Posts Tagged With: Opinions

It’s Still 2006, And the Midterms Were A Month Ago

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Do we really need to start wondering now about who's going to run for president in 2008? The election is a full two years away and yet we are already casting the unforgiving glare of public attention on our potential candidates. That's a long two years of not screwing up any Senate votes, staying consistent with your opinions (avoiding categorization as a flopper), and not pulling any George Allens. I want a rest from political speculation. Let's focus our attention on the current officials.

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Thanks Jay Bilas

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Just finished watching Southern Illinois vs. Indiana on ESPN, a good game in which Indiana finally pulled away by putting on a 1-3-1 defense and forcing Southern Illinois into turnovers. Both teams played pretty solid defense - the score was 42-39 with 6 minutes to play before Indiana pulled out a 10-0 run. Thank you Jay Bilas for providing solid commentary throughout the game and for putting up with the shit you get from the co-commentators, who have no idea what they're talking about. Thank you for refusing to fill the 10 seconds before commercial break with inane yelling, as Dick Vitale and the guy next to you love doing. You are the only commentator on ESPN I can stand.

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Why Tariffs Are Silly, and How Economists Think About the World

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From Tim Harford's book The Undercover Economist, which took me about a day to read: "There are two ways for the United States to produce automobiles: they can build them in Detroit, or grow them in Iowa. Growing them in Iowa makes use of a special technology that turns wheat into Toyotas: simply put the wheat on ships and send them out into the Pacific ocean. The ships come back a short while later with Toyotas on them. The technology used to turn wheat into Toyotas out in the Pacific is called "Japan," but it could just as easily be a futuristic biofactory floating off the coast in Hawaii. Either way, auto workers in Detroit are in direct competition with farmers in Iowa. Import restrictions on Japanese cars will help the auto workers and hurt the farmers: they are the modern-day equivalent of "frame breaking."

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An Open Letter – what do you think?

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To whoever's willing to listen: In my humble, college-freshman opinion, the failure of Congress boils down to a matter of incentives. Congressmen want to get themselves re-elected and make sure their party's in power at all times. However, the purpose (I assume?) of Congress is to increase the welfare of the American people and protect the Constitution. This failure has two consequences - extreme short-sightedness, and the political gambit-izing of legislation. I don't know if it matters so much anymore what a piece of legislation says, as long as Democrats will say 'it's all a political ploy' and each side will claim victory. The loser is the public interest. Take for example the recent decision by GOP leaders to shelve the Vietnam free trade vote, which was supposed to be a rebuke to the White House from the Republicans in Congress. The American people just lost, because this vote is now going to fail. What concerns me the most is the apparent lack of consideration for whether or not American people would be better off with a free trade agreement from Vietnam. I propose two solutions. The first is to make every Congressional vote anonymous. This would free people to vote rationally (or as rationally as they can, given all the noise from the Cato Institute about how we vote), rather than to vote in fear or with some external motive. This would also decrease the effect of lobbying and of voting as a bloc. As I see it now, with econ 1 analysis, there are two cartels in Congress preventing vote equilibrium. If we made votes anonymous we would see more of how people actually feel and less of two talking points. Moreover, politicians would no longer be able to blame "the other side" for failures. Furthermore, I feel that 20 years down the road we won't be able to elect anyone, because of Facebook and weblogs. The public will very quickly learn that no one's perfect, and attack ads will have loads of material to work with (Drunk pictures, questionable opinions, etc). Our candidates, I believe, won't have personalities or opinions (besides "I'm against crime, for democracy, and for education"). Making votes anonymous would stop attack ads based on decade-long voting records. My second idea is for mandatory 30-year prediction and long-term goal statements, updated every 4 years (this has no way of passing, because it sounds similar to the old Soviet central planning idea). My goal here is to get Congress to realize that problems like "our budget is unsustainable," "global warming is something we need to deal with," and "many Americans and Iraqis are dying every day" are statements that can't be passed from session to session without action. Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading this. Kevin

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Election Endorsements/Predictions

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I expect that the Republicans are going to do better than they're polling right now. As stupid as it sounds, they still have the 'trust' factor going for them over Democrats. Furthermore, many people may tend to say that the problem resides not with my Republican representative but with others. I'll predict that the Democrats will hold an extremely narrow margin in the House, and Republicans will hold the Senate. I'm excited, because I turned 18 Sunday, allowing me to vote for the first time. I'm unsure whether to vote for Santorum or Casey. I will vote for Rendell for governor over Lynn Swann. I don't know who my state senate candidates are and may abstain from that vote. There are two City Charter amendments on tomorrow's ballot - the first one would give hiring preference to children of policemen and firefighters who died in the line of duty. This is a feel-good ballot issue, but I am going to vote no, because this means we'd be turning down someone with better credentials. Furthermore this would only create more bureaucracy and requirements for businesses to fulfill. The second measure would call for a citywide study of contracting practices, which I don't know much about, but I'll trust the Inquirer and vote no. The other measure is a statewide proposition to borrow to give bonuses to veterans of the First Gulf War. I'm going to vote no, because money spent to do this cannot be spent for other (in my opinion better) uses, such as funding Pennsylvania schools.

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On Being an Elementary School Teacher

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The NYT has a new blog up (subscription required) featuring posts from five schoolteachers from around America. Reading the last post from Mor Regev, a brand-new teacher in the Bronx, about how her attempts to discipline a student not only made him more disobedient but threw off her plans for the rest of the class. Schoolteaching is possibly the only discipline where we take brand-new teachers and throw them in a classroom with thirty (in this case, forty-two) students, with virtually no supervision or feedback. Furthermore, because teaching carries such a low salary, it is difficult to find qualified teachers for positions. There are two things which, based on my experience as a student, will most dramatically improve quality of education: improve the quality of the teachers, and have smaller class sizes. Improved technology in classrooms may be nice, but it doesn't do a thing if the teacher is horrible; indeed, it may be a bigger distraction to students. Furthermore, I highly doubt teachers in the 1940's and 50's were hindered by their lack of access to computers and email.
We can improve the quality of teachers first and foremost by raising salaries, but also by improving mentoring programs to give better feedback and introducing better sharing of lesson plans and effective techniques for handling and teaching a class of kids. Reducing class size will only be made possible by investing in more classrooms and more teachers at each grade level. The problem boils down to money, and better use of the money we spend. For now, we'll have our brand-new elementary school teachers on the verge of tears because they're trying their best, and failing, to control a class with forty-odd kids.

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The Difference Between Knowledge & Intelligence

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Right now I'm reading Justin Menkes' Executive Intelligence. Menkes points out that many top businessmen aren't competent and fail basic management objectives, and wonders how the screening process failed to winnow out the bad executives. He defines executive intelligence, shows examples of exec-intelligent CEO's who lead their companies to success, and proposes ways to screen for it that would be better than our current measures. I'm reading it because I think the SAT is a crappy, racist test, and I want to see what tests Menkes proposes and if they'd be good for high school seniors. By far the heaviest hitting part of the book was when he talked about the difference between knowledge and intelligence, and how we confuse the two.
"The distinction between knowledge and intelligence is frequently blurred. For example, most people are familiar with the popular television show Jeopardy!, on which contestants are rewarded for the amount of knowledge they possess of a wide variety of topics. Often the winners are referred to as "exceptionally smart." But the truth is that they are exceptionally knowledgeable. Successful Jeopardy! contestants haven't really proven anything about their intelligence...[Joseph Fagan, chair of psychology at Case Western] has done research focusing on racial differences in test scores, and his experiments found that measures that required certain kinds of academic knowledge, such as vocabulary or complex math, yielded significantly different scores between racial groups. But tests focused on reasoning or processing skills, such as picture and spatial pattern recognition, showed no such differences."
I generally score well on IQ and SAT tests and people call me smart, but I don't think my ability to take tests well is any measure of 'intelligence.' I run my mouth when I shouldn't, run in with cops when they have the power to detain me, and sometimes fail to grasp the rules of simple social situations. What I can do, I think, is aggregate information, discard the useless parts, repeat things other more intelligent people say, and use my fantastic memory to recall information and arguments at will. If we are going to rely on tests as much as we do as a society (just look at No Child Left Behind), we need to make sure the tests are measuring what they're supposed to measure, and that we want to rely on test measures to determine success.

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