:
If the University of Michigan case proved one thing, it's that affirmative action in college admissions has broad national support, which runs from the U.S. military to dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Those were among the many players filing briefs on behalf of the university's affirmative-action policies.
So what? When it comes to ballot measures, what matters is support among public. And as this Gallup poll shows, the public favors affirmative action in general by a margin of only 6%. However, when the question is phrased as one of merit vs. race in college admissions, 69% of respondents said admissions should be based solely on merit.
They all recognize the compelling national interest in colleges enrolling a "critical mass" of minority students to ensure diversity on campus and to provide a broad pool of people of color from which employers can recruit.
What they fail to recognize, as does Basu, is that students admitted under preference systems have much higher dropout rates than students not so admitted. But such concerns are secondary to the all-consuming quest for the nebulous concept of diversity.
And ultimately, the arguments were so persuasive that a conservative, Republican-heavy Supreme Court recognized it, too - even against the wishes of the Bush administration.
Goodness, goodness, goodness. Can’t Basu do even the most rudimentary bit of research? With a little searching on the Department of Justice website one can find the amicus brief the Bush Administration filed in the case of Gratz vs. Bollinger. That brief stated “the Court should hold that the University's race- and ethnic-based undergraduate admissions policies are unconstitutional because proven race-neutral alternatives to achieving the laudable goals of educational openness and diversity remain available.” In other words, the Administration favored the goal of diversity, just not the use of quotas to achieve it. I suppose she also could have simply visited the Whitehouse website and read Bush’s statement on the decision—I don’t see a lot of “the Supreme Court went against my wishes” whining by Bush in it. Alas, that would require some basic research, and as we well know Basu never lets facts get in the way of her fantasy-land version of reality.
Then there is this sad attempt at justifying the use of race-based preferences:
The premise behind affirmative action always made sense to me as a way to get historically disadvantaged groups better represented in the halls of academe. But since this spring, when I got a close-up look at the college-admissions process through the lens of many graduating high school students I know, I'm even more convinced it's an appropriate tool.
The assumption of the would-be Michigan students who sued, saying they were unfairly discriminated against because they're white, is that merit alone should get you into college. But a look at who got into good colleges and who didn't just from people I know quickly shakes up that presumption.
The fact is, if you're looking for consistency, predictability or some airtight admission formula that relies purely on performance and test scores, you can forget it.
How to explain, for example, why someone who is accepted at two of the top Ivy League universities is rejected by a liberal-arts college with less stringent admissions criteria? Or why an exceptionally bright student with great grades taking advanced placement classes doesn't get into a mid-ranking Midwestern college? Or why someone in one state who by all obvious measures belongs in the Ivy League only gets into a state university, yet someone in another state surprises everyone by getting into Harvard?
Many subtle variables go into admissions decisions. Maybe the university needed an Alaskan that year to balance things. Maybe the mediocre student was an exceptional athlete or did something extraordinary outside school. Maybe the parent was an alumnus and big donor.
Basu’s argument boils down to the existence of some randomness in the admissions’ process, plus the existence of various types of systematic discrimination like being the child of an alumnus, justifies systematic discrimination on the basis of race. One might think it would mean looking for ways to eliminate some of the randomness—if that is possible—or calling for the elimination of the alumnus preference. But in Basu’s world two wrongs apparently make a right.
The students who sued chose to focus on Michigan giving a 20-point edge, out of a possible total of 150 points, to undergraduate minority applicants. They could instead have griped that it also awards 20 points to an outstanding athlete or impoverished student. Is that unfair to rich students or non-athletes? What makes athletic considerations fair and race ones unfair?
Nothing.
Actually, letting in the poor student might make considerable sense. If a student from a ghetto school scores 1150 on an SAT while a student from a wealthy suburb scores a 1200, one can easily make a case that the student with the 1150 has far more potential. Given the disadvantages that the student from the ghetto has likely faced, his 1150 is indicative of considerably more academic ability. As for athletic exceptions, it depends on whether you consider athletic programs to be an integral part of a university program. If so, the merit argument holds; if not, then it does not.
With so many competing priorities - geographic representation, ethnic diversity, gender balance, sports and, of course, legacies- there is no objectively "fair" way to do it. A college makes value judgments about what kind of campus it wants to have. And creating a racially diverse school to prepare students for a diverse workplace and society is at least as legitimate a goal as making sure your sports teams have enough good players.
Actually, there is an “objectively fair” way to do it—you just have to first get your priorities straight on what the purpose of higher education should be. If, like me, you think its primary purpose should be to educate young minds, then criteria related to academic abilities are eminently fair. If, like Basu, the purpose of higher education is “diversity”, then any and all criteria have equal claim. And if diversity is the purpose, why stop with race? Why not use weight as a criterion? After all, our society is becoming more obese, and students will soon be entering a workforce with more and more obese people. Surely they should be exposed to the concerns of obese people while at college. How about political ideology? Many workplaces are an amalgam of liberals, conservative, and moderates. Wouldn’t students be better prepared for their after-college lives if institutions of higher learning did their utmost to ensure that their student bodies were ideologically diverse?
Basu ends with this little kernel of wisdom:
Every affirmative-action supporter's hope is that its effective use will someday make it unnecessary. But it's naive to think we'll overcome centuries of exclusion, patronage systems and race-based privileges without taking pointed steps to compensate for them.
No, life isn't completely fair, but it is getting fairer, and thanks to the court's ruling, can continue to.
What’s naïve is to think that race-based preferences contribute to society’s quest for fairness. To believe that you not only have to overlook the fact that race-based preferences set minority students up for failure, but also that they discriminate most heavily not against whites, but Asian-Americans. Given that few, if any, Asian-Americans have participated in “exclusion, patronage systems and race-based privileges” (if anything, some have been the victim of them) using race-based preferences is doubly unfair.
Yes, another brain-dead column from Rekha Basu. But then you’d expect that from the author of the Des Moines Register’s Worst Column Ever.
. . .
|
. . .
|
