26
People > One person households
4
	6	Education > Average years of schooling of adults	12

We’re spending longer in school before we enter the workforce, and we expect the kids we have to do the same, at substantial cost. Alternatively, this confirms the conservative thesis that book larnin’ corrupts. Your call.

“Weak man” arguments also seem much easier to make in good faith. If you’re having a friendly debate, and someone offers up three arguments, and one of them has glaring problems, then of course that’s the one you jump on first. But it also meshes with an unfortunate psychological bias that I’m finding more and more grating lately: It seems that most people genuinely have no idea what people with very different views actually think. A shocking number of folks on the left seem to be under the impression that apparently well-educated libertarians have somehow never encountered the idea of a “collective action problem” or “imperfect information.” And in fairness, you run into libertarians who think that progressives are all just innocent of elementary microeconomics. This is one reason I’m not entirely persuaded that norms of cross-linking will keep online discussion from devolving into a series of echo chambers: There’s strong incentive to link the other side’s worst arguments. (Scroll down to that post from earlier—if you’ve got ten minutes to write, the easiest thing to do is beat up on the dumbest, most outrageous thing you heard today.)

A related pet peeve: Watch your media stream for rhetorical questions where the upshot is “but where do you draw the line?” or “then doesn’t this unsavory implication logically follow from my opponent’s position?”  In 9 of 10 cases, I’ll wager the person making that move hasn’t made any kind of serious effort to think about how a partisan of the view being critiqued might actually draw the line or resist the unsavory implication. I’m not talking about subtle, nuanced arguments that you’d encounter reading a book by someone defending the position. I mean, stuff any ordinary person ought to come up with immediately if they sincerely ask themselves “what does a sane defense of this view look like?” One reason we don’t do this is the tendency to make ideology and identity. So “pro-life,” “environmentalist,” “conservative,” “foreign policy realist,” stop being “positions I might hold if I were convinced of such-and-such” but inscrutably different types of human being, to be studied with the tools of anthropology or pathology if at all.

Addendum: The debate over Sotomayor, incidentally, is a good example of why “weak manning” isn’t necessarily fallacious or disingenuous. There were some thoughtful critiques of her approach to judging getting made by some of the conservative lawbloggers, but they didn’t have a great deal of currency.  What you did see people repeating over and over again was profoundly confused nonsense about how Sotomayor had a “60 percent reversal rate.”  So you had people patiently (and then not-so-patiently) explaining, for the millionth time, that the “60 percent reversal” was based on the tiny fraction of her opinions to be reviewed by the Supreme Court, and that this was actually a below-average ratio for cases that make it before the Court. Stuff like this wasn’t the best argument anyone had against Sotomayor, but it certainly made sense that people wanted to get this kind of confusion out of the way before tackling any of the more intricate arguments.

It’s a dumb joke, but I think it also goes a ways toward explaining why Dana Goldstein thinks the essay prompts on France’s college entrance exams cover “complex, intellectual topics” that their U.S. counterparts would never be expected to attempt. Like Michael Moynihan, I’m not quite as impressed. First, the prompts are pretty vague and, like the ones I remember seeing on similar tests as a teenager, offer a fair amount of latitude: They’re the kind of  questions that give a middling student the opportunity to produce a competent response, and a stellar student room to show off. So let’s look at a couple of the questions:

1) Does objectivity in history suppose impartiality in the historian?

In almost every case here, we’re dealing translations that preserve the form of the original French sentence, and we’re culturally programmed to find this especially—how do you say?— impressionnant. I bet we’re not quite as bowled over by:

If a historian is to write objective history, is it necessary that she treat her subject matter impartially?

There’s a sort of boringly obvious “yes” answer any competent student should be able to knock out. A slightly more sophisticated version might warn against treating “past as prologue” and note the dangerous temptation to forget that our own values are an inheritance from history’s winners. The “no” answer runs through ways that excessive impartiality can prevent us from passing judgments that reveal objective truths.

Does language betray thought?

In fairness, I’m not even sure what this one means, mostly because of the ambiguity of the English “betray.” But I can think of two or three readings, all of which can be worded rather less pompously as questions I’d expect a college-bound 18-year-old to muster something coherent about.

Is it absurd to desire the impossible?

That “absurd” is doing a lot of the intimidation work here, dragging in the specter of Camus  and the problem of meaning in a disenchanted world. How about:

Does it ever make sense to want what you can’t have?

Basically the same question, no longer anything we’d blink at on an American SAT.

Are there questions which no science can answer?

In a flash, I grasped the true value of a college degree. It didn’t matter what I majored in. It didn’t even matter all that much what my grades were. What mattered was that I got that rectangular piece of paper that said, “Lane Wallace never has to work in a corrugated cardboard factory again.” A piece of paper that was proof to any potential future employer that I could stick with a project and complete it successfully, even if parts of it weren’t all that much fun. A piece of paper that said I had learned how to process an overload of information, prioritize, sort through it intelligently, and distill all that into a coherent end product … all while coping with stress and deadlines without imploding.

First, it’s just worth being clear on what the OIRA administrator—a post WND keeps referring to as “regulatory czar”—actually does. OIRA reviews regulations promulgated by federal agencies, first, in order to do an independent cost-benefit analysis, and second, to ensure that when the domains of multiple agencies overlap, the rules they make fit together into a coherent system or regulation rather than working at cross purposes.  Probably given his high profile and his prior relationship with Obama, Sunstein will have more sway than previous occupants of the office. But it is not a position with any independent power to create  rules. That means his views on the best approach to gun control, for example, are pretty much irrelevant. He can encourage different agencies to prefer some consistent types of regulatory mechanisms to achieve their substantive goals, and he can object to proposed regulations that his office concludes are inefficient, but he can’t tell the agencies what their goals should be, let alone grant them new regulatory powers.

For the most part, then, it wouldn’t matter all that much if Sunstein held the positions WND attributes to him. But just about every claim in the article falls somewhere on the gradient between “grossly and deliberately misleading” and “a flat-out lie.” The two big ones are the claims that Sunstein supports regulation to create “electronic sidewalks” on the Internet where people visiting partisan Websites are exposed to opposing views, and that he favors some kind of mandatory “cooling off” period before sending angry e-mails, enforced by some kind of government monitoring.

The first idea, floated in Republic 2.0 Republic.com, is thrown out as an idea for countering the online echo-chamber effect, and in a way, WND illustrates his point by basing their characterization of Sunstein’s views on an Adam Thierer post, which they don’t link because it would make it too obvious how dishonest they’re being.  The important thing to note here is that Sunstein is tossing out a bunch of proposals primarily as food for thought, that he’s mostly talking about the desirability of having online norms encouraging links to people you disagree with (and, indeed, the Internet has developed such a norm), and that he briefly suggests that failing this it would be “worth considering” regulation, though he quickly notes that there would be serious free speech objections to any such policy.  Here’s the actual passage about “electronic sidewalks”:

Drawing on the public forum analogy, law and technology specialist Noah Zatz has suggested that through this route, “sidewalks” might be created in cyberspace, allowing speakers to have “specific access” to certain users subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. An obvious objection is that many people would find this intrusive. Attempting to have access to the Website of Time magazine, they might find themselves opening a page to Citizens for Control of Nuclear Power as well. This is indeed an intrusion. But is it much different from daily life on a street or in a park? Is it much different from reading the newspaper or a general interest magazine? Because it is so easy to close a Webpage, any intrusion on Internet users seems far more trivial than those introduced via public forums and general interest intermediaries, intrusions that produce many benefits.  What is important about Zatz’s proposal is not the relatively complex details, which I do not mean to endorse, but the effort to adapt technology to the service of goals associated with the public forum doctrine.

Emphasis mine. Now, even if offered tentatively, as springboards for further thought, these are in fact, pretty dumb, unconstituional ideas. Don’t take my word for it, just listen to… Cass Sunstein:

I now the believe that the government should not consider that — that it’s a stupid and almost certainly an unconstitutional suggestion…. [My view changed after hearing] counter-arguments and seeing the nature of the Internet as it unfolded over time. “Republic.com” made a mistake of applying to the Internet some ideas that were developed in a world of three or four television networks. … But the kinds of regulation that would respond to my concerns, they’re not really feasible and they probably wouldn’t help. Most problems are best solved privately, not through government. There’s a problem of discourtesy in the world, which is best handled through social norms, which are indispensable. But you wouldn’t want the government to be mandating courtesy.

So, just to be clear: Sunstein once thought some profoundly dumb policies might be worth considering, but realized years ago he was wrong about that. WND does acknowledge that Sunstein’s backed off the idea, but you’re left with the impression that this was a policy he vehemently endorsed and has now sort of reluctantly been forced to abandon hope for—that darn constitution won’t let him. The reality, of course, is more or less the opposite: The idea was a tentative, speculative suggestion he now condemns in pretty strong terms.

Possibly even more outrageous is the spin they put on a suggestion in his recent book Nudge, basically hoping that someone would create a piece of software like Google’s Mail Goggles designed to deter people from hastily sending drunken or angry e-mails. Since Google’s Mail Goggles now exists, their proposal has already been implemented. WND bizarrely interprets this inoccuous idea as a proposal for some kind of mandatory government screening of private communications.

Of the remaining claims they make, two are basically accurate:

In a 2007 speech at Harvard he called for banning hunting in the U.S.

In “Animal Rights: A Very Short Primer,” he wrote “[T]here should be extensive regulation of the use of animals in entertainment, in scientific experiments, and in agriculture.”

He was only talking about hunting for sport, but otherwise these are pretty much correct. If you’re a hunter or a rodeo cowboy, these might be good reasons not to vote for him should he run for Congress—at least if you thought those proposals had any chance of making their way into law.  I have no idea why they’re relevant to his fitness for the OIRA job

In his book “Radicals in Robes,” he wrote: “[A]lmost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And if the Court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.”

Here’s the quotation in context:

The Court [in United States v. Miller] said that the Second Amendment must be interpreted in light of the constitutional goal of recognizing and permitting militias…. If this pronouncement is taken seriously, then almost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine…. Of course, the Supreme Court could have been wrong in the Miller case. but its reading of the text is reasonable, and the history is not without ambiguity. I am not insisting that there is no individual right to bear arms; the history can plausibly be read to support that right. But on the Constitution’s text, fundamentalists should not be so confident in their enthusiasm for invalidating gun control legislation.

Fair game, I suppose, if and when Sunstein is nominated to the Supreme Court. Again, not sure what it has to do with the OIRA gig.

In his 2004 book, “Animal Rights,” he wrote: “Animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives …”

Accurate quote, but grossly misleading out of context. Sunstein was suggesting that in order to enforce animal cruelty laws already on the books, private parties might be given standing to bring civil actions against those who violate these existing laws, rather than leaving it up to government prosecutors to investigate and make cases. Judges could order plaintiffs to pay defendants attorneys fees in order to deter frivolous suits. I’m inclined to agree with his own characterization of this as a pretty modest reform proposal.

WND primarily seems interested in peddling their book and getting media bookings for the author, but they’re also touting the American Conservative Union’s petition to “Stop Sunstein”. That petition makes the following claims:

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Sunstein will have unchecked power to severely limit or end hunting freedom and gun ownership in America.   [....] Sunstein will have the power to write regulations dealing with the length of hunting seasons, Federal land use, deciding which species are “endangered,” draconian noise and environmental standards at shooting ranges,  taxes on guns and ammunition, gun shop and gun show regulations, federal record keeping on gun purchases…  And on thousands of regulations dealing with meat processing, life-saving medical research that involves animal testing, animal “rights,” and much more.

This isn’t just false, it’s insane. Go read the executive order establishing OIRA’s responsibilities if you have any doubts. The office is probably more potentially influential than its almost total neglect might suggest, but honestly, do they really expect people to believe that there’s a post with this kind of ludicrously sweeping authority, and nobody’s ever heard of it? Unless they’ve actually finally snapped and think this is true, the petition is just an insulting attempt to collect e-mail addresses from gun enthusiasts. Seriously, this is just conservative leadership’s way of announcing that if you care about the Second Amendment, they think you’re an easily-maniuplated halfwit.

For further reading, check out endorsements of Sunstein for the OIRA job from such flaming pinko commies as Jonathan Adler and Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Some folks piling on here are adding that Obama is a hypocrite on this front, suggesting that he’s himself a monoglot. Actually, he’s told The Hill he speaks Indonesian and “a little Spanish.” Though having heard his accent in the latter case, I don’t mind if he refrains from deploying that knowledge.

Update II: Apparently, we have a difference in interpretation. Here’s the actual relevant quotation:

I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about, we need to have English only. They want to pass a law, we just, we want English only. Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English, I agree with this. But understand this, instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English—they’ll learn English—you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. We should have every child speaking more than one language. It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup.

At the Standard, they appear to find it obvious that Obama is just personally mortified that his countrymen are making him look bad at Au Bon Accueil, and cited French and German specifically because we should be preparing our students to sing along with Bizet and Wagner. (Actually, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea.)  I thought it was equally clear, in context, that the point was that we should be embarassed that European students consider fluency in three or four languages perfectly normal, while our schools have trouble with two, and that the choice of French and German was merely illustrative. Of course, if you’re precomitted to the narrative that Obama is an arrogant snob, then the first reading is natural enough. I’ll even allow that it’s consistent with the text, so to speak. But it boggles the mind a bit to see it dubbed a “mischaracterization” when someone fails to strain for the least charitable reading.

The  really odd thing here was that usually conservatives are better at making the point that our educational standards in much of the country are embarrassing. But then, I suppose what I used to like most about conservatism was a certain species of elitism that may have died off with Bill Buckley. This was the conservatism that insisted a decently educated person would know some Shakespeare, even if he was a Dead White European Male. It was a conservatism more concerned with encouraging and celebrating excellence than ensuring mediocrity didn’t interfere with self-esteem. It was a conservatism that could use the word “refined” as sincere praise, rather than as an ironic term of abuse. It was, in other words, a conservatism prepared to assert that the proper response to ignorance was, indeed, shame, not defiant pride. Honestly, one of the more depressing things about contemporary politics is that what used to be the central redeeming feature of the right has instead become their favorite attack on the left.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

[....]

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.

I think this and the Smith incident I wrote about below are both cases where in the background you’ve got something akin to the Foucauldian idea of power/knowledge, warped and applied in a way that I’d guess would have appalled Foucault himself. The basic idea, which I’m going to horribly bastardize, is that social power is exerted not just through obvious physical or economic coercion, but also in the ways information is categorized and used. One sense in which this is true is that a state’s ability to control a population is a function of the information (stat-istics) it can gather; another is that public discourse is conditioned by a framework that necessarily exists outside the discourse itself. Who gets to count as an “expert” whose views must be taken seriously? What forms of difference are expressions of a dissenting opinion, and which are treated as mere symptoms of a pathology? (Troublesome kids are now sometimes classified as suffering from “oppositional defiance disorder.”)

There’s obviously something to this notion, though Prof. Venkatesan’s professional specialty appears to be taking it to autoparodic extremes. Often, though, we see the idea deployed to argue, in effect, that speech is (often? always?) just coercion by other means; the traditional liberal distinction between speech and action is illusory. Speech that serves to marginalize a disfavored group, or to rationalize their unequal status, is therefore just disguised violence, and silencing the speaker just a form of self defense.

I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that I think this is a pernicious and self-defeating line of argument. Truth has always been a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the oppressed; treating “truth” as nothing more than a weapon, however, saps it of that power.

Update: Oh dear… the face of harassment, from a Dartmouth Review interview:

Priya Venkatesan: One of the things that she did, this is also really interesting, was that she would always ask me how to spell things. That was her thing. She would say how to do you spell this? How to you spell that? I mean—what am I supposed to do?—so I would tell her. One time Tom Cormen was sitting in the class, and she asked me, how many T’s are in Gattaca. This was the kind of question she was asking, “how many T’s are in Gattaca?,” and I was about to answer her and Tom Cormen pre-empted me, “two t’s.” I’ll leave you to interpret it.

TDR: No. No, I don’t understand that.

PV: I have to tell you: it means tenure track.

TDR: Oh, okay.

PV: Because I wasn’t tenured track.

TDR: Oh, okay, yes.

PV: They were trying to intimate that I wasn’t ready for tenure track.

TDR: Yes, okay, I didn’t realize that’s what that meant.

It’s sad first at a principled level, because two women who student feminists around the country look to as guides are endorsing the utterly illiberal idea that the proper response to bad speech—and after skimming a draft of Sorba’s preposterous forthcoming book, I can confirm that his remarks were destined to be both loathesome and stupid—is to silence the speaker. The man’s views may be repulsive, but the students who invited him were entitled to have an opportunity to evaluate those views and come to their own conclusions about their merits. Indeed, had the protesters sent in a couple of halfway-bright students from the biology and philosophy departments during Q&A, I’m confident they could have made the poverty of his reasoning embarrassingly clear to all in attendance. It probably would have made a hell of a YouTube clip, as well. Instead, by choosing bullying over persuasion, they handed this jackass the moral high ground, for what I can only assume is the first and last time in his life.

It’s also sad at the tactical level, because it shows how little some folks have learned from a decade of David Horowitz’s antics. Congratulations, guys: You’ve just elevated this obscure clown into the online right’s celebrity du jour. I’m glad you enjoy the video clip of the students shouting Sorba down so much, because you’re about to see a lot of it, on a hundred conservative blogs, as proof that those awful boorish feminists are so afraid of Sorba’s “ideas” that they’re unwilling to engage him in debate, or indeed, to even let anyone hear whatever “devastating” case he was planning to make. How many times does this scenario have to play out before people start to recognize that it always ends up as a PR coup for the supporters of the silenced speaker?

Addendum: The comments at Feministing show this to be an interesting Rorschach blot. Plenty of folks took more or less the position I did, provoking a variety of responses.

A number of people appear to think that showing up at an event for which a student group has properly reserved space, then making it impossible for anyone to hear the speaker, simply counts as countering his speech with theirs. I’m curious how many would take that view were the situation reversed; I suspect few.

A few think that “free speech” is not at issue because the government wasn’t censoring the speaker. Of course the First Amendment is not at issue for just that reason, but “free speech,” the broader concept, surely is. Some of those folks made a similarly confused appeal to private property. But, of course, the property belongs to Smith, which had allowed the College Republicans to use that property to host a speaker.

Most common, though, was some variant of the idea that free speech and open debate are wonderful, but this particular fellow is so hateful or so irrational or so beyond the pale that his remarks don’t count. But the value of endorsing “free speech” as a general principle is precisely to avoid having to make these kinds of decisions about the merits of the speech, barring some very specific exceptions like “incitement to riot.” Speech that isn’t controversial, that isn’t going to occasion protest, will never require us to invoke free speech as an ideal. Conversely, speech that is controversial—the kind of speech that might actually need the protection of that principle—is always going to be regarded as “beyond the pale” or “too much” by somebody. (Fill in the blanks yourself for the variant where this case is different because he’s not a “scientist” or an “expert.”)

Conservatives think Jeremiah Wright’s sermons are “hate speech”. “Men’s rights” activists say feminists regularly engage in hate speech. Presumably they, too, would like to send a message that those speakers are unwelcome on their campuses. You can say “well, their view is wrong and the Smith students’ view is correct,” but insofar as the disagreement is still there, this is pretty unhelpful: Everyone thinks they’re right, and so everyone feels entitled to drown out the speech they dislike. You end up with the meaningless principle: “Free speech, except when we feel strongly enough about how terrible and wrong it is.”

I suppose that works out fine in Northampton: If someone’s invading your safe space, someone whose ideas and way of life are not just wrong but deeply abhorrent, an assault on your identity and community by their very presence, then the community can hound them out—at least if enough people feel strongly enough about it. But I’m guessing LGBT folks in the rest of America might be less sanguine about living under that set of rules.

The book is replete with profanity, overt racism through multiple uses of the N-word, an  explicit description of a sex act involving Mother Theresa and some of the most graphic, vile and vivid depictions of homosexual anal sodomy every put in print.

Oh girlfriend, not even close.  Let me send you some Marquis de Sade, for starters.  We also get this claim:

NSSA complained to the State Attorney’s office of Lake County, Illinois, and they agreed that the book violated Illinois’ obscenity statute prohibiting adults from “distributing harmful materials to minors.” But, amazingly, Hauser was told by the State’s Attorney’s office that state and federal obscenity laws exempt school officials from prosecution.

I believe the legal term for this is “humoring you.”

Rather, the idea is supposed to be that, while there will be a mix of good and bad schools to start, over time price signals and market pressure will spur the formation of new schools to meet demand, force existing ones to adapt in whatever way attracts parents, and eventually eliminate the ones that fail to deliver the goods. Maybe there are overheated voucher boosters out there promising instant improvements, but there’s relatively little reason to expect a market for education to show its advantages right out of the starting gate. If a broad, well-designed, and generous voucher program shows no advantages a decade in, then obviously that’s more telling—though ceteris paribus I’d think there’s some independent, intrinsic value to parental choice. In any event, I don’t think you get to pat yourself on the back for your rigorous empiricism if you cry “Nothing to see here” after a year of vouchers, then return to insisting that urban public schools that’ve been wretched for a generation will finally turn around, if only we Care Bear–stare hard enough.